Cricket meets 'Kantara' — only in IPL

K L Rahul invoking 'Kantara' made for a perfect IPL moment — cinematic, emotive, probably calculated, and utterly confusing.

Last week, a friend sent me an Instagram reel asking if I had seen it. It was a mashup of batsman K L Rahul doing the famous Kantara move with his bat, with the actual scene from the movie spliced in; with that wonderful, moving signature score in the background. He draws a circle with the bat, and then lands it like a sword in the middle. A gesture that said, unequivocally, ‘this belongs to me; this is my home turf!’

He said as much in a post-match interview. “Just a tiny reminder that this ground, this home, this turf is where I have grown up; and this is mine,” he said looking straight into the camera, with all the quiet confidence of a man who has just taken his side to a well-fought victory.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) is exactly the sort of pop culture juggernaut where this mixing up of different genres of entertainment coming together should be expected. This was India’s two big passions coming together — cricket and cinema. Rahul is from Bengaluru, and for him to invoke his home through a Kannada film was exactly the sort of moment that would invoke comment all over social media; and it did. We’re still talking about it!

As someone who has been theorising around the IPL for many years now, it felt to me like a perfect IPL moment — cinematic, emotive, probably calculated, and utterly confusing.

I’ll try to explain.

If you think about it for one second, Rahul’s team is the Delhi Capitals. That’s the team he marked the territory for. The team he defeated? The local team — Royal Challengers Bangalore. The stadium is technically their ‘home’ ground. So, who won, again? Who cares. Bengaluru boys did very well — from Rishab Shetty the filmmaker to Rahul the star of the opposition.

In many ways, that is the essence of the IPL. As a friend once commented, “one part Mumbai, two parts Ranchi, sprinkle in a South African pacer and a Caribbean finisher, and voilà: a franchise!” In this highly profitable mish-mash melting pot of cities, nationalities, cultures, languages; there is one thing that all these players know: they aren’t just athletes anymore; they are entertainers. Rahul crafted the moment perfectly; and the many, many cameras knew exactly how to frame it. He made more than a winning score, he made a moment — complete with slow motion replay and a rousing background score. Rishab Shetty should be proud.

Kantara, a film about the important issue of indigenous rights to forest land, is also problematic in many ways — its portrayal of masculinity, its caste politics, its fetishisation and appropriation of tribal cultures, etc. But as the second-highest-grossing Kannada film of all time (after KGF: Chapter 2), it has enough recall value almost three years after its release that the gesture was immediately identified. Of course, Rahul helpfully explained the metaphor at the end, in case anyone missed it.

The traditional sports fan has been described by academics as ‘topophilic’. Richard Giulianotti, talking of football fandoms in England described topophilia as ‘an intense emotional attachment to a particular part of the material environment; otherwise stated, it is a love of place.’ This description applies when you think of any major sports tournaments — the Olympics, the World Cups, etc — George Orwell famously called sports competition ‘war minus the shooting’. The IPL format re-jigs that formulation a bit. And Rahul’s celebration is such a great example of it.

Talking to this author about a decade ago, Australian journalist Gideon Haigh theorised the IPL as a game in which India never loses. It looks and feels every bit as international as the World Cup (yes yes, Pakistanis cannot play in the IPL; but when has politics ever been too far from cricket in the subcontinent!). But it’s a game in which the mercurial Indian fan always has an Indian team’s victory to cheer. The IPL was set up right after the financially disastrous 2007 World Cup (disastrous because both India and Pakistan crashed out in the league stages; and advertisers didn’t make any money); the IPL has now become Indian cricket’s greatest money spinner. As a game in which India never loses, the loyalties of fans shift with players, brands, scandals, and none of it really matters.

The game isn’t topophilic anymore. Even if, on the surface, teams in the IPL are based in cities, people don’t choose their team based on the cities they live in. Shah Rukh Khan fans pick Kolkata, Dhoni fans have supported Chennai for many years; and in the first 10 years of the IPL (which was when I was doing fan interviews for my doctoral thesis), no one — even in Delhi — picked the Delhi Daredevils as their favourite team, because they just didn’t win enough. In such an environment, a ‘home ground’ is more an aesthetic than an identity.

In many ways, Rahul’s celebration was a masterclass in affective marketing. It used the grammar of popular cinema to short-circuit the contradictions of franchise cricket. It allowed a ‘non-local’ player to perform this sort of topophilia. It played on the emotion of place while delivering multi-modal entertainment. And it was precisely this blend of calculation and catharsis that made the moment so typically IPL.

The IPL has decoupled regional belonging from team composition, but that doesn’t have to mean that fans have stopped yearning for it. Perhaps this craving for rootedness still exists, even as the franchises become more brand than team. That could also be why this gesture worked. It gave fans a sliver of emotional geography in an otherwise disembodied league.

Still, I can’t help but return to the contradictions. This entire scene was anchored around a film whose plot revolves around the assertion of indigenous land rights, spiritual traditions, and the conflict between forest-dwelling communities and modernity. It is quite literally a film about reclaiming ‘home’ from corporate encroachment.

To deploy this in the IPL — a tournament whose entire premise is the corporate ownership of the local — is, well, ironic. A player performing a tribal ritual from a film about land sovereignty while playing for a team owned by a conglomerate headquartered elsewhere, in a match that cost thousands to attend, streamed on an app owned by yet another corporate behemoth… This is peak postmodern India.

Vidya Subramanian is associate professor at Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), and author of 'Speeding Up Sport: Technology and the Indian Premier League'. X: @ vidyas42.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.