The three films in the past which did make it to the top five also couldn’t have been set anywhere else. Lagaan too had the Raj (for good measure, Ashutosh Gowarikar gave us good Brits and bad Brits, and a pretty lass who falls in love with the rustic, ‘dhoti’-wearing hero), and a horse-whip wielding Englishman. It also had dirt-poor villagers, famine, and starvation, and cricket: for those who do not play the game, it is infinitely exotic.

So was 1989’s Salaam Bombay, Mira Nair’s paean to the street-child. Her hero Chaipau, the little boy thus called because he carried cups of tea to his customers all day long, was a uniquely Indian creation, at home with the cast teeming with pimps and prostitutes. And the first one which made it to the last mile, and didn’t win, was Mehboob’s Mother India. Nominated in 1958, its all-encompassing mother figure, the good son-bad son combo, and its theme may have been universal, but the style and the treatment was just so us.

The Oscar gatekeepers are looking for material which is, clearly, foreign. And which cannot be transplanted to any other part of the globe. The year Lagaan lost, the best foreign film Oscar went to No Man’s Land, a wonderfully moving film about two warring soldiers, a Serb and a Bosnian, connecting as they face certain death: that movie couldn’t have come out of Africa, or China, just as Lagaan had to be set in a tiny hamlet in Madhya Bharat.

... contd.