A small-town girl, Tara (Plabita Borthakur), grows up in a patriarchal and regressive household in 1990s Rajasthan. She wants to break free; she is different from the rest. Like millions of Indians, she finds inspiration in the clutter-breaking career of a cricketer. So we see Tara’s coming-of-age journey intercut with the story of Sourav Ganguly transforming a meek Indian cricket team into a combative force. Doosra, directed by Abhinay Deo, is a docudrama that plays out like a fragile film-school idea inflated into a feature-length production. At its best, it feels like one of those patriotic World Cup commercials with farfetched allegories and corny copywriting. The entire cricket-as-a-metaphor-for-life analogy is well past its sell-by date.
The connection between Tara’s spirit and Ganguly’s legacy is flimsy on paper itself. They don’t feed off each other so much as interrupt one another and yank the viewer out of the experience. In the end, neither works in isolation, and it works even less as misguided reflections. The sports arc features archival interviews of voices like Rajdeep Sardesai, Harsha Bhogle, Boria Majumdar (miscast, even though he’s not a fictional character), Shashi Tharoor and others to spell out the context of the decade. It’s a tired tale retold a thousand times before, but it’s further weaponised in this age of a national persecution complex. We get it: the minnows struck back.
The fiction of the girl’s life is forced to find echoes in this nonfiction narrative of Team India; all her arc has is a voice-over (“marriage is the price men pay for sex, sex is the price women pay for marriage”), and one totally unnecessary interview of a social activist. In other words, the docu and the drama of this docudrama are as compatible as Tom and Jerry.
The parallels are awkward. For instance, a little Tara learns that it’s fine to be a short-haired rebel when she hears (rumours) of a young player being dropped for being too proud to carry drinks as the 12th man. Her brief resurgence as a daughter happens during Ganguly’s debut century at Lord’s (while her father and brother mock his Bengali ways): “every time he scored runs, it felt like I was standing up to my dad”. Indian cricket reaching its nadir, with Sachin Tendulkar quitting captaincy, is connected to Tara’s fate in the family: her father’s abusive behaviour and her mother’s reminders to remember a woman’s place in the household.
The match-fixing scandal of 2000 is juxtaposed with — you guessed it — the “fixing” of her marriage against her wishes. The shady suitors visiting her home are compared to dubious characters of the scandal (a Dubai-based suitor with an import-export ‘business’ is one of them). And the clunkiest of them all: Ganguly making rival captain Steve Waugh wait at the toss and giving back a dose of mental disintegration is intercut with a scene of Tara making her demanding in-laws wait at her home — and not showing up — after she walks out on her husband.
The famous Border-Gavaskar series win in 2001 is attached to Tara’s come-from-behind resistance against marriage, of course. But the linkage of her in-laws with dominant Australians (and Western colonialism) bullying inferior Asian teams is, to put it mildly, tone-deaf and melodramatic.
Tara’s liberation, if you haven’t guessed it yet, unfolds during India’s iconic Natwest final win against England in 2002 and culminates in Ganguly’s shirt-twirling moment. Thankfully, the translation is not literal here; my worst fears are not confirmed. The climax revolves around a country shaking off the shackles and mental blocks of the past, adopting a newer language of conviction and self-belief. Given the stature of Indian cricket today, I’d be keen to know how this mirrors Tara’s future. If there were a sequel called Googly, would she retain the integrity and grace of someone who came from nothing? Or would she get rich and mutate into the very oppressors she once defied?