Delinking “The Gentleman’s Game”: Visual Epistemic Representations in the Film Shabaash Mithu

Abstract

Indian Hindi language sports drama films centered on cricket function as performative documentaries depicting the lives, accomplishments, and trajectories of cricketers playing for the India men’s national cricket team, also known as Team India or the Men in Blue. These films, as cultural artifacts, are embedded in the establishment of a homogeneous episteme that consistently fails to offer alternatives to unsustainable development and pluralism of knowledge. Their persistent renditions of hegemonic masculinity and the gendered structure of cricket shape the politics of representation, positioning women of all classes, castes, and ethnicities as “others” in the sphere of mediated sport. In this regard, the Indian Hindi-language biographical sports drama film Shabaash Mithu (2022), directed by Srijit Mukherji and streaming on Netflix, serves as the first feasible approach to display the inspirational and empowering journey of Mithali Dorai Raj, the former Test and ODI (One Day International) captain of the India women’s national cricket team. In this paper, we argue that delinking and unlearning the dominant episteme associated with the representation of cricket in Indian Hindi films brings forth an episteme that can make the cultural representations comprehensive. In doing so, we analyze the multifaceted visual epistemic representations and establish that Mithali Raj and her team not only experience the subjugations of epistemic hegemony but also delink those and make their episteme visible in layered ways.