Abhinay Deo’s Doosra refers to, all at once, the delivery style in cricket, the endeavour of the story’s heroine to seek an alternative to her miserable life and the film’s hybrid form. Doosra is part-documentary and part-fictional feature, in which former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly fires the imagination of a cricket-loving woman in a small town.
The story unfolds between 1991 and 2002. Tara (Plabita Borthakur) belongs to a conservative family in which women are expected to know their place. When Tara speaks up, she is slapped by her strict father (Ankur Vikal). Elsewhere, the Indian cricket team is getting beaten up too, as is the country itself.
In unsure times, amidst a balance of payments crisis and a cricket betting scandal, Sourav Ganguly stands for much-needed chutzpah, his reputation for arrogance and his refusal to take orders just what the country’s battered image needs, according to Doosra. The story, by Rohan Sajdeh and Agnello Dias, imagines Ganguly as the spearhead of newfound assertion, most vividly expressed in the cricketer’s notorious shirtless celebration of India’s victory over England at the Lord’s Cricket Ground in the NatWest Series in 2002.
Ganguly’s ascent is explored through a documentary whose talking heads include Rajdeep Sardesai, Shashi Tharoor and former cricket coach John...