‘A metaphor for life’: A whirlwind love affair between Bollywood and Indian cricket | ICC Cricket World Cup
New Delhi, India – Born into a middle-class family in Mumbai, leg-spinner Pravin Tambe has toiled for years in companies and club teams with the sole goal of playing first-class cricket.
Even as he got older and other players started calling him “Uncle,” he continued to run.
Then, in 2013, at the age of 41, he was discovered by former Indian captain Rahul Dravid and signed to play for a professional franchise cricket team.
In the 2014 Indian Premier League (IPL), Tambe, who was playing for Rajasthan Royals, scored a hat-trick against Kolkata Knight Riders and was named Man of the Match. He went to the locker room and cried.
His story was dramatized in the 2022 Bollywood biopic Kaun Pravin Tambe? (Who is Pravin Tambe?), the role was played by actor Shreyas Talpade.
When Talpad auditioned for the role, his career was not going well.
Talpad, now 47, told Al Jazeera: “I have heard that some people are not sure if I can make it.”
He practiced hard from the age of 20 to 41 to play the leg-spinner convincingly. One evening when his body was aching and he was feeling particularly depressed, Talpade and his wife watched his 2005 Bollywood film Iqbal.
In Iqbal, Talpad played the fictional protagonist, a deaf and mute village boy obsessed with playing cricket for India. Despite Iqbal’s disability, his father’s disapproval, and lack of formal training, he perseveres and, as is often the case in good sports movies, human spirit and grit triumph at the climax. I did.
“(I wanted this film) to just be a reminder, not only of this man’s story, but also to remind myself that I’ve done the same thing and can do it again,” he said.
Talpade also won. He started playing Tumble, and cricket became more than just a sport, it became, as many Indians say, “a metaphor for life.”
Even now, people come to Talpad and say that they often see Iqbal when they are “feeling low.”
“The underdog factor is probably the crux. There’s a lot of energy and motivation,” says Talpad.
The story of Indian cricket is the story of India, the Tarpades and the Iqbals, the men and women who struggle with poverty, caste, class and gender discrimination yet rise from gully cricket to play for the country that will host the 2023 Cricket World Cup. This is the story of .
India’s “dream machine”, Bollywood, has always reflected the national mood by drawing inspiration from real life, including cricket, but its relationship with sport has been rocky.
“Cricket and movies are really two religions in this country,” says Kabir Khan, one of Bollywood’s top directors. His last film ’83’ was the story of India’s first victory in the 1983 World Cup.
“Having said that, maybe they should have made more cricket films.”
Long Cricket – The “Jinx” of Bollywood
The love affair between Bollywood and cricket began on a sticky wicket in the late 1950s, when the black-and-white film A Marriage of Love was released.
Those were the days when cricket was only played in its longest professional format, the five-day Test. Although the game and the cricketer were hugely popular, the slow pace of his Test cricket was not particularly suited to on-screen drama.
“Love Marriage” is a work about love, and it uses Cricket as Cupid, and the young heroine falls in love with the brave Tennant, who is approaching 100 years old.
For several years after the love marriage, Cricket did not appear on the silver screen. But in the 1970s, cricketers became stars when India beat England in England and West Indies in West Indies when batsman Sunil Gavaskar scored 774 runs in his debut Test series and was celebrated with calypso songs. , and started participating in matches. In the movie.
Gavaskar plays Salim Durrani, the brave Afghan-born Indian all-rounder known for singing, dancing, shouting “I love you” and pushing boundaries in response to fans’ demands in Marathi films, in a slightly brooding role. She was cast in a romantic lead role in a Bollywood movie. The movie is titled “Charitra (Character)”.
Although these films did not do well at the box office, Bollywood capitalized on the cricket boom and started preparing the idea of releasing cricket-related films to coincide with big tournaments and victories.
In the 1980s, after India won their first World Cup, two cricketers from the winning team appeared in a Bollywood film. Batsman Sandeep Patil played the romantic interest of two women in the film titled Kabhie Ajnavi Za (Once We Were Strangers). Wicketkeeper Saeed Kirmani plays the villain.
The same decade saw the release of two seriously bad films that told fictional stories about rivalries between cricketers. One was a romantic melodrama and his other one was decidedly weird. The sequence of events involved two helicopters and cricketers, angry at being dropped, attempting to blow up the pitch where the India-Australia match was being played.
“The cricket[in these films]was lame,” Vasan Bala, a Bollywood writer and director, told Al Jazeera.
“Growing up, we knew that cricket and Bollywood would never work out. It was a complete jinx.”
One movie changed that.
The movie that broke the jinx
Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India was released in 2001, starring Bollywood star Aamir Khan and directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar.
It was a huge hit and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Lagaan did not win, but defeated Jinx at home. He also divided the story of Indian cricket in the film into two: the pre-Lagaan drought and the subsequent deluge.
The story of Lagaan (Taxes), set in the 1890s during the British Raj in an Indian village suffering from drought and heavy taxes, was not just about cricket. It was about colonial injustice, caste discrimination, and moral beliefs.
The film’s fictional story is inspired by the first “all-Indian” cricket team that toured England in 1911.
The three-hour, 38-minute film follows a ragtag team of impoverished villagers (Hindu, including a disabled Dalit man with a natural twist, a Sikh, and a Muslim) who escape from a British officer. It was a depiction of what one would do in response to a challenge. Cricket match: “If we win, we won’t be taxed for two years. But if we lose, the tax will triple.”
It was a classic David vs. Goliath story with a bit of romance and nationalistic fervor thrown in.
“‘Lagaan’ was a very smart movie…I remember watching it in a theater where the entire cinema hall was turned into a stadium,” says the biographical drama about former Indian women’s cricket team captain Mithali Raj. said director and cricket enthusiast Srijit Mukherji. last year.
Lagaan took over a year after cricket suffered a devastating blow. In the shocking match-fixing scandal, then India captain Mohammad Azharuddin was also implicated along with other players. The captain, whose graceful batting and pop collar once symbolized stylish integrity, betrayed his fans and tarnished cricket.
“With Lagaan, the excitement wasn’t about cricket. The excitement was about seeing characters whose lives depend on this game,” says Bala.
Director Lagaan’s motley crew of cricketers goes one way or another to restore faith in the game of cricket, with several parallels from Bollywood and an entirely new crop of regional films set in small towns and gully tournaments. It spawned a generation of cricket films.
Many have been forgotten, but a few have left a lasting impression.
Like Iqbal, there was also ‘MS Dhoni: The Untold Story’ which was released in 2016. The film, starring Sushant Singh Rajput as the eponymous protagonist Dhoni and directed by Neeraj Pandey, one of Bollywood’s leading directors, is a biopic of former Indian captain Dhoni. Mahinder Singh Dhoni.
The film follows his journey from working as a ticket checker at a small railway station in a dusty town to leading India to their second World Cup victory in 2011.
A film that was less popular at the box office, but no less influential, was ’83.
$34 million cricket movie
“A sports movie is only good if it’s a good underdog story. And 1983 was a classic underdog story,” says director Kabir Khan. “I don’t think there’s anything more exciting than ’83, because after ’83 we were never the underdogs.”
His feature film, which will be released in 2021, depicts India’s rise to become world champions in the 1983 tournament in England, when British bookmakers were offering India a 50-1 record at the time. But this is not just a tribute to the iconic tournament, Bowl, which is etched in India’s collective memory. Not just four-balls, wicket-to-wicket, but to the moment at Lord’s when captain Kapil Dev lifted the World Cup trophy and cricket shed its colonial legacy and became part of India’s national identity.
“India is a country where everyone is a self-proclaimed cricket pundit and is ready to give batting tips even to Sachin Tendulkar. My goal is that no one can stand up and say, ‘This is not like the original.’ It was about making a movie,” Khan said.
Khan’s team spent nearly two years researching the tournament and even succeeded in recreating the match in which Kapil Dev scored 175 not out against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells in Kent. did not exist.
The actors trained for months, and one of Bollywood’s biggest stars, Ranveer Singh, who played Kapil Dev, spent two weeks with the former captain. Not only did he learn to walk, talk, and play like him, but he also learned to embody his unique style of quietness and gentle swagger.
In 1983, cricket was glorious. But this cinematic coup came with a high price tag. Produced on a budget of $34 million, 83 is one of the most expensive films ever made in India.
Critics praised the film, but four days after its release in December 2021, theaters in India began shutting down due to the third wave of the coronavirus, and the film became a huge flop at the box office.
But ’83’ set a new standard for cricket films and inspired many cinematic ambitions.
Bollywood has released five cricket films since 1983, including Mithali Raj’s journey from a small town to leading the Indian women’s cricket team to the final of the 2017 Women’s World Cup, where they lost to England. It also includes ‘Shabaash Mithu’ directed by Srijit Mukherji.
“They may have lost the battle, but they won the battle against misogyny, discrimination and the sorry state of women’s cricket, and inspired a whole generation of girls and women to take up the sport,” Mukherji said. Ta.
There is authenticity to the cricket action in Shabaash Mith but it fails like all the other films.
Looks like the jinx is back. Or maybe genteel nostalgia and underdog stories no longer resonate in a changed country.
“Movies reflect society”
In every David vs. Goliath story sequel, David becomes Goliath.
India is currently one of the fastest growing economies in the world and a cricket powerhouse in terms of viewership and revenue.
Meanwhile, aggressive Hindu supremacy has been on the rise since the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014.
“Cricket and cinema are the last bastions of secularism, but they are also a reflection of our society,” said writer-director Varun Grover.
The Cricket World Cup match between India and Pakistan in October was a huge hit. The match, which was watched by 35 million people on Disney + Hotstar, with more than 100,000 spectators at his stadium and tickets reportedly sold for as much as 5,700,000 rupees ($69,170), won.
But the crowd at Gujarat’s Narendra Modi Stadium, named after the Indian prime minister, chanted “Jai Shri Ram,” a right-wing Hindu rallying cry praising the warrior god, as a mockery of Pakistani cricketers. ” was chanted.
Another Bollywood film titled ‘Fuksu Buksu’, named after a popular Kashmiri folk song, was released on November 3.
The film, set in Kashmir, is about a Hindu man who desperately tries to build a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Krishna in a conflict-ridden Muslim-majority region, but who encounters Muslim politicians with vested interests. It is a fictional story of conflict. His son, a fan of Tendulkar, plays in a cricket match to win the temple land.
“Films reflect society and its changes,” says Mukherji. “Cricket movies are no exception.”
