Bollywood and Cricket: Pravin Tambe, a leg-spinner from a Mumbai middle-class family, toiled away in company and club teams for years with the sole goal of playing first-class cricket. He kept going even as he got older and other players started calling him “uncle.” Then, in 2013, at the age of 41, he was discovered and signed to play for a professional franchise cricket team by former Indian captain Rahul Dravid.
Tambe scored a hat-trick against Kolkata Knight Riders in the 2014 Indian Premier League (IPL) while playing for Rajasthan Royals. He was named man of the match. He went to his dressing room and sobbed. His story was adapted for the 2022 Bollywood biopic Kaun Pravin Tambe. (Who is Pravin Tambe?), in which actor Shreyas Talpade played his character. Talpade’s career was not going well when he auditioned for the role. “I was told that some people weren’t sure whether I’d be able to pull it off,” Talpade, now 47, told Al Jazeera
Bollywood and Cricket on a rocky road:
Talpade portrayed the fictional lead character in Iqbal, a deaf and mute village boy who is obsessed with playing cricket for India. Despite his disability, his father’s disapproval, and his lack of formal training, Iqbal persevered, and in the climactic sequence, human spirit and grit triumph.
“[I watched it] just as a reminder – not only about the story of this guy but also to myself – that I’ve done this before and I can do it again,” he went on to say. The story of Indian cricket is the story of India, of Talpades and Iqbals, of men and women overcoming poverty, caste, class, and gender discrimination to play for the country that will host the 2023 Cricket World Cup.
Bollywood, India’s “dream machine,” has always reflected the nation’s mood by drawing inspiration from real life, including cricket, despite a rocky relationship with the sport.
The long jinx:
Bollywood’s love affair with cricket began on a sticky wicket in the late 1950s, with the release of the black-and-white film Love Marriage. Cricket was only played professionally in its longest form – Tests – over five days at the time. Though the game and its players were popular, the slow pace of Test cricket did not lend itself well to on-screen drama.
Love Marriage was about love, but cricket was portrayed as cupid, with the young heroine falling for her dashing tenant when he scores a century.
There was no cricket on the big screen for several years after Love Marriage. However, in the 1970s, when India defeated England in England and the West Indies in the West Indies – where batsman Sunil Gavaskar’s 774-run debut Test series was celebrated with a calypso song – cricketers became celebrities and even appeared in films.
Gavaskar sang, danced, and screamed “I love you” in a Marathi language film, and Salim Durani, a dashing Afghan-born Indian all-rounder known for pushing boundaries on fan demand, was cast as the romantic lead in Charitra (Character), a rather drab Bollywood film.
Despite the fact that these films did not perform well at the box office, Bollywood began to warm up to the idea of releasing cricket-related films around major tournaments and wins in order to capitalize on the cricket craze.
The history of Bollywood and Cricket:
After India won their first World Cup in the 1980s, two members of the winning squad were cast in Bollywood films: batsman Sandeep Patil played the romantic interest of two women in Kabhie Ajnabi The (We Were Strangers Once), and wicketkeeper Syed Kirmani played a baddie.
In the same decade, two terribly tacky films were released, the fictional plot of which involved a rivalry between cricketers. The first was a romantic melodrama, while the second, Awwal Number (Number One), was simply bizarre. Its climactic sequence involved two helicopters and a disgruntled cricketer attempting to blow up a pitch where an India vs. Australia match was taking place.
Bollywood writer-director Vasan Bala told Al Jazeera, “The cricket [in these films] was lame. We just knew growing up that cricket and Bollywood would never work. It was a completely cursed event.” However, One film changed all of that.
The film That Broke the Curse:
Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India, directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar and starring Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, was released in 2001. It was a huge success and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film.
Lagaan did not win, but it did break the curse at home. It also divided India’s cricket-in-cinema story into two parts: the drought preceding Lagaan and the deluge following.
The story of Lagaan (Tax), set in the 1890s during the British Raj in an Indian village suffering from drought and heavy taxation, was not just about cricket. It was about colonial injustice, caste prejudice, and moral conviction. The fictional story was inspired by the first “all-Indian” cricket team, which toured England in 1911.
The three-and-a-half-hour-and-38-minute film follows a motley crew of poor villagers — Hindus, including a disabled Dalit man with natural spin, a Sikh, and a Muslim — as they respond to a British officer’s challenge to a game of cricket: “Beat us and no tax will be levied for two years. If you lose, however, the tax will be tripled.”
It was a classic David versus Goliath story, with a dash of romance and nationalistic zeal thrown in for good measure. “Lagaan was an extremely clever film… I remember seeing it in a theatre where the entire cinema hall was transformed into a stadium,” said director and cricket fan Srijit Mukherji, whose biographical drama about Mithali Raj, a former captain of the Indian women’s cricket team, was released last year.
Blockbuster cricket films:
Lagaan arrived a year after cricket was dealt a devastating blow. Then-India captain Mohammad Azharuddin was implicated in a shocking match-fixing scandal, along with others. The captain had betrayed fans and tainted cricket with his graceful batting and popped collar.
“The excitement in Lagaan was not about cricket. The thrill was watching characters whose lives depended on this game,” Bala says. In addition to Iqbal, MS Dhoni: The Untold Story was released in 2016. It is a biopic of India’s former captain, Mahinder Singh Dhoni, starring Sushant Singh Rajput as the eponymous lead, Dhoni, and directed by one of Bollywood’s leading directors, Neeraj Pandey.
It follows his journey from ticket checker at a small railway station in a dusty town to captaining India to their second World Cup victory in 2011. 83 was a less popular box office hit but no less influential.
Whopping box office collection of $34m:
Director Kabir Khan says, “A sports film is only good if it tells a good underdog story. And 1983 was a classic underdog story. I don’t think anything can ever be as exciting as 83 because post-83, we were never the underdogs.”
His 2021 feature film is a homage not only to an iconic tournament that is etched in India’s collective memory, ball-for-ball, wicket-for-wicket but also to the moment at Lord’s when captain Kapil Dev raised the World Cup trophy and cricket shed its colonial legacy and became a part of India’s national identity.
“In India, everyone is a self-styled cricket pundit, and they’re willing to give Sachin Tendulkar batting tips. My goal was to make a film where no one could say, ‘This doesn’t look like the original,’” Khan explained.
Khan’s team spent two years researching the tournament, even recreating a match – in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where Kapil Dev scored 175 not out against Zimbabwe – for which no footage existed.
Actors trained for months, and Ranveer Singh, who played Kapil Dev, spent two weeks with the former captain, not only learning to walk, talk, and play like him but also embodying his unique style of reticent, gentle swagger. Cricket was at its peak in 1983. However, this cinematic triumph came at a high cost. 83 is one of the most expensive films ever made in India, with a $34 million budget.
The jinx is back:
After 83, Bollywood has released five cricket films, including Srijit Mukherji’s Shabaash Mithu, which follows Mithali Raj’s journey from a small town to leading India’s women’s cricket team to the 2017 Women’s World Cup final, where they were defeated by England.
“They lost the battle but they won the war against misogyny, against discrimination, against the sorry state of affairs of women’s cricket and inspired an entire generation of girls and women to pick up the sport,” Mukherji said in a press release.
Shabaash Mithu’s cricketing action is authentic, but it, like all the other films, bombed. The curse appears to have returned. Perhaps genteel nostalgia and the underdog story no longer have resonance in a changing country.
Films on society:
In every David versus Goliath story, David transforms into Goliath. In terms of viewership and revenue, India is now one of the world’s fastest-growing economies and a cricket powerhouse. Meanwhile, since the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, aggressive Hindu supremacism has skyrocketed.
“Cricket and cinema are the last bastions of secularism, but they are also reflections of our society,” said writer-director Varun Grover. The India-Pakistan Cricket World Cup match in October was a smashing success. The match was watched by 35 million people on Disney+Hotstar and more than 100,000 people in the stadium, where tickets were reportedly sold for as much as 5,700,000 rupees ($69,170).
Crowds at Gujarat’s Narendra Modi Stadium, named after India’s prime minister, chanted “Jai Shri Ram” – a rallying cry of right-wing Hindus hailing a warrior God – as a taunt to Pakistani cricketers.
On November 3, another Bollywood film, Hukus Bukus, named after a popular Kashmiri folk song, was released. It is a fictional story set in Kashmir about a Hindu man desperately trying to build a temple dedicated to the Hindu God Krishna in the contested Muslim-majority region, but he is up against Muslim politicians with vested interests. His son, a Tendulkar fan, participates in a cricket match in order to obtain land for the temple.
Mukherji said, “Films reflect society and its inflexions, and cricket films are no different.”
So, this was all about the rocky relationship of Bollywood and Cricket. Also read, Afghan cricketer Rahmanullah Gurbaz’s kind act on Diwali!
