83: Falls short of being a classic, Kapil's Devils' story needs to be told

Producer Vishnuvardhan Induri, in a recent interview, revealed how it took him multiple visits to New Delhi and 15 months to convince Kapil Dev to say yes to the making of 83, the iconic movie tracing India’s glorious march to the World Cup title in England in 1983.

Induri revealed that when the skipper did give his nod, it came with a rider – that “each and every player get equal importance, and the film is not just about me”.

If the end result doesn’t necessarily reflect this, it’s not for want of trying. It’s impossible that Kapil will be anything if not the first among equals when the story of the 1983 World Cup is told in any shape or form.

83 tries hard, sometimes overtly so, to share the credit around, but through the impressive Ranveer Singh, it is Kapil who stands the tallest. After all, it was his belief, his spark and his cricketing brilliance that fuelled the against-all-odds fairytale finish.

It’s hardly a secret that few gave India a chance of being even relevant to the 1983 tournament. After all, in two previous World Cups and six matches, India had won just one game – in 1975 against East Africa, a team the irrepressible K Srikkanth dismisses as “not even a country, just a side made of Gujjus”.

The bookmakers had installed India as 66-1 outsiders to turn the world order upside down; the odds found resonance not only with cricket fans in India and elsewhere, but even within the contours of the 14-man playing party.

A majority of Kapil’s Devils, as they have subsequently come to be immortalised, believed England was merely a stop on their way to the United States for a series of exhibition games at the (premature?) conclusion of India’s World Cup campaign.

The skipper had other visions. He had had enough of being looked down on by the snooty English, and while he didn’t chest-beat or talk his team up in public, a quiet fire raged inside him. Through his mix of pidgin English and inherent innocence, he won the sceptics within his group around, turned his warriors into believers. That was his first success, to get everyone thinking that nothing was impossible. The bigger, more pronounced one, was in translating that belief into performances on the park.

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The two huge Kapil moments on the field during the tournament came against Zimbabwe, when he walked out at 9 for 4 and smashed a record 175 not out, and in the final, when he ran back and back from mid-wicket to pouch Viv Richards and signal the rejuvenation of the team in the title clash.

The elaborate details and understandably sometimes-cinematic handling of these two seminal developments have to be one of the highlights of an offering of many highlights that doesn’t ask the viewer to suspend disbelief but holds them in thrall despite no mystery or suspense to drive the denouement.

Those who go to movie halls hoping for two-and-a-half hours of pure cricket will come away feeling let down and disappointed. Those who expect 83 to strictly adhere to reality and leave the frills aside won’t be impressed by the licence they might feel director Kabir Khan has stretched a little too far.

But to the larger proportion of the cine-goer who has been brought up on Twenty20 cricket, the judicious mix of cricket and entertainment will hardly look out of place. After all, this is a generation that thrives on instant gratification and demands value for money, which is its right. To that populace, 83 will resonate as a resounding success on every front.

The nitpickers might point to less-than-perfect cricketing resemblance to the players, they might feel the 1983 heroes could have done without being portrayed as awestruck fanboys ahead of their Cup opener against two-time defending champions West Indies in Manchester. After all, India weren’t so intimidated by the Caribbeans that they couldn’t put it past Clive Lloyd’s men in their own backyard, in Berbice, just a few weeks before the World Cup. Furthermore, India were no first-time entrants to top-flight cricket, having been a part of the Test firmament for more than 50 years at the time.

But what’s a good movie without a little drama? How does entertainment crown itself without heart-tugging emotion and an overwhelming current of high-octane patriotism punctuated by the mellifluous ‘lehra do’ that complements key developments beautifully?

How can there be no humour when the naturally funny Srikkanth, the sardar Balwinder Singh Sandhu and a bunch of naughty characters led by Sandeep Patil come together, complemented by Kapil’s insistence on addressing team meetings in English, no matter how much open mirth it generated?

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If, through Ranveer, Kapil comes across as larger than life in 83, it’s because he was precisely that during the fortnight of the World Cup. Ranveer is the unquestioned star of the show, putting his natural rambunctiousness aside and producing a performance that ought to make Kapil proud.

His intensity provides a window to the flame that burnt fiercely inside the Haryana Hurricane for a decade and a half. Deepika Padukone, Ranveer’s wife who plays Kapil’s wife Romi in the film, is equally understated and holds her own, coming through as the pillar who props up Kapil in his moments of uncertainty, not least on the morning of the June 25 Lord’s final against Lloyd’s champions.

More feel-good is sprinkled through a message from the Pakistanis on the morning of the final, encouraging India’s armed forces to enjoy the match without the fear of interruption of firing from across the border. And through then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s masterstroke to use the semi-final against England to douse communal tensions in one pocket of the country.

This is a story that needed to be told, a tale that needed to be recounted in celluloid because it was this triumph that inspired the Golden Generation of Indian cricket, that allowed the country to dare to hope and dream and believe and deliver even beyond cricket.

83 might fall short of being a classic, but then again, few classics traverse the spectrum beyond the tragic. To judge 83 only through the prism of absolute adherence to non-cricketing truism will do no justice to either those associated with the movie or the stars of that heroic climb to the summit.