Lights, Camera, and Gold Medals
A still from Mary Kom (2014)
There is a clear disconnect between Indian sports and films about Indian sports. We love inspiring cinematic stories about sports in India—often ignoring the sports themselves. Jamie Alter analyses this dichotomy.
India is that rare country where a high-profile film on hockey (think Shah Rukh Khan’s Chak De! India) can get more attention than an actual high-profile hockey match. While film-goers may have flocked to watch Mary Kom (2014) because of its lead Priyanka Chopra, how many actually knew that the titular character was, at the time of the film’s release, already India’s first boxing Olympic medal-winner, a five-time Women’s World Championships gold medalist and a mother of three?
Omung Kumar, who directed Mary Kom’s biopic, admitted that he did not know even know who the boxer was before the script landed in his lap. And therein lies the plight of Hindi sports biopics and their subjects. There is a clear disconnect between Indian sports and films about Indian sports. In India, we love inspiring cinematic stories about sportspersons more than we love, or pay attention to, the actual sport.
Cinema is a mass medium, and so is sport. Why, then, is there such a dichotomy?
It is a fact that in India, apart from cricket, there is no sport that we avidly follow. I use the word ‘follow’ deliberately, instead of ‘watch’. There is a vast difference in number when we compare the viewers of Hindi cinema, and to those of all the Indian sports that don’t include cricket. Millions of Indians watch Hindi films and millions watch cricket. Millions, however, do not closely watch or follow hockey, football, track and field or badminton.
Yes, more people might have gotten to know more about Mary Kom after the release of Kumar’s film, but the fact remains that Chopra and the picture’s producers and director gained far more from it than the sport itself. Since the time Mary Kom released, Indian boxing has lurched from one controversy to another. In 2016, the immediate Olympic games from the one in which Mary Kom made history with a bronze medal, just three boxers represented India—five fewer than from 2012.
In 2013, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s ode to great Indian Olympian Milkha Singh Bhaag Milkha Bhaag became a box office hit against the backdrop of the sorry state of Indian track and field. The film did nothing for the sport—not that it was supposed to—and the fact that the mainstream audience lapped up such an exaggerated and unabashedly fictitious representation of a true sporting legend’s career went almost unnoticed.
The reason? The state of affairs inside the Boxing Federation of India, which at the time stood suspended. There had been no national championships for several years; the suspension of the governing body had jeopardised the future or the sport in India, and the ones suffering were our boxers.
So why was the film Mary Kom so successful? The primary reason is the pull of Chopra, its leading star, who is among the most well-known global Indian celebrities. The film is average at best, even though Chopra clearly gave her best to the role. She deservedly won her admirers. But Mary Kom didn’t put Indian boxing in the limelight.
A few years ago, when my wife and I took our little son to a play-zone in a popular Noida mall, we bumped into the real-life Mary Kom with her three kids, the youngest of which was nearly four at the time. There stood Mary, five-time world boxing champion, with her family and a maid, in the middle of a teeming kids play area, and not a single other person recognised her. We were the only ones to go up and speak to her, and she seemed genuinely surprised.
It was a sobering moment.
In 2013, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s ode to great Indian Olympian Milkha Singh Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (starring Farhan Akhtar) became a box office hit against the backdrop of the sorry state of Indian track and field. The film did nothing for the sport—not that it was supposed to—and the fact that the mainstream audience lapped up such an exaggerated and unabashedly fictitious representation of a true sporting legend’s career went almost unnoticed.
And then there is Dangal (2016), which ranks as the highest-grossing Hindi film of all time. Aamir Khan’s excellent portrayal of Mahavir Singh Phogat, the Haryanvi wrestling icon who trained his two daughters Geeta and Babita to become star wrestlers, pulled in the audience. As engaging as Dangal was, it did little to change the face of Indian wrestling. Indian wrestlers such as Geeta and Babita owe more to their father and his own coaching setup than they do to the Wrestling Federation of India.
Clearly, there is a difference in people’s psychologies in India towards entertainment between sport and movies. Those who make films, it appears, are catering to a different audience. Cricket aside, why do people watch biopics more than the sports they are based on?
Devansh Patel, a film critic and host turned producer, offers the view that film-makers need to understand and research their subjects better. “No actor is bigger than the sports biopic,” says Patel. “In any true-event story, the story is bigger than the actor. We need to change this,” In his own words, Patel is “surprised and shocked” that when sports biopics are made at the level of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag or Mary Kom, there is a level of apathy from the makers to loop in sports journalists to actually contribute in writing such films.
“If we want to religiously tap into the people who watch Bhaag Mikha Bhaag or Mary Kom to also follow the sport, that one change needs to be implanted from the lowest level,” he says. “As a sports fan, I would have loved to see an article or column in the sports pages of the newspapers of a sports magazine about these films and their protagonists. There are a lot of avid sports readers. When you have everything encapsulate in basically one page, Bollywood, you are putting that viewer or reader off. If I don’t watch movies but read the sports pages, and I read that there’s a movie on a famous athlete coming up, whom I may have followed, I would want to see it because it has come on a sports page.”
“I would love to see a film’s press conference dominated by the sports media. I haven’t heard of a sports biopic’s PR people calling sports journalists. They only call film reporters. Why are we doing that? If you are aiming at a 100-crore film about sports, why are you sidelining the people who report on it? How do you keep tabs on what is happening in the country? Through newspapers and TV and websites and social media, right? If you isolate the sports media, how will you attract sports enthusiasts to watch your film? It works two ways; it will encourage a sports enthusiast to watch your film and it will encourage film-makers to follow that sport.”
The fundamental question is: why does anyone in Indian cinema make a sports biopic? Two answers present themselves as soon as you ask that question. One, for profit. Two, they believed in the journey of a particular sportsperson or were emotionally moved by the entire graph of that athlete’s life and career. The two are not necessarily mutually connected.
Rohit Vats, a film critic and entertainment journalist, believes that in India the audience’s desire to watch something dramatic and at times unbelievable trumps the reality of sport.
“The idea of a legend appears bigger than the legend’s day to day life, because we want to see our own life’s reflection in films,” he says. “We search for a connection which could make us feel more alive than before, something that could inspire us within 120 minutes. It’s a quest for immediate solutions rather than going for the full cycle of preparation and training. We want the easy way out, and what could be a better source for such relief than cinema?”
The actual sports may remain in shoddy condition, riddled by mismanagement, lacking funding and quality infrastructure, but if someone can paint an inspiring story on celluloid and entertain millions and make money from it, the audience is satisfied. The film wins the race, while the sport gets left far behind in the dust.
Vats raises a valid point. The sports films made in Hindi cinema, broadly speaking, are more about escapism rather than reality. Perhaps it is because when audiences flock to movie theatres, they are taken into a different world where they invade the space of so many different people. Maybe it is the fact that these dazzling, sculpted, frightening, inspirational, repulsive and interesting characters make for intoxicating viewing. It could be the range of emotions displayed by such people across two hours that viewers find irresistible.
Which brings me back to Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. Like few other sports biopics, this film took the term ‘cinematic liberty’ rather too liberally. The makers of this film, shockingly, claimed that Milkha Singh broke the 400m world record. He did not. Google it yourself.
In a superbly crafted montage—cinematically, at least—at the start of the film, Milkha is shown to look back at a shadowy horseback figure when in the lead during the 400m Olympic race in Rome. YouTube has clips of that race, and never at any point did Milkha lead in that famous race and he certainly never looked back. Apart from being excessively melodramatic (in slow motion, Milkha’s bandages fly off a severely injured ankle that in reality would require months of recovery) Bhaag Milkha Bhaag was a dishonest biopic. And yet no one seemed to realize or care and the film raked in money.
That is the power of cinema and jingoism.
On the cinematic horizon are biopics on Abhinav Bindra (starring Harshvardhan Kapoor), Saina Nehwal (headlined by Parineeti Chopra), and one on Syed Abdul Rahim, the iconic football coach who oversaw India’s run to the semi-finals of the 1956 Olympics (starring Ajay Devgn).
But the one which has made the most news is ’83, fronted by Ranveer Singh as Kapil Dev, about the Indian cricket team that won the World Cup in 1983 by beating two-time winners West Indies at Lord’s. Why? Because it’s about cricket, the most popular sport in India and the easiest to market, sell and profit from.
So how can we expect other sports to gain from the films about them?
“The world over, people look up to sportspersons and movie stars,” says Patel. “If movie stars don’t become ambassadors for the sports films that make and act in, who will? I had a word with Harshvardhan Kapoor not too long ago, and I asked him—a tiny piece of advice from a journalist, for whatever it’s worth—to ensure that the sports media reports on the Bindra biopic. Bindra is not just an Indian figure. He is an Olympic gold-medal winner, India’s first individual gold medalist. His is not a national story; it is an international story in itself. As a kid, I saw only China, America, Germany and Japan dominate at the Olympics. Suddenly when Bindra puts India on the world map, it is an immense sense of pride.”
In 2007, before Chak De! India released, the producers looped in members of the Indian men’s and women’s hockey teams for publicity events and gave them a bigger platform to be viewed and heard. But once the film was released, and made money, the hockey players slipped back into anonymity.
Vats offers an example from his own work experience. “A couple of years ago, I went to Haryana to cover a film’s promotional event based on the life of a quite remarkable hockey player,” he says. “The film’s star, who was playing the hockey player in the biopic, was also there. A huge crowd gathered around the place of event, and everybody wanted to get a glimpse of the actor. That made me think whether they would show the same enthusiasm for the actual player and their game too?”
“It seems we like the heightened drama elements in a sportsperson’s life than the actual sporting event which is more about stats and physical prowess. Take Race, which is based on Jessie Owens’ life, for example, or even MS Dhoni: The Untold Story… what would their impact be in absence of slow-motion shots and catchy punchlines?”
Therein, perhaps, lies the difference between the hype of sports biopics and the sports themselves. The actual sports may remain in shoddy condition, riddled by mismanagement, lacking funding and quality infrastructure, but if someone can paint an inspiring story on celluloid and entertain millions and make money from it, the audience is satisfied. The film wins the race, while the sport gets left far behind in the dust.
***
Jamie Alter is a sports writer and journalist in the digital world, having covered cricket around the world including three World Cups. After nearly five years working for ESPNcricinfo, Jamie served as Sports Editor of the Times of India Digital, Cricbuzz, Cricketnext and most recently as Group Sports Editor (Digital) at Zee Media. He also also authored two cricket-related books and dabbled in acting. You can find him on Twitter: @alter_jamie.
