There’s a reason films like Lion, Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire — essentially Indian stories and characters encapsulated by the craft of a Western gaze — appeal to curious cinematic sensibilities. They may seem exoticised, naïve even, to conditioned desi viewers, but there’s a stark clarity and basic-ness of storytelling that often transcends its sweeping generalisations of texture. Often, it’s like a teacher summarising the vast content of a fairytale in order to narrate it in the most dramatic and inclusive way possible: complete with beats, lingering pauses and lavish hand gestures. In filmmaking parlance, it’s the equivalent of a director finally seeing his film through the distant, clinical eyes of a hired editor. That’s not to say the romance is filtered out; it’s just simplified — and punctuated upon — to outline both a quick introduction and an extrinsic exploration.
Gotham Chopra’s 50-minute long ESPN documentary on Sachin Tendulkar, The Little Master , is a classic example. While I’m tempted to call it an ‘NRI film’ about India’s biggest ever sports icon, I’d be hard-pressed to find a more suitable career that lends itself to this theatrical template. His longevity enables his second-generation countrymen on faraway shores to belong again, by telling – proudly, excessively, animatedly – versions of his story to their new neighbours in their own language. Chopra, too, is no exception.
A stateswide view
You don’t expect to hear an American accent in a cricket documentary, yet there’s senior ESPN writer Wright Thompson recalling his ‘tour’ during the 2011 World Cup – the few months it took him to go from “who is this chap?” to “Mickey Mantle and Michael Jordan have nothing on him!” Other cultural-appropriation devices burst to the fore: baseball references flow thick and fast, the filmmaker’s famous father Deepak Chopra provides the voiceover, fan-boy interviewees range from precise communicators like Rahul Bose and Shashi Tharoor to the properness of Amitabh Bachchan and Preity Zinta, mythological metaphors of Krishna and Kamsa are dropped to explain Tendulkar’s divine image, and visuals of aspiring slum cricketers are juxtaposed with ‘modern’ cities to symbolise Tendulkar’s status as the sole flag-bearer of this new India. In fact, 14 minutes into the film, the rules of cricket — batting (offense), bowling (defense), runs and wickets — are rapidly explained.
This is not entirely an awkward situation for a foreign production. In fact, it’s quite timely to be reminded about the roots of the game, and why one pint-sized batsman invariably united a nation made of differences – especially when the sport has become more of a business than ever before. It’s nice to rediscover the deconstructed littler things through the wondrous gaze of other eyes, like Azad Maidan, Shivaji Park, the ‘Sa-chin’ chant, and the sight of a 16-year-old Mumbaikar slamming Aaqib Javed for a boundary with a bloodied nose.
Americans, too, love the quintessential underdog theme. A few early years aside, Tendulkar spent most of his life being the top dog in an underdog team. But the core of his existence falls squarely into this crowd-pleasing category simply by virtue of being Indian for an audience largely ignorant about our ways.
The task of first presenting a hero while simultaneously concentrating a definitive 24-year-old legacy onto a specific national motif is an unenviable one. The art, the technicalities and the personality of the game take a backseat. It just begins with the established idea of a player’s greatness, not the method or intimacy of it. Yet, the information must be limited enough for a bird’s-eye view and extensive enough to demand attention and emotional investment.
Like a fairy tale
Therefore Chopra chooses the most familiar, and maybe the most rightfully exploited, timeline: the tireless quest of an ageing superstar – a man who has “sacrificed” his life at the altar of a higher religion – to win that one elusive title. This , everyone will understand. This , everyone will root for.
We see the narrative framing the failed 2003 World Cup Final as a springboard to launch the ‘journey’ of the chaptered eight years that followed. For a sport that is notoriously exclusive like a self-important Gentleman’s Club, limited to the imagination of the eight or ten nations that actually participate, it’s rare to see cricket described in an innocent, fable-like manner. Chopra continuously words it in a larger context, painting a ‘big picture’ about the small, calm man captivating a country so unstable, so unlike him.
Making sense of it all
One can almost imagine uninitiated gasps at the images of posters burning during the team’s unprecedented failure at the 2007 World Cup. Even Thompson struggles to draw parallels to explain this toxic fanaticism, but doesn’t hesitate as soon as the successful 2011 World Cup campaign enters the fray. In between, it’s interesting to see the South Africans in charge of the team in transition – coach Gary Kirsten and physical trainer Paddy Upton — briefly explain how their own alien, borderline-gaze helped break down the traditional Indian habit of hierarchy within the squad.
It’s during this era-defining tournament that Chopra identifies biopic-worthy, conflict-causing sub-plots (Yuvraj Singh and his fading health) and the heightened tone he was looking for: Thompson’s very American description of the mere concept of a volatile India-Pakistan rivalry (“think Red Sox-Yankees with both cities aiming nuclear missiles at each other”), the colonial significance of the India-England match (the dated slaves v/s ex-rulers thread et al), and the David-Goliath undercurrents of the India-Australia quarterfinal – all made thematically relevant by the throbbing anticipation of the Final.
I couldn’t help but grin at the choice of analogies, which aren’t quite dissimilar to the exaggerated, preconceived notions Bollywood filmmakers harbour about the West. Or even at the irony of a young, chubby-faced Virat Kohli describing how painfully silent the stadium had gone when he walked out to bat after the early dismissal of Tendulkar. One can imagine, done the line, today’s middle-order batsmen saying the same about Kohli’s dismissal.
Snapshots of a legend
Towards the end, with Tendulkar in the dressing room and his teammates galloping towards victory, Chopra contextualises the tension – the gravity of the occasion countlessly familiar to us – like only a dreamy-eyed yarn-spinner can: a suspenseful memory-flash capsule of Tendulkar’s life, the kind you’d imagine a rags-to-riches protagonist to have on the cusp of destiny. But he wasn’t at the crease, and the match wasn’t quite the cliffhanger the narrators would like us to believe. While this may be blasphemy for bemused local viewers, it’s an accessibility-driven creative license just about consistent with the film’s suspended treatment.
Fittingly, the one moment the makers don’t really find the need to ‘inject’ is the epilogue: tearful players on the field magnanimously declaring they won it only for Sachin Tendulkar, lifting him on their shoulders, as if he were a long-overdue lifetime achievement awardee. This is after all not just an Indian phenomenon – standing on a glittering global stage and saying the right thing, thanking God during, and for, their greatest moment irrespective of whether they’re religious or not.
The Little Master will air at 12 p.m. on April 23 on Sony ESPN
