“All right, let me cut it short. It was like slaves whipping the asses of masters.”
- Bunny Wailer, Bob Marley and the Wailers.
Bunny Wailer does have a way of getting to the point in the film, “Fire in Babylon”, that was screened by Alternate Law Forum, last week. The avid Rastafarian and Bob Marley's mate has also been a keen follower of cricket. In that terse statement he was talking about the West Indies' Test Cricket tour of England in 1984 when the Windies ‘blackwashed' England. Lording it at Lord's and across venues in England, the charismatic Caribbean team won the series by winning the five tests that the two teams played.
The West Indian team was the master of Test Cricket through the late 1970s till the early 1990s and “Fire in Babylon” tells the story of this team during their grand reign. “Babylon”, in the lyrical vocabulary of the Rastafarians, is the oppressive regime or society, and the film's title is a reference to how cricket stirred and shook the existing social order.
Sport is intensely political and cricket, particularly, has a strong colonial legacy which makes it an even more serious game in the former colonies. Ramachandra Guha's award winning history of Indian cricket, “A Corner of a Foreign Field”, makes this point well and shows how India tried to have a swipe at England through cricket. Stevan Riley's film, “Fire in Babylon” also shows how, for the West Indian team, cricket was a way to salvage their pride in a world that was racist even till the 1980s.
The story starts with the team getting their first black captain in 1960 but it sort of gets into faster mode when Clive Lloyd becomes the captain galvanising the disparate team. Riley's film shows how the status of West Indians in world cricket was like that of the kid who is given a chance in gully cricket to make up the quorum. Their job was to entertain and they were called the ‘Calypso Cricketers' till the team pulled up its socks in the 1970s. In the words of Vivian Richards who is interviewed several times in the film: “We had a mission and the mission was that we believed in ourselves that we were just as good as anyone – equal for that matter.”
The crazy fast bowlers that West Indies became known for — the ‘Four Horsemen of Apocalypse' as they were popularly known — made their debuts and batsmen had to return to the pavilion with bruises that looked like they were results of street fights. The West Indian batsmen were fearless. Richards, Greenidge, Haynes and others – stood stubbornly at the crease and hooked and smacked the best deliveries with stylish swagger. For the West Indians, cricket was a great leveller. It brought the Caribbean islands together in a huddle and made the world sit up and notice. The dreadlocked Rastafarians were their spiritual cheerleaders and the mad frenzied energy of the black crowds their energy drink. And with this, the warriors from West Indies turned the game upside down as they battled racism and became legends forever and ever.
Last week, Kumar Sangakkara, the Sri Lankan captain, gave a memorable speech at the Lord's where he narrated the story of Sri Lankan cricket and of moving from the periphery to the centre of world cricket. It was a fantastic tale of the underdog and it becomes even more invaluable for its empathetic telling. “Fire in Babylon” also tells a similar tale from a different time and era when batsmen walked out to the crease and stood without a helmet waiting for ‘Whispering Death', as Michael Holding was known, to run down and let loose a missile.
Published - July 14, 2011 07:21 pm IST
