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Can Fire In Babylon fuel West Indies?

PORT OF SPAIN (Trinidad): Watching Fire In Babylon at the Movie Town multiplex in Port of Spain, Trinidad instantly reminded this avid Hindi movie buff of the kind of cinema that graced the screens in the 70s and 80s when Amitabh Bachchan played the Angry Young Man.

An innocent kid whose hand is forcibly inked with the words "Mera baap chor hai" grows up to become a rebel whose only aim in life is to inflict pain on those who robbed him of that innocence.

Fire in Babylon - a documentary directed by Englishman Stevan Riley that talks about the great West Indian cricketing era of the 70s and 80s - plays on your mind to that effect. It's the story of the innocence of Calypso cricket, robbed by plaguing racism, which goes on to spill over on to the cricketing field and in turn inspires the West Indian cricketers to seek 'revenge' on those who caused them that pain and humiliation.

While what Bachchan did was fiction, the story of Fire in Babylon isn't one. It is about the very unpleasant and bigotic culture of whites seeing blacks as nothing else but slaves that continued to haunt the West Indies teams touring England and Australia during those decades.

Deryck Murray spoke before the movie premiered in Port of Spain on Thursday evening, reviving good old memories of the inspirational Clive Lloyd and the proud Vivian Richards, who put together a team that did not lose a single Test series for 15 years (between 1975 and 1995).

Had former England captain Tony Greig restricted himself from saying he intends to make the touring West Indian side "grovel", on national TV prior to the 1976 series, West Indies cricket history would've perhaps been written a bit differently and their teams too would have perhaps been less intimidating.

The documentary revolves around Greig's comment along with other developments in those years, and how Lloyd's bunch took Greig's words very seriously and unleashed an array of fast-bowling geniuses which invoked the fear of God in the hearts and minds of the opposition.

In many ways, just like quintessential Bollywood movies that are filled with melodrama - Fire in Babylon too could have done with some crisp editing. There's too much drama on the screen when a padded-up West Indian batsman seems to be taking great pride when a white cricketer bends down to tie his shoelace on the field. How the West Indies cricketers managed to play their cricket so technically well has little or almost no mention.

Cricket, ale and politics: Pace, race and resistance

Belle époque of West Indian cricket. This footage depicts the fastest ‘bouncers’ - short-pitched, fast-paced deliveries which rise up at the batsman’s ribs/throat/face - in an frenzy of broken jaws, cracked ribs, bruised torsos and dislodged helmets. The game can be brutal and captivating in equal measure - a world away from the soporific shelter of the exclusive MCC box at Lord’s. As any trip to the slums of Mumbai or the shanty towns of Bangladesh will show, cricket is a sport that can capture the heart and minds of millions. The team’s legacy lies not merely in the fact that it rose to become the best in the world within a matter of years, nor that its development of breakneck speed bowling revolutionised the game. The team also became an outlet, a mouthpiece of black self-assertion, confidence and identity for a people who had been stripped of this identity by the chain and lash of colonialism. The team sought to create a ‘level playing field’ in a world still marred by the basest racial prejudices and inequality. And then it proceeded to bombard that playing field with unplayable, lighting bolt deliveries, with which few could cope. In the words of Bunny Wailer (of Bob Marley and the Wailers fame), cricket in the West Indies belongs to “daily life” and is deeply rooted in the “spirit” of the islands. The film portrays the roots of the game by filming local musicians - young and old - rapping, singing and telling stories about the great cricketing names which every young person growing up on the islands would have known: Garfield Sobers, Frank Worrell and so on. Cricket and social life are almost inseparable.  It is no accident, then, that one of the greatest works on cricket was written by the Trinidadian Marxist, CLR James (‘Beyond a boundary’). As James harrowingly depicts, the game blossomed within the struggle against colonial oppression. He writes of black slaves working on plantations who, in a desperate attempt to escape their bondage through cricket, would wait for the ball to be hit out of the cricket ground and throw it back as hard as possible, hoping to be accepted on to the team of their masters. To the colonial masters living out their lives in the sun, cricket was seen as a way of imparting British values and decency. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s that the West Indies team had a black captain, thanks in part to the outraged CLR James.

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