In trying to show his young student how to take a penalty shot, the rogue sports teacher kicks the football — and hobbles away screaming with pain as the audience breaks into guffaws…
Bollywood has rarely been serious about football, as we saw in this sequence from Do Aur Do Paanch (1980). Being headquartered in Bombay, majority of sports-based Hindi films have been around cricket, with leading cricketers like Sunil Gavaskar, Salim Durrani, Sandeep Patil, Syed Kirmani and Mohsin Khan donning the greasepaint. Or the one-off hockey-based themes like Chak de! India (2007).
Eastwards, the Bengali film industry, located in Calcutta, has tickled the fanatic nerve of this football-crazy city with football-centric films right from the Black and White era. Uttam Kumar’s short but memorable stint on the soccer field in Saptapadi (1961) was one of the most remembered sequences from this classic. A middle-aged Uttam Kumar in Dhonni Meye (1971) sparked the football fever across Bengal, playing the patriarch of a family who literally ate, drank, and slept football, and had surreal dreams around the game. Dhonni Meye had more than one Bombay connect. It was Jaya Bhaduri’s first film as the central character. Yes, it preceded the Hindi Guddi (1971) And the train song Sab khelar shera Bangali r tumi football, which became an unofficial anthem of the football fans, was written with two Bollywood giants S D Burman and Manna Dey in mind. The two were great collaborators in the music rooms in Bombay, but typical fanatic rivals when it came to supporting their football clubs – Burman for East Bengal FC and Manna Dey for Mohun Bagan Athletic Club. Needless to say, the film was a monumental hit. The East Bengal – Mohun Bagan rivalry fuelled films like Mohun Baganer Meye (The Mohun Bagan girl/bride) in 1976, where an elderly man (Utpal Dutt) goes to the extent of insisting that his daughter-in-law has to be a Mohun Bagan supporter.
But yes, there have been a handful of Bollywood films based on football – interestingly, these were clustered in the first half of the 1980s. One which comes to mind almost immediately is Mashaal (1984), where the two protagonists, Dilip Kumar and Anil Kapoor, battle it out on the football field. Here, the football field acts as the levelling ground, and the game is used to set up a simile with the characters in the film. Riding on the success of the film, Anil Kapoor had become the footballing mascot for Bollywood. In the mid-1980s. More on him later.
Hip Hip Hurray (1983), Prakash Jha’s version of To Sir with Love (1967) was filmed in Jharkhand. The rivalry between the coaches of the two rival teams – Sandeep (Raj Kiran) and Roy (Shafi Inamdar) extended beyond football. Anuradha (Deepti Naval) was Roy’s ex-girlfriend and was now dating Sandeep. But the thunder in Hip Hip Hurray belonged to Nikhil Bhagat (playing the brat Raghu) who, with the help of his coach Sandeep discovers a football hero hidden somewhere deep within him.
The role of football in both the films was metaphorical, with the typical emphasis on fair-play. Aruna and Vikas Desai broke the paradigm of using the game as just of the many signposts. In the unusual film Situm (1984), the game was used as one of the main characters responsible for inducing severe trauma in both the lead characters. Vikram, who produced the film, played Inder, a champion footballer suddenly going into a state of unresponsive stupor following a football match where his shot had accidentally killed the goalkeeper Subhash, played by Naseeruddin Shah. The prevailing sense of guilt, further fuelled by indictments from all quarters including Meenakshi (Smita Patil), Subhash’s widow drives him to insanity. A failed suicide attempt further compounds problems and Meenakshi is advised by Mr. Baxi (Keith Stevenson) to step in and help Inder come out of the compulsive guilt complex, which, we discover, had existed since he was a child. The death of Subhash helped to snowball the guilt into proportions beyond his tolerance levels.
Like most avant-garde Hindi films of that time, this film suffered severely due to appalling production values, dreadful acting by a major chunk of the cast which included one of the directors, Vikas Desai, and a lack of continuity. Result — no distributor was ready to take it up. It was with great difficulty that the film was cut, re-cut and sold.
- Saheb (1985) connected Bengal, Bombay and the South – based on a Bengali play and later a Bengali film, it was remade as Vijetha in Telugu in 1985 starring Chiranjeevi.
A Bollywood film made in 1985, which garnered a good response from both the mass and the critics for the message it conveyed, was the Hindi version of a Bengali film of the same name made in 1981. In the original Bengali play in All India Radio by Ranjan Roy, the hero was a boxer — not a footballer — who, in an act of extreme selflessness, donates one of his kidneys to facilitate his sister’s marriage. Saheb was a roaring success on AIR Calcutta, till it was filmed, with alterations to the story as mentioned before by Bijoy Bose. Rights to the same were bought by Anil Ganguly for his Hindi version soon. While the pathos of the original did not quite reflect in the Anil Kapoor – Amrita Singh version, readers might recall the super-hit duet Yaar bina chain kahan re. Utpal Dutt played the role of the head of the family in both the versions.
Not all fanaticism around football is necessarily clean. In Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal (2007), Sunny (John Abraham), a Briton of Indian origin, gets left out of Aston Football Club team despite being the best and the fastest player. “It is not about football, it is about my colour”, he laments.
With leading Bollywood personalities like Abhishek Bachchan, John Abraham, Ranbir Kapoor and Hrithik Roshan owing Indian Super League (ISL) franchises, football fans can reasonably expect more football-based Bollywood offerings. Till then, let us linger in the excitement of the World Cup semis and the finals coming up!