With hindsight it isn't hard to show that the 25th of June 1983 was Day One of a new era in Indian sport. Cricket writers like channelling their inner CLR James, so that shock World Cup win was thoroughly mined for its implications. These ranged from changes within cricket ¬- the rise of the limited-overs game and the decline of Test match spectatorship - to meta-cricketing consequences, such as the new political economy of cricket, dominated by the BCCI. This piece doesn't go there. It doesn't try to understand what that win means now; it's a bid to reimagine what it meant then.
It has been more than 30 years since Kapil Dev took the trophy from some English toff on that pavilion balcony at Lord's, so it's hard to just shut your eyes and taste the fizzing shock of it. Things read, things written, television reruns, YouTube videos, that endless loop of Kapil loping one way, looking another before casually catching Viv Richards' skied pull, get in the way. That it's a television memory to start with doesn't help; there's nothing to smell, no weather, just a bunch of us sweating in a room in Delhi, staring at a chunky TV that looks like furniture.
I could have been there. I remember thinking that when Kapil grinned goofily, announced that drinks were on the house and invited everyone to join the team in its celebrations. I had been a student in England till less than a year before the final, and if I hadn't been hopeless at archival research my grant might have been extended for a third year, which would have seen me through to that World Cup summer. An Indian friend, a parasitologist on first-name terms with Trypanosoma brucei but who couldn't tell Kirti Azad from Maulana Azad, went instead. Gaiti Hasan's first cricket match was a World Cup victory at Lord's.
"The only non-violent seam attack in the history of the game went up against the scariest quartet of fast bowlers assembled in one team... and won"
She didn't even want to go. A fellow doctoral student, who bred rats and puréed their innards for usable tissue, had two tickets for the 25th. He being English and this being 1983, he was certain England would win their semi-final against India. Low delight in the disappointment of ambushed angrezes was one of the chief pleasures of '83. When Bob's heartbroken friend dropped out he needed company, so he asked Gaiti. She couldn't see the harm in it, so she went.
She was the only friend of mine who was actually there at Lord's, so ignorant or not, she was my representative. They took the train to London carrying sandwiches they had frugally made themselves for lunch. They didn't have seats directly behind the batsman. They sat at an angle to the action, sort of mid-off or long leg. She didn't know the names of the fielding positions. "About 20 degrees to the pitch" is what she said. Between innings, as they ate their sandwiches, Bob and everyone else around them thought India would lose. She registered the excitement when Kapil caught Richards out, and she thinks she saw champagne being sprayed around in the pavilion after the match. She doesn't remember much else.
Nobody felt the earth move or the balance of power shift. This was the third World Cup in England and the third final to be played at Lord's. It was played in whites, with a shiny red ball, through England's long, long summer days that fit two 60-overs innings in with daylight to spare. It seemed unthinkable then that the Cup's tableaus wouldn't be staged in England forever. Kapil Dev took the English ownership of the tournament so much for granted that he declared he wanted to come back with the boys and win it all over again. Continuity was everywhere; the great Sunil Gavaskar took guard against Andy Roberts, Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding and Joel Garner bareheaded. Later, when he caught Larry Gomes off Madan Lal during the chase and reduced West Indies to 66 for 5, the teams, with the match in the balance, went in for tea. Tea! The old ways lived.
But they lived on as eccentric leftovers from another time. And not just in distant retrospect: later that morning Gavaskar's quixotic refusal of protection seemed more daft than heroic when Marshall's wickedly fast bouncer hit Balwinder Singh Sandhu on the head. A brave No. 11, Sandhu drove the next ball off the front foot, but if it hadn't been for the helmet perched on his patka, the scorecard might have read "BS Sandhu, retired dead."
I had forgotten about Sandhu being hit as I had forgotten so much else about this match. The '83 final is an object lesson in how the past recedes. We keep the bits that fit the story, and the story of a cricket match is written by its end. Every desi who watched that final remembers Sandhu for that artful inswinger that bowled Greenidge even as he shouldered arms. Almost no one recalls that near-death moment. I caught it in a fuzzy highlights package online. There was an English commentator, I can't tell who, tut-tutting gently about the wrongness of bouncing a tailender. "It was a good bouncer," he said, "but..."
That "but" has never gone away, not even now after helmets have become the norm. There's a lethalness to cricket that gives people pause. It certainly did that June afternoon. Play stopped; Jeff Dujon walked up to Sandhu to see how he was. Sandhu leaned on his bat and affected indifference. Marshall took a moment; he stopped in his follow-through, bent over and tied his laces for a long time. Playing cricket is a mortally serious business; no one dies playing tennis.
"Perhaps this battling veteran saw clearly in that moment that he had transcended a chequered career and found, along with his team mates, a kind of immortality"
The difference between cricketing memories before television and after is that before, there wasn't a video archive to keep people honest. In the mid-'60s, my father told me about the Tests he watched in England as a young man. So Duleepsinhji, slight in his billowing silk shirt, walked out to bat and Frank Woolley drove through cover and Percy Chapman fielding at slip took every catch that came his way with his bucket-like hands. He had followed the Australians around England one long-ago summer and he was full of tales. I don't know how many of them came from matches he had watched and how many from second-hand lore; I don't think he did either. When he told me those stories, they were more than 30 years old, which is roughly the distance in time between Lord's 1983 and now. Except, now we have YouTube to refresh (or reconstitute) our memories.
In 1983 it would have been hard to argue on the evidence of the cricket played that the tournament was a hinge moment in the history of cricket. From an Indian point of view the win wasn't a revolution, it was a heist pulled off against the odds by a mix of old lags and new bucks, more Ocean's Eleven than Battleship Potemkin. If India's great tradition was spin, the tournament marked the triumph of its little tradition, military-medium seam bowling. If we discount Kapil for a moment, Mohinder Amarnath, Sandhu, Madan Lal and Roger Binny were India's answer to Roberts, Holding, Marshall and Garner. The only non-violent seam attack in the history of the game went up against the scariest quartet of fast bowlers assembled in one team... and won. Madan Lal took three top-order wickets in the final; Amarnath bagged two as well as the Man-of-the-Match award. In some ways the '83 win was less a harbinger of a powerful future than the fugitive triumph of a hardscrabble past.
The things that foretold the future happened off camera. Like Kapil's match-saving, tournament-winning hundred against Duncan Fletcher's Zimbabwe: 175 runs in just 138 balls, it was clearly one of the first if not the first great limited-overs innings. There were no cameras at Tunbridge Wells because of industrial action at the BBC. There is no footage to rework or ratify lore, so we are free to imagine those six sixes and those 16 fours, that 72-ball century.
"Kapil Dev took the English ownership of the tournament so much for granted that he declared he wanted to come back with the boys and win it all over again"
The other game-changing thing that the cameras didn't catch was the Indian cricket board president's pique at being denied two 11th-hour passes to the final for his VIP friends. Gossip had it that the MCC's arrogance so infuriated the Indian apparatchik that he moved heaven, earth and Dhirubhai Ambani to wrest the World Cup from England and bring it to India in a new avatar, the Reliance Cup. But I didn't know that then, and even if I had, I wouldn't have cared. No desi fan has ever mistaken the grievances of these thin-skinned operators with the cause of Indian cricket.
When the last wicket fell - MA Holding lbw b Amarnath 6 - the thing that mattered was the look on Mohinder's face as the umpire's finger went up. He grinned and kept running, swerved to grab a bail and raced for the pavilion as the desi hordes invaded the ground. The camera closed in on him in mid-shot; he was smiling his Errol Flynn smile (he had a little moustache) and it was a look of serious delight. Perhaps he was thinking of his father, the great Lala, who had scored a Test fifty in that same ground in 1946; knowing père Amarnath, this would have been a tale told often to his hectored sons. Or perhaps this battling veteran saw clearly in that moment that he had transcended a chequered career and found, along with his team mates, a kind of immortality.
Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in New Delhi