40 years since India's 1983 World Cup victory | When Kapil's Devils changed Indian cricket forever

Forty years ago, Kapil’s Devils scripted a fairytale that would inexorably alter the face of Indian cricket. (Screen shot/YouTube)

It’s an image that’s seared in the memory of Indian cricket followers of a certain vintage. A slice of action that crowned India as World Cup winners. No, we’re not talking about the shot that elicited the famous ‘Dhoni finishes off in style’ on-air comment from the elated Ravi Shastri after Indian skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni smashed Nuwan Kulasekara for six at the Wankhede Stadium on April 2, 2011. We are referring to an event that transpired nearly 28 years before that, at Lord’s when, against all odds, Kapil’s Devils scripted a fairytale that would inexorably alter the face of Indian cricket.

Unlike when Dhoni opened his broad shoulders and broke a million Sri Lankan hearts, television sets were as rare as hen’s teeth when Kapil Dev’s band of warriors was tilting at the windmills in England in 1983. Live telecast of sport in India was still in its infancy, satellite television a lifetime away and state-owned Doordarshan the only source of joy, even if the pictures went from grainy to guesswork, depending on which part of the country one was in.

The BCCI on June 18 tweeted this photo of then skipper Kapil Dev scoring 175 against Zimbabwe in the 1983 World Cup campaign. (Image source: Twitter/ BCCI)

There was no telecast of India’s six league matches – by accident, or by design because no one had given them a ghost of a chance at the start of the tournament, one is still not sure – but as they lined up for the semifinal at Old Trafford in Manchester against England, excitement began to soar and so many started to dare to dream. To dream of a place in the final, at most. After all, once you get there, how do you stop the mighty West Indies, the two-time defending champions, the team made up of Greenidge and Haynes, of King Richards and Lloyd, of Marshall and Roberts, of Holding and Garner?

Also read: Book excerpt | 'Miracle Men': Two moments that changed the course of the 1983 World Cup final

People congregated in droves around the scattered TV sets, first celebrating the conquest of England in the semis and then watching dumbfounded as the impossible no longer looked that in the title clash. India’s 183 seemed remarkably sub-par in a 60-over contest against a batting line-up that sent shivers down the spine of the onlookers, and Viv Richards seemed as if he wanted to finish it all off by the 30th over, until Kapil ran and ran and ran back from mid-wicket to snare a catch for the ages. Lifted again by their talismanic skipper who had kept their campaign afloat with that magical unbeaten 175 against Tunbridge Wells – sadly, not filmed because India-Zimbabwe wasn’t on BBC’s priority list on a day of four World Cup games – India regathered focus to bear down on West Indies, harried and hassled and hounded as the hunter became the hunted.

And so it was that the denouement played out, Michael Holding hacking at a Mohinder Amarnath delivery, missing it completely and being struck on the pads. Hardly had an appeal escaped Indian lips that Dickie Bird’s right index finger shot up skywards, formalizing a most remarkable 43-run triumph. Now, that’s the image we referenced at the top of the piece.

From 66 to 1 rank outsiders at the start of the competition, India had pulled off the mother of all coups, a second win in three matches against the holders in the World Cup emphatically scuttling any potential whispers of a ‘fluke’. It’s debatable if any one other event, one other tournament, one other triumph, has ever altered the landscape of any sport in any other country.

As the nation celebrates the 40th anniversary of that epochal victory on June 25, it’s worth recalling the impact that monumental development had on Indian cricket. For starters, it infused the confidence and the belief that they were inferior to no one. When the 14-strong team, with manager PR Man Singh as the only member of the support staff, began its campaign in Manchester against West Indies, more than half the squad was convinced that there were there to merely make up the numbers. After all, in two previous editions, India had won just one game – against an unfancied, unfashionable and tangibly non-existent entity called East Africa – and so the players couldn’t be blamed for training their focus on the planned tour of the US immediately at the end of their World Cup campaign for a series of exhibition matches. But one man refused to follow that train of thought; to his credit, after initially being greeted with scarcely concealed disbelief and unmasked scepticism, Kapil managed to convert his lads into believers, with the most sensational outcome.

Beyond the immediate gains – greater acceptance of the limited-overs game within the Indian milieu, a massive spike in interest and the influx of money, even if in trickles – there were other major ramifications waiting to unfold. It’s questionable if India would have co-hosted the 1987 World Cup had they not won in 1983. As if that wasn’t huge enough, that successful run ignited the spark in Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman, gentlemen who would go on to rule world cricket in time to come.

Not even the players involved in ripping the form book to shreds would have bargained for the mushrooming impact of their stirring fortnight-long journey in England. Today, if they feel that the health Indian cricket enjoys is a direct fallout of their accomplishments of four decades back, that is not without reason or justification. Instead of resting on their laurels, India went out and conquered the world again in 1985 by lifting the title at the World Championship of Cricket, cementing a romance with white-ball cricket that has grown exponentially with every passing week.

Kapil Dev holding the World Cup trophy aloft at the Lord’s balcony, his toothy smile and endearingly pidgin English in tow, encapsulated the determination of the underdog and the value of bloody-mindedly setting out to chart one’s own path. From that initial seed has spawned a revolution that has installed India as the financial capital of the sport, with its cricketing achievements not far behind. From being a land teams dreaded to visit, India has emerged as the most preferred destination, the dust and noise and population that were once seen as deterrents today hailed as elements of the endearing charm of our nation.

The stimulus for these perceptible changes clearly lies at the altar of Kapil Dev and his unyielding champions. Indian cricket owes them everything for where it is today, something current and future generations would do well to never forget.

Also read: Kapil’s Devils of 1983 flew back on the Kanishka, which was bombed by terrorists two years later