How do you get a bunch of 13-year-olds to love, play and win in a sport they've never watched or known? That too, in under six months?
With a hint of pride and some ownership, Sanjay Patra will tell you he was part of a coaching team that did exactly that. Twelve years ago, he helped pick 12 tribal teens from over a few thousands, trained them in rugby through the summer break and they returned to Kolkata from London in the fall of 2007 jetlagged but euphoric champions.
In the 10-team, Under-14 international schools tournament for the Nations Cup, the Indian boys beat Zambia, Swaziland, Kenya and Romania before a 19-5 win against South African side Langa Lions in the final.
A little over a decade later, their largely unknown journey and obscure triumph finds a re-telling through a movie - 'Jungle Cry' (drawn from the nomenclature of the then Indian team 'Jungle Crows'), filmed in Hindi and English and expected to hit theatres in September this year.
When the subject was broached to him by producer Shabbir Boxwalla in early 2018, director Sagar Ballary's primary challenge was getting to know the sport. "I knew squat about rugby," Ballary, best known for his comedy film Bheja Fry, tells ESPN. "So, first thing I did was google it up. I began reading up everything I could on the sport - how it's played, what the rules are, how points are scored, what a try is, how the ground is marked - apart from watching tons of documentaries and matches. My biggest fear was the film shouldn't look foolish. Especially, in the sport part."
Ballary had his bases covered. He found a ready rugby reckoner in Paul Walsh, who runs the not-for-profit Jungle Crows Foundation in Kolkata and played a key role in the Indian side's training and participation in the 2007 tournament. An ex-British diplomat who stayed back in Kolkata to teach rugby to underprivileged kids, Walsh, along with Indian coaches Patra, Sailen Tudu and Rudrakesh Jena, went on to train tribal kids at the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), pruning the team from the initial batch of 60 to the final 12 who went on to win the title.
With little equipment-driven physical strengthening at their disposal, the coaches took the primitive route to fitness. Blessed with the natural agility that is typical to tribal kids, they swam across creeks and climbed trees to build body strength.
Patra recalls the bewildered looks when the pig-bladder-shaped rugby ball was tossed around and rules were broken down to the gathering of teens.
"Among themselves they were wondering, 'Kya paagal sport hai. Ball nariyal ki tarah dikhta hai, bhaagna aage hai aur pass peeche karna hai.' (This sport is bonkers! The ball looks like a coconut and you have to run forward but pass backward).
Not just scrums, quick throws and line-outs, the teens travelling for the 2007 tournament were also unfamiliar with air travel and the use of table cutlery. They were taught how to hold a fork and spoon and almost all of them had air sickness bags wrapped around their mouths through the long flight to London.
The movie found support from the World Rugby body and Scarlets, a Welsh rugby side, stepped in as sponsor and threw open their home ground for shooting the movie. Captain of the 2007 Indian side Rajkishore Murmu was also called upon to assist with inputs during the filming in India and Wales.
Two years ago, when ESPN visited Rajkishore's village in Keshadiha in the tribal belt of Kendujhar district, roughly 250km away from the state capital Bhubaneswar, we learnt that electricity and water supply were just as infrequent visitors to the village as its home boy. Against the shadow of our camera lights and the sound of crickets, Rajkishore recounted how the team he was asked to lead was initially torn by infighting, crippled by the biting cold weather, dwarfed by its opposition and yet much to everyone's disbelief, came up trumps. To shut the cold out, the Indian boys were even given sips of brandy during training.
"All we knew was to run and pass the ball," says Rajkishore. "Technical know-how was very low among us. Opposition players tried clever manoeuvres and feints and we froze on the field not knowing how to react. We just stuck to what we knew -- run hard."
After Rajkishore was named captain just ahead of the tournament, the team split up into camps. A few felt they were more deserving of the role and the fissures deepened in the first few matches. Some glimpses of it appear in the film trailer, which was released at the Cannes film festival in May this year. "There was some hostility at the start," says Rajkishore, 26, and now a rugby instructor at KISS. "Slowly everyone realised that this was only pulling us apart and unless we came together as a team we couldn't go all the way. We were already up against so much. The cold was killing us, many of us were hamstrung and in a lot of pain and rival players were almost twice our size."
Ballary says he's attempted to keep alive the drama and emotion that surrounded the experience. Sidestepping the usual inspirational, cliché-ridden trope was his focus. "Telling an underdog story without treading on tried and tested methods was tough. The aim was to make an emotional film and also have the rugby look very real so that even someone who doesn't follow the sport connects with it and learns the game."
Ballary's brief in casting player roles was clear - they weren't looking for great actors, but decent players. "We wanted expressive faces and good voices, but beyond that we needed guys who play the sport." Almost all the boys who are in the movie as Indian players are either picked from Jungle Crows or KISS.
Rajdeep Saha, who started playing rugby for free food, finds himself on the poster for the movie. Formerly an inmate of Don Bosco Ashalayam in Kolkata, an NGO which works towards the rehabilitation of destitute children, Saha hated rugby. "Maar peeth ka game hai mujhe laga, aur haath, pair bhi chhil jaate the." (I thought it was a rough sport and also I'd be left with bruises on my arms and legs)," says Saha, now under-18 Bengal state rugby captain, "But slowly the sport began to have a positive influence on me. Earlier I used to pick up fights with hostel mates and was rebellious and disrespectful but being part of a team, travelling for tournaments and seeing the outside world made me value and respect people and changed me as a person."
KISS coach Jena, whose role has been essayed by actor Abhay Deol in the film, recounts the weak hope and faint conviction he tried hard to camouflage back then. "The boys were scared. Honestly, deep down so was I. But they played their hearts and guts out like mad, mad boys. Nobody thought we'd win. Even we ourselves didn't."
In the immediate afterglow, the import and ramifications of the title weren't too obvious. "We knew we'd achieved something," says Rajkishore. "But we didn't know what it meant."
The magnitude of the win seeped in over the years through the fresh droves of kids in Orissa, especially at KISS, who picked up the rugby ball. While some of them were sold out on the unbelievable story of children who were exactly like them beating world sides, others were envious of the chance to board a plane and travel to a foreign land. Today, Orissa is among the sport's most thriving hubs in the country and a large majority of these kids are drawn from the tribal populace at KISS, at least 40 percent of them girls. A paradigm shift from the urban centres the sport used to be formerly cloistered in.
But in the macro context, rugby doesn't find a large audience in India.
Invisible in the Indian sport lexicon and broadcast space, story-telling through mainstream cinema, even if belated, could be the try rugby can do with.