Supriya Sobti Gupta’s ‘Caught Out’ Shines a Light on Investigators in Indian Cricket’s Match-Fixing Scandal

Following India’s historic cricket World Cup win in 1983, the sport’s ecosystem as well as Indian pop culture slowly began revering cricketers as the new superstars. The celebrity status that bowlers and batsmen enjoy right to this very day, still, was deflated in a way in the late Nineties when instances of match-fixing, friendliness with bookies, an underworld nexus and more came to light.

Filmmaker Supriya Sobti Gupta’s new documentary Caught Out shines a light on just how corrupt cricket had come by then. The hour-long film – out now on Netflix – does offer the view that anti-corruption squads now follow India’s cricketers on every match, but the larger focus is on the investigators and journalists who broke the story of match-fixing (which still isn’t considered illegal) and how they put their reputation on the line. From former senior officers at the Central Bureau of Investigation in New Delhi to embedded reporters at Outlook and even former cricketers, Caught Out takes an unflinching look at what went wrong.

In a conversation with Rolling Stone India, Gupta talks about the making of Caught Out and why the scandals from about 20 years ago still hold relevance or at least serve as grim nostalgia today. Excerpts:

There’s sometimes a sense of collective amnesia when it comes to corruption in Indian cricket history. Does this documentary want to shake things up and remind us of cricket’s unforgettable past?

Supriya Sobti Gupta: Definitely. Call it collective amnesia or a walk down memory lane, it’s nostalgia for so many of us who grew up in the Nineties. But you know, there’s also with Netflix, a wider audience that you reach out to when the idea was to bring to light the events of this scandal, which was the biggest to have hit the global cricketing sphere, not just Indian cricket, but globally.

I call it the turnaround time in cricket. Because we realized that yes, there is wrongdoing, something is going on at needs to be looked at. So, this is really the first step towards that. In the Nineties growing up, cricketers really were our heroes because they stood for this idea of nationhood, they represented India on the global stage. And they did well, so they got us this glory that we would all bask in.

Even 20 years on, this film finds relevance because so long as competitive sports is alive, you’re always going to want to remember these moments that marked the turnaround time, because it changed the way we look at sports, even though briefly, but it also brought a few corrective measures in place.

At some point in the documentary, it’s said that people turned off their TVs when they found out cricketers were involved in match-fixing. Do you think people just stopped watching cricket from thereon?

Definitely. I wasn’t an ardent cricket fan, but cricket was always on the telly. Whether or not you liked it, you always knew what was happening. When this scandal broke, it hit home hard because all these murmurs like, ‘Arrey yeh match toh fixed hai’ (This match is fixed), we would hear these terms very loosely, especially when India was playing Pakistan. It just confirmed something that we didn’t want to confront. When this scandal blew up, you realize that this is actually true and what I’ve invested all my time in and believed in the sport and cheered for these guys, who are representing us as a people, was all a farce.

How long was Caught Out in the works?

I would say this was one of my quickest, quickest deliveries for Netflix because we were very focused on the story that we want to tell so it wasn’t sort of, “Okay, let’s dive in and find out what the story is.”

Let’s be honest, 20 years ago, the cricketers maintained a conspiracy of silence. We had that inkling that it’s going to be really hard to get the cricketing fraternity to talk about the tough truths and tell us their side of the story.

We also knew that there was another side which is there were these investigators who stuck their necks out 20 years ago to bring to us granular details of what had happened then. For me, these investigators, I call them the unsung heroes because I feel although they did a commendable job 20 years ago, we’ve never heard from them about what it took for them to make this story come alive.

This investigation in itself was a big deal. It was probably a remarkable time in their individual careers as well, whether it’s the CBI director or the Delhi police officer, or the Tehelka guys that got this, really was one of the biggest stories of their lives as well. It did take a lot of convincing getting them on board, trying to reassure them that the narrative we want to tell is one of theirs and what it was like for them.

Did you face any hurdles getting more out from the cricketing bodies and associations and their officers who were around at the time?

We tried reaching out to authorities and the BCCI [Board of Control for Cricket in India] administration from then, because this is a retrospective film. It didn’t make sense to get people in the administration now because it’s got nothing to do with them.

There was a hard wall that we hit against when it came to the BCCI or the cricketing fraternity but we got an incredible amount of support from the big guns and the unsung heroes. Let’s face it, the cricketers will have a platform to tell their story if they decide to, but how many times have you heard a CBI guy dive into details and tell what it was like to be in that room [with former Indian captain Mohammed Azharuddin]?

We’ve got to just be open to discussing issues and talking about them. This is the human interest in these stories. These are humans and we wanted to look at human frailties.

What kind of legal vetting went into being allowed to say the things you wanted to say in Caught Out?

There is an element of right to reply when you’re a journalist. I’m a former journalist and making this film, I knew that there will have to be checks and balances in place because, look, this is about cricket. There’s a lot of public interest in this story. Everything said and done, these were our heroes and a lot of people still consider them heroes.

It was kind of difficult to dive into what those technical grounds [that charges against Azharuddin were overturned] were in detail, but we were able to sum it up by explaining that match-fixing is not a crime, and it’s still not a crime, so how do you press charges against somebody when there is nothing to judge them with?

What else is coming up for you in 2023?

I know I don’t want to be caught up in more scandals [laughs]. This was an incredible project on several counts, because it’s something I directed while I was pregnant with my twins. It’s a film I made with a female lead producer on the ground. We talk about very few women in the Indian film industry in positions of leadership, but our film had if not more, at least an equal amount of women who brought this story to life.

Going forward, I’m very keen that we tell certain stories that are driven by a female narrative with a female team, and that’s something that we’re focusing on, without giving away too much. So it’s going to be a hard-hitting story on a powerhouse woman who a lot of women and men will identify with today, just to tell you what modern India is like.

Watch ‘Caught Out’ on Netflix. Watch the trailer below.