Indian cricket: celebrate and reflect
The Week (Cochin), 5 October (BCCI 75th anniversary special issue)
In India I saw cricket stripped of its English accoutrements, the pretensions and prejudices the game had acquired in its native land, and played and watched in a different vein. I saw cricket installed at the heart of a burgeoning popular culture, subjected to all the pressures that come with that status. And over the years I’ve seen cricket unfold its wonderfully pointless essence in the myriad forms that only a society as vast and diverse as India can generate.
One of the things I relish in Indian cricket is the uninhibited way the game displays itself, brash, ubiquitous and transparent. At the same time, I’m fascinated by how every trend in Indian society seems to finds expression in it, clouding and colouring its surface. For me, what’s compelling is that intersection between the universality of the game and the specifics of climate, topography, culture, politics and economics.
Once, in Lahaul, I saw boys playing cricket in a small open space high up on a ridge beneath which opened a deep and distant valley. A giant television dish erected on top of a school building loomed over the rock-hard pitch. The ball was a badly battered, somewhat ragged affair, and the bats were held together by string. The bowlers strove for pace. The batsmen were cautious, tipping and running. Suddenly, a lusty pull (executed by a skinny child whose face was wrapped in a frayed woollen scarf) sent the ball disappearing over the cliff edge – followed by one of the fielders. For a frightening moment I imagined both ball and boy plummeting through empty space. Then the fielder reappeared, bobbing up over the ridge like a jack-in-the-box, ball in hand, and the game resumed.
It’s the spirit of adaptation and improvisation that makes Indian cricket live and throb. You find it in the barefoot beach cricket played from the Gulf of Cambai to the Bay of Bengal, where the game is timed precisely to take advantage of the ocean’s ebb and flow. You find it in the galis and maidans of every town and city. And you find it in the floodlit spectacles staged at Eden Gardens or Chepauk.
But it would be wrong to think that the multiple spheres of Indian cricket exist in harmony, or that Indian cricket is a single entity. As a believer that birthdays are occasions not only for celebration but also for reflection and introspection, I’d like to offer the following observations.
It’s worth noting that this anniversary also belongs to Pakistani cricket. The BCCI and the teams it selected represented undivided India, and the game’s early heroes – Amar Singh, Mohamed Nissar, Lala Amarnath, Vijay Merchant – can be claimed today by both countries. Indian and Pakistani cricket are certainly not identical, but they share a common root, and still have more in common with each other than with other cricket cultures.
Ashish Nandy’s aphorism about cricket being an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British is a delightful and arresting reminder of just how remarkable it is that cricket found a home in a land so distant from that of its birth. But in so far as it suggests that there is some neat match between the peculiarities of cricket and those of Indian culture, or that Indian cricket has some unchanging identity, it’s terribly misleading.
India’s first formal steps in world cricket were faltering. The birth of the BCCI in 1929 was marked by wrangling between Bombay and Calcutta, and its midwives were dedicated empire loyalists, a mix of upper class Englishmen and Indian princes. Within a year, Gandhi had set out on the Dandi march and the country was engulfed by the civil disobedience movement and the repression that followed. The premier domestic tournament – the communal quadrangular in Bombay – was suspended between 1930 and 1934. India played its first home tests in the 1933-34 season, but did not play a test at home again until the end of 1948. Indeed, India played no test cricket at all between 1936 and 1946.Its first test victory came as late as 1952, when a less than full strength England side was beaten at Madras, thanks to Vinoo Mankad’s bowling (match figures of twelve for 108). Its first test victory away from home (against New Zealand) had to wait until 1968, nearly forty years after the country achieved Test status. Maybe Bangladesh has less to be embarrassed about than is sometimes assumed.
Only in the course of the first decades of independence did cricket spread beyond its elite confines and became a truly national game – a development that owed much to increases in education and infrastructure as well as direct support from the public sector and from state-protected Indian industries. In the 1970s, India came of age as a force in world cricket, recording its first Test victories in England, West Indies and Australia. This was the era of the great spin quartet and the emergence of Sunil Gavaskar, the prototype of the modern Indian cricketer.
My own acquaintance with Indian cricket begins with the England tour of 1976-77, and in the nearly three decades since then I’ve witnessed (sometimes from a distance, sometimes close up) huge changes in the game. Not long ago, Indian cricket lovers routinely filled Test grounds to capacity and sat in patient absorption through session after session of slow-moving, often defensive cricket. Today, one day cricket reigns supreme. Fans pack the stadiums seeking the adrenalin kick of national triumph rather than the chance to savour an intricate contest. Coverage of the game in the Indian media – like coverage of football in England – seems to know no limits. Broadcasters over-hype match after match, wicket after wicket, stroke after stroke. The once sedate pastime seems shot through with sensationalism.
The World Cup victory of 1983 is often cited as a turning point. I was lucky enough to be at Lord’s on that memorable day and I remember how surprised the cricket world was that India, of all countries, had overthrown the mighty West Indies. Its amiable cricket culture (epitomised by spin bowlers and stonewallers) seemed so alien to the one-day thrash. Indeed, the World Cup triumph was won not by any of the stylists or geniuses of Indian cricket but by the humdrum medium pace of Madan Lal, Mohinder Amarnath and Roger Binny (plus Kapil Dev’s running, over the shoulder catch to dismiss Viv Richards).
Overall, the story of Indian cricket has been one of decentralisation and democratisation, but both processes are far from complete. The longstanding dominance of Bombay and western India has been diluted by the establishment of new cricketing centres (Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, West Bengal). A far greater proportion of the population now has access to cricket – as players or spectators – than at the time of independence. But in huge swathes of the country, and among vast slices of the population, the enthusiasm for cricket has outpaced the wherewithal to take part in it beyond the most rudimentary level. This social gulf is the real challenge facing Indian cricket. It may be why India remains, despite the success of the current side, a relative underachiever in the global game, given its size and the unrivalled place of cricket in its culture.
What we are seeing in Indian cricket today might more aptly be called vulgarisation than democratisation. In the 1990s, the game found itself ideally placed to serve as a prime symbolic (and sometimes material) vehicle for India’s globalising consumer classes. In the fortunes of the Indian team, in the rise (and fall) of its superstars, national and individual aspirations seemed to mesh. Tendulkar’s success story became an affirmation for those who were making it under the new economic order, and a compensation for those who were not.
Liberalisation bred a VIP cricket culture besotted with glamour, celebrity and competitive success, generating unprecedented wealth in and around the game and fomenting rivalries among broadcasters and administrators – as well as match fixing scandals. It also accounts – but only to a degree – for the panache of the current Indian team, with its abundance of strong, self-confident personalities. When the team has been at its best, as it was in Pakistan earlier this year, the cricketers have combined the zest of the gali and the maidan with a shared sense of social responsibility.
Ganguly’s men are the embodiment of a living, ever-shifting and contradictory cricket culture remote yet recognisably descended from the founders of the BCCI. CK Nayudu, whose batting exploits helped stimulate the popular interest in cricket that led to the formation of the BCCI and who played in India’s first Test in 1932, once observed: “Cricket must be played in harmony with its inherent genius, with wild and free abandon. Let our players attack the bowlers and provide spectators with a feast of strokeplay. If cricket, like life, is full of uncertainties, why make it a dull affair?”
