Chronicle of an obsession
Review: You Must Like Cricket? Memoirs of an Indian Cricket Fan by Soumya Bhattacharya (Yellow Jersey Press).
[An edited version of this review appeared in The Guardian, 2 September]
Like Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, Soumya Bhattacharya’s memoir is an intimate, often wry account of “thirty years of following a team. Three decades of highs and lows.” Hornby showed what a complicated business it can be to support Arsenal FC. When the object of the fan’s devotion is the Indian cricket team, the complications are multiplied and magnified.
Indian cricket is a huge canvas: the most popular sport in the world’s second most populous country, an intensely grass-roots phenomenon that is also a vehicle for powerful social and economic forces. Bhattacharya shrewdly chooses to explore this vast territory through a series of close-ups, chronicling his personal engagement with the mega-drama of international sport, his experiences as a fan at home and abroad, his responses to the landmark events of the modern Indian game, from the unexpected World Cup triumph in 1983 (“With victory, we discovered that we’d hated one day cricket not because we were purists but because we had been so bad at it”) to the heroic pursuit of a massive England total at Lord’s in 2002.
In light and fluent prose, Bhattachararya guides us through the conundrums of his harmless but sometimes disturbing obsession: the mix of the fanatic and the frivolous, the caring intensity lavished on something essentially inconsequential, the desire both to disparage and defend a helpless infatuation. Part of the logic of the insanity is that having made an irrational but substantial emotional investment in a sports team, one does end up continuously throwing good money after bad.
At times Bhattacharya dances round his obsession, unable to come to a conclusion about it. But if the journey is somewhat circular, it’s nonetheless highly entertaining. His first major Indian cricket hero was the batsman Gundappa Vishwanath, “flawed, fallible and fickle” whose signature shot square of the wicket “made you want to genuflect in front of him.” Inevitably, Sachin Tenulkar looms large. When the icon takes strike in front of an Indian crowd, “lurking somewhere in the minds of all these people is a sense of fear: that their boundless expectations, just this time, might not be met.” Charmingly, the author is unsettled by India’s recent successes; it’s as if, after decades of backing a losing side, he daren’t trust the sense of elation.
At the core of the memoir is Bhattacharya’s off and on romance with Eden Gardens, the 100,000 seat cricket arena in the heart of Kolkata. He recreates this raucous, glaringly public space as a private domain; sitting in his favorite spot through 27 years of matches, he observes the shifting mores of the cricket crowd, reflected in the contents of food hampers, and less endearingly, in a decline in manners and the occasional riot.
Bhattacharya deals with cricket fandom as it is in the 21st century, mediated through television, text messages, the internet. Nonetheless, his book is heir to a tradition harking back to cricket’s first literary classic, John Nyren’s Hambledon memoir, “The Cricketers of My Time”, published in 1833. Cricket-lovers are always lamenting that the game has lost or is in danger of losing some precious innocence. “Perhaps my favourite drink is nostalgia on the rocks,” Bhattacharya observes, as he mourns the changes of the last thirty years, notably the way that patient appreciation of the finer points has been replaced by an abrasive jingoism. There are “too many fans who care too little about cricket – and too much for flag-waving”. He is unnerved and repelled when, following a disappointing performance by the team, spray-painted slogans appear calling for “DEATH PENALTY TO THOSE WHO HAVE RAPED INDIAN CRICKET”.
With his account of India’s cricket rivalry with Pakistan, a darkness creeps into the narrative. “The only time I feel ashamed to be a cricket fan is when India play Pakistan,” he confesses. Here the innocence of sporting partisanship seems an impossibility, even as it’s desperately longed for. “We, all of us, have allowed cricket to become more than a game; as a result, it has also become less.” As Bhattacharya acknowledges, his account has been overtaken by recent events: since the resumption of regular India-Pakistan cricket in 2004, a more relaxed and generous spirit has marked the matches. There seems reason to hope that a greater number of Indian fans are adopting Bhattacharya’s own tempered approach to the great rivalry. He wants to see Indian win but he takes pleasure in the way the Pakistanis play: “their audaciousness, their unpredictability, their guts”.
Bhattacharya never quite succeeds in convincing us that he is really a suitable case for treatment. He’s frank in recounting a clutch of cricket-induced personal lapses, but despite his best efforts, he comes across in the end as balanced, modest, and proportionate.
