Boundary buster commemorated
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 1 July
It’s rare that a fashion item makes the slightest impression on me, but I have to confess to being childishly delighted by a purchase I recently made over the internet. It’s a tee-shirt emblazoned with CLR James’s ever-pertinent rhetorical question: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
The tee-shirt is the latest product from PhilosophyFootball.com, “sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction”, a do-it-yourself enterprise offering a line of handsomely designed sportswear bedecked with pearls of wisdom from Marx, Galileo, Pele, Bakunin, Bobby Moore (captain of England’s 1966 World Cup winning team), Jean-Paul Sartre (“In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team”), Albert Camus (“All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”), Manchester United manager Matt Busby (”Winning isn’t everything. There should be no conceit in victory and no despair in defeat”) and George Best (“I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered”).
The whole point of PhilosophyFootball is the unlikely mingling of thinkers and doers, observers and performers. CLR James fits precisely in that nexus. James brought to the study of cricket the same high-energy intellectual engagement, wide range of reference and fertile imagination with which he also tackled organising share croppers in Missouri, analysing ancient Athenian democracy or debating black self-organisation with Trotsky.
“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” James’ motto opens his masterpiece, Beyond a Boundary, published back in 1963 to little acclaim and a mere handful of reviews. Since then, the book has crept gradually into wider circulation and now enjoys the status of a literary classic. But it remains a one-off, a mix of memoir, theory, history, polemic, wide angle and close-up, sublime and eccentric. Among its many distinctions, Beyond a Boundary is a genre-maker and genre-breaker. Even today it’s difficult to classify, leaping as it does from Trinidad to Lancashire, WG Grace to Learie Constantine.
James campaigned for West Indian independence and was a key figure in the development of the pan-African movement. But this critic of empire had a soft spot for imperial culture. Readers coming to Beyond a Boundary for the first time are always puzzled to find cricket’s most eminent Marxist singing the praises of the English public school ethos. The aphorism on the tee-shirt is itself an adaptation of a line from Kipling: “And what should they know of England who only England know?”, from an 1891 poem entitled “The English Flag” in which Kipling mocks the empire’s foes: “The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag, / They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at the English Flag!”
CLR James was subjecting popular culture to serious scrutiny decades before the field acquired academic legitimacy. As a radical democrat and social scientist he refused to take seriously those forms of history that habitually excluded this vast field of human endeavour. In particular, he argued that it was impossible to understand the politics of the West Indies unless one also understood cricket, and impossible to understand cricket unless one placed it in that larger context.
Yet James would have had little patience with much of the scholarly study of popular culture these days. He was not a cataloguer of soap operas or decoder of advertisements. He took cricket seriously, perhaps too seriously, as an art form, and he insisted on rigour of argument. Just because the topic was cricket or calypso was no reason to cease demanding the highest intellectual standards in addressing it. And he applied those standards at a time when then the very idea of a serious book about sport – not nostalgia, not whimsy, not statistics – was a decided novelty.
CLR prophesied West Indian cricket dominance long before that dominance was fully established on the field of play. What would he have made of its current eclipse? How would he have explained the sheer miserableness of the West Indies’ Test performances during this English summer?
In the past decade, a great deal of ink has been spilled on this subject, and various theses propounded to account for the wilting of one of world cricket’s most attractive, distinctive regional cultures. Most of these fall apart under examination. Too often the starting point is that the twenty odd years of West Indian greatness were the norm from which recent performances are a deviation. But perhaps what really needs explaining is not why West Indies are currently so mediocre, but how it was that a population of a mere 6 million, divided into a dozen nation-states, could ever have achieved and sustained supremacy in a global sport in the first place?
Which brings us back to CLR James, who saw in West Indies cricket a tool of aspiration, collective and individual, a level playing field in which the victims of colonialism could, for a moment at least, shape their own destiny. What’s clear is that cricket under current conditions – globalised, corporatised, television-dominated – no longer serves effectively as that type of tool, at least not in the West Indies.
