Passion play: Indians’ cricket connection

(NOTE: The article was published in the INDIA TODAY edition dated August 20, 2007)

There are people in India who never vote, who don’t watch Hindi films and who make a habit of loudly declaring that they can’t fathom what people see in cricket. Such men are dangerous. To be apolitical is a short step from being disaffected, to shun mainstream cinema is a symptom of alienation, but it is the ostentatious indifference to cricket that marks out the rudderless malcontent lost to all civic or national virtue.

Seriously, though, does a passion for cricket help national communities overcome social divisions? There is some anecdotal evidence that it does. In the colonial territories of the Caribbean populated by slave and indentured labour who were held down by racism, cricket became both a proving ground for the equal potential of black people and a force that briefly created a Caribbean ‘nation’ each time the West Indies took the field.

Success at cricket became a measure of racial equality and political progress. At the time of their independence, many political leaders of Caribbean countries, such as Forbes Burnham and Eric Williams, saw in the game a chance for self-respect and international standing. When the West Indies won its first Test series against England in 1950, it was celebrated as a national achievement, as a way of demonstrating that West Indians were the equals of white Englishmen. Certainly Frank Worrell’s ascension to West Indian captaincy was a landmark in the political development of the dominions that made up the side.

In a Sri Lanka riven by civil war, peace generally broke out when the national team figured in an important cricketing contest. The presence of Muttiah Muralitharan—the Tamil star of a largely Sinhala team—became a symbol of what was possible in that riven country. I sometimes think that if the Kashmir dispute were resolved, the only thing that might hold Pakistan together would be its cricket team.

But the truth is that compared to the great social moulds that shape us—class, caste, community, race, nation—cricket is trivial. Cricket creates no solidarities: it merely provides an arena in which to rehearse those solidarities as already exist. Before India became independent, Indian cricket obediently reflected every passion and prejudice that was current in colonial India.

Cricket gave the white colonist a way of asserting racial exclusivity in his all-white gymkhanas; it gave indignant Indians (Parsis in the first instance) the opportunity of showing that they were the white man’s equal, given a level playing field, and, as Ramachandra Guha has shown in his definitive history of the Indian game, it allowed ‘twice-born’ Hindus to be bigoted in the matter of caste, dressed in cricketing whites.

Anyone who hazily believes that cricket brings men together in common sporting endeavour should read Guha’s harrowing account of the indignities Palwankar Baloo, the great Dalit left arm bowler, had to suffer at the hands of his ‘upper caste’ co-religionists, to play at the highest level in colonial India. Often the best players in the ‘Hindu’ team, Baloo and his brothers were grudgingly selected, denied captaincy and ritually humiliated by being forced to take their refreshments in the open air instead of the high Hindu air of the clubhouse. You could argue that cricket gave them a platform, they wouldn’t otherwise have had, to challenge the exclusions and bigotry of caste, and that much is true, but that is true of every public arena subaltern heroes compete in: cricket can claim no special virtue.

Guha has shown us how cricket became an arena where arguments about defining issues like race, class, caste, religious community and nation were played out. The early dispute between the Parsis in Bombay and the white official class, about the right of colonial subjects to play cricket on public turf also claimed by polo-playing Englishmen, pushed cricket into the highway of Indian history, where it took on more and more passengers, some muttering about race, others about caste or community, all of them united by a shared passion for an unlikely game.

After India became independent, the domestic game was remade to conform to the ideological assumptions of a secular nationalism. In colonial times India’s main first class tournament was the Pentangular, in which five teams defined by race and religion competed for the trophy: Europeans, Parsis, Hindus, Muslims and the Rest. Vijay Hazare, the great batsman and captain of India, played for the Rest because he was a Christian (his middle name was Samuel).

For Congress nationalists like S.A. Brelvi and M.K. Gandhi, a tournament that required sectarian teams and encouraged sectarian loyalties (the Pentangular, based in Bombay, drew vast crowds where Hindus supported the Hindu team and Muslims rooted for the Muslim XI) was an anathema. The Ranji Trophy, which gradually replaced the Pentangular as India’s premier first class competition was broadly based on the territorial principle: teams generally represented provinces, though some represented cities and others erstwhile princely states. One or two teams represented all-India organisations like the Railways and the Services. Communal representation was rigorously avoided.

In contrast, the other nation carved out of British India, Pakistan, had no such difficulties with the idea of a Muslim team. Its first captain, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, saw Pakistan’s Test team as a Muslim side, representing a new Muslim nation. He saw its victories as a vindication of Pakistan’s existence. Cricket, like all team sport, reflected the ideological fashions of the day.

In apartheid South Africa, Coloureds and Blacks were excluded from international cricket and played in segregated teams. Till well into the 20th century, first-class cricket in England faithfully mirrored the class divisions and prejudices of the time. Amateurs and professionals were known as Gentlemen and Players. The greatest batsman of his time, Jack Hobbs, never captained England because he was a professional. It was not till 1952 that a professional, Len Hutton, led England out. It took a war, a Labour victory and the welfare state to accomplish that.

Has Indian cricket been a good citizen? If we don’t make the mistake of seeing it as an agent of a virtuous patriotism, the answer is yes. It would have been an even better citizen if it had won more often, but in every other respect Indian teams have been models of republican propriety. Their selection has sometimes drawn the charge of regional parochialism but never the more serious allegation of sectarian partiality. The captains have spanned the rainbow spectrum of Indian diversity: Christian, Sikh, Muslim and Hindu.

Outside the film industry, there’s no other part of India’s public life that has had careers as open to talent as cricket. Nor is it a coincidence that cricket and Hindi cinema are governed by a measurable ideal of performance and merit: namely, sporting results and the bottom line. Two reasons why cricket has been successfully used by filmmakers to make inspirational films like Lagaan and Iqbal are that Indian cricket has been properly representative of India’s diversity, and that the game has come to symbolise the possibility of massive success through merit. Lagaan isn’t exactly realist, but it is plausible in a rhetorical way because the rustics who taken on the colonial state at cricket and win, are no more diverse than India’s real cricket teams, both past and present. Similarly, Iqbal’s feel-good idea that a deaf boy from India’s rural hinterland can, with unswerving commitment and some luck, make it to the Indian team, succeeds in getting the audience to suspend disbelief because cricket has, especially in recent times, seen young men from the mofussil (Virender Sehwag, M.S. Dhoni, Munaaf Patel), do something nearly as unlikely in real life.

Even here, fans of the game oughtn’t get carried away. No sport can transcend the society in which it is played. Cricket is an enormously popular game and after the television explosion of the 1990s, it’s on the way to becoming India’s mass sport, but a quick census of international players will show that unlike hockey, for example, it doesn’t represent India’s considerable tribal population nor, in significant numbers, its Dalits. Still, as a totem of India’s pluralism, cricket does its job admirably. Stern critics will sometimes reproach us for celebrating Patel or Irfan Pathan not as players but as representatives of minorities. And the criticism is well meant because sportsmen should be singled out for their abilities, not their identities. But it is inevitable that a complex society like India with a history scarred by sectarian conflict, will anxiously look for symptoms of sickness or signs of good health. In this context the success of Patel and Pathan takes on a meaning larger than its sporting significance: alongside being good players, they’ll become good omens.

(The article was published in the INDIA TODAY edition dated August 20, 2007)

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