Books

Sweetly Through The Covers

Witty, sarcastic, despairing, ecstatic, Kesavan looks at the genteel sport with a warm, old-world flair

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Sweetly Through The Covers
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I don’t know who, now, is our best cricket writer, but Mukul Kesavan must be our best writer on cricket. He brings to his favourite sport the training of a historian and the temperament of a novelist. Men in White is a book best read in the safety of your bedroom. There is a brilliant or witty insight every other page—at any rate, I was laughing out loud every now and then. Sometimes the target is a contemporary cricketer. Kesavan complains about Rahul Dravid that "the press he gets is so fawningly good, it would embarrass a North Korean despot". At other times, the target is popular culture in general. Of the Ramlilas performed in his native city, Delhi, Kesavan notes that "Sita is often a hairy man".

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The essays that make up Men in White range widely across the game’s various terrains. We learn here of changes in the way cricketers dress and field, and in how cricket is run worldwide. Kesavan writes evocatively about what radio once meant and what television now means to the appreciation of the game. Of his own boyhood experience of listening to the radio in the wee hours, when India was playing in Australia or the West Indies, Kesavan remarks: "I knew jet lag before I’d ever been on a plane."

Men in White begins with a defence of Test cricket. Later, Kesavan offers this marvellous demolition of the pajama game: "The one-day game in its present form is formulaic, predictable, monotonous and wholly forgettable.... It promotes and protects second-rate players, treats bowlers like extras and coddles batsmen."

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As a patriot, Kesavan wants his team to win, but he can be splendidly bilious about them when they lose. He is sarcastic about the way our men in white can look: "In the seventies...Indian cricketers came in three physical types: puny, portly and passable." He can despair of the sheer decency of our cricketers, their inability to sledge or intimidate their opponents. He says that all Indian batsmen should wear shades when batting against Australia, for "even a glowerer like (McGrath) might find it hard to eyeball tinted plastic".

Kesavan is an unabashed cricketing nationalist, who can yet write appreciatively about cricketers from other lands. There is a fine description of Sanath Jayasuriya’s batsmanship, his wilful (and spectacularly successful) defiance of the rule book and the coaching manual. And he notes of Adam Gilchrist that he has "a strike rate that makes bowlers feel they’re bowling in the highlights of the evening news".

It must be said that not all of Kesavan’s cricketing judgements are reliable. He claims that "Azharuddin is best understood as a right-handed Lara"—but Lara had a rock-solid defence. He writes that "most fast bowlers do not rely mainly on movement for wickets: men like Holding and Marshall bowled straight and fast a lot of the time. So did Donald". Batsmen in five continents might greet this remark with a rueful grin, for these were all masters of swing and seam. (Had they merely bowled fast and straight they would all have had the Test record of Mohammed Sami.)

But then this book should be read not only for what it tells us about cricket, but also about Life in General. The rhetoric of international cricket, and of international politics, is steeped in sanctimony, and only a novelist could so effortlessly and simultaneously puncture the pretensions of the colonist and the coloniser, as in the annual contest Kesavan recommends, to be played between a combined England/ Australia team, here called the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, and a combined India/Pakistan eleven, going under the name ‘Allies for a Shilling’.

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My own appreciation of this book was enhanced by the fact that I am roughly the same age as its author. We share some of the same memories, and many prejudices. Of my all-time favourite cricketer, G.R. Vishwanath, he says: "He looked like a sawn-off dacoit and played like a wristy angel." The Indian cricket fan probably doesn’t care what Mukul Kesavan looks like. But he should know that he writes like an angel.

(Ramachandra Guha is the author of India after Gandhi.)

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