Rabindranath and Cricket

A British friend of mine, more passionate about Rabindranath Tagore than mostof us Indians here at Oxford, asked me recently, "Is there any sphere inIndia where this legend has not left his mark?"

"I am sure Tagore had nothing to do with cricket", another onepiped up, seeing me (a cricket historian and a Bengali to boot) around.

Cricket, he assumed, may well be that 'outcaste', one left untouched byTagore.

Reminded me of a story I'd read many years back, a story in an unpublishedessay on the genesis of sports journalism which I'd like to narrate here, as ahumble tribute to the legend, in commemoration of his 139th birth anniversarytoday.

Brajaranjan Ray, the pioneer of sports journalism in Bengali, recounts hisexperience after having met the proprietors of the Ananda Bazar Patrika andhaving convinced them of the necessity of sports journalism (without pay,however) in this unpublished essay I had the fortune of having read. Apparently,he was at a loss for Bengali equivalents of English terms indescribing/reporting cricket matches. And who else to turn to but Tagore?

Tagore, of course, was encouraging as ever and asked him to go ahead withoutfear, inventing terminology. He guessed it right that whatever Ray coined andpersisted with, would, with the passage of time, become standard usage. Roy ofcourse was free to turn to him for advice and corrections.

So, there.

It is not for nothing that we Bengalis think that there ain't no sphere thelegend left untouched.

Not just that. Apart from this Ray-Tagore encounter of the 30s, there is alsoan imaginary match apparently played sometime in the 30s (fascinatinglydescribed in a piece -- loosely translated as Rabindranath and Cricket --sometime in the 50s in Dainik Basumati, a Bengali journal, and laterreprinted in some collections) that I was and am reminded of..

The setting of the match is Gomoh, a small town near Dhanbad, Bihar, morefamous for its railway station from which Subhash Chandra Bose took his traintowards Europe. Tagore apparently had gone there for a brief visit and haddecided to organise the match is what the writer of the piece wants us tobelieve.

The players who played against Tagore's team included such luminaries asVizzy, the Maharjkumar of Vizianagram; The Maharaja of Patiala, Pataudi Senior;The Maharja of Cooch Bihar and Duleep Sinhji. They apparently all come in theirprivate aeroplanes, a point much emphasised in the piece.

That they spent to play the game, rather than playing to earn, does not need to beemphasised, but another interesting sidelight of the described match was the bitabout ads. Now in the 30s, advertising was still in its infancy, but notapparently for this match. The leading sports goods dealers from Bengal -- S.Rayand Co., Uberoi et al -- had all seemingly assembled in Gomoh with a range oftheir products.

The inaugural ceremony of the match was initiated by a shenai recital,though the Maharja of Patiala had also, it seems, arranged for a band to performon the occasion. Two players from Tagore's side, Professor Kshiti Mohan Sen(father of our Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen) and Acharya Bidhusekhar Shastrirecited vedic mantras to start off the proceedings. The stadium, a temporaryarrangement for the match (typical of modern one-day internationals) was packedto capacity.

Another key aspect of the match, one typical of modern cricket, was thepresence of women spectators. They were all dressed in saris worn theMaharastrian way. (It is worth mentioning in this context that women in the1930s played cricket in saris and there was a regular tradition of cricketbetween men vs. women in Kathiawar.)

Also present for this match, were the great dancer Mani Behn, RajkumariSharmila, the famous motor racing specialist, the daughters of the Gaekwadfamily, the Rajkumari of Burdwan and sundry other who's who.

Needless to mention, it had to have nationalist overtones. So Rabindranath,inspired by swadeshi, played with a bat made from local wood, wore a toka(a headdress worn by peasants) made of palm-leaves and was dressed in a dhoti.Now this is not just the anonymous writer's imagination for cricket in dhotiswas very much in vogue in the 1930s and may well be perceived as an attempt bythe Indians to appropriate cricket for nationalist purposes. (The Mohun BaganClub did this in 1930 in a match against the Governors XI, and upon beingreprimanded by R.B.Lagden for their dress refused to play. The match waseventually abandoned when Lagden refused to tender the apology demanded by MohunBagan. Six months later, a similar thing happened in a match between theVidyasagar College and the Calcutta Cricket Club.)

So you see, whether or not Tagore had much to do with cricket, we Bengalisdefinitely think -- and have evidence too -- that not only was he involved with the genesis of cricket journalism in Bengali, but that he also was a pioneer in thecommercialisation of the game. After all, the various dynamics ofcommercialisation are very much in evidence in the imagination of the author ofthe above story, aren't they?

His internationalism in all spheres of public life was based on a stronggrasp of and love for local realities, even if we may not want to start playing in dhotisagain (but those are the local realities today). A realisation/acceptance ofthis message will be our best tribute to him on his 139th birth anniversary.