The Republic Of Cricket

How far from the Best Bakery does Irfan Pathan live?

I am not a spoilsport. I too would like to feel good though I am not one of those Brave New Hindus. But Iwas born and raised in Baroda, or Vadodara, and my childhood heroes--all Ranji Trophy players for the Barodateam--were Vijay Hazare, Gul Mohammad, Amir Elahi, and Hemu Adhikari. ‘Dada’ Hazare was a MaharashtrianChristian, and the two Muslim stars of the Baroda team became mohajirs in Pakistan. Colonel Adhikari--oneof my maternal uncle’s bosom buddies--was the only Hindu in this list.

You need a Ramchandra Guha to read cricket as a dimension of India’s social and political history. Butfor him, few of us would have understood what the Dalitness of the Palwankar brothers contributed toour cricketing dynamics as well as to our democratic evolution. Guha showed us how the ‘Quadrangular’championship helped the British to divide and play a very Indian kind of cricket.

I moved to Mumbai during my early adolescence and lived near Shivaji Park. To know a cricketer’s religionand caste, his community and jati, did not necessarily make one a communalist. We all learnt thatcricket was a great leveller and not just a gentleman’s game as imagined by upper-class English snobs. Wedidn’t have an Indian reader of C.L.R. James’s calibre until the arrival of Guha who could read thesociological subtexts of cricket and, of course, its broader and deeper political context.

When the Ranji Trophy replaced the Quadrangular, we had started moving from the colonised ethos towards thepostcolonial era, though the divisive communal politics that led to the trauma of Partition also impactedcricket’s meaning to the millions that listened to radio commentaries of India-Pakistan encounters. Theywere viewed as battles in an unending proxy war. The Opposition’s occupation of the crease was uncannilylike the most hated neighbour’s occupation of Kashmir. The wicket was a disputed territory.

Everybody in India and Pakistan knows that cricket is a marginalised minority’s only chance to become anational and a transnational hero. So, in both countries, individual heroics were seen as social salvation andan honourable way out of oppression. But to win Test matches, a cohesion of talent was needed as well as a ‘killerinstinct’. Sheer aggression and cricketing genius were not enough even for someone leading from the front asLala Amarnath did. The English drove a class wedge into the Indian cricketer’s mind. A nincompoop cricketersuch as the Maharajkumar of Vizianagaram could lead a talented team to defeat, just because he happened to besome sort of a ‘prince’.

Saurav Ganguly has the Lala’s aggression, but not his acumen. However, Ganguly knows how to transformeleven players into a team. It has taken Indian society a century to create cricket out of a plurality oftalent--whatever its source; and become consistent international winners. But let us all remember that thelaws of cricket were not written by Manu and neither were they inscribed and enshrined in the Shariyat.

Cricket sublimates, despite being a very mean game most of the time; and the same applies to democracy.Will our elections be cricket? And who will be the third umpire and the match referee this time?

Dilip Chitre, a Sahitya Akademi awardee is a poet, writer, translator of Bhakti poetry, painter andfilmmaker. He lives in Pune.