India's undying passion

David Gilmour

A CORNER OF A FOREIGN FIELD: THE INDIAN HISTORY OF A BRITISH SPORT by Ramachandra Guha Picador, £20. pp. 496, ISBN 0330491164 In 1946 a senior official of the All India Congress condemned cricket as a pastime of 'the rich and the snobs', a game 'purely English in culture and spirit' and a symbol of India's `utter slavery' to the idea of the English gentleman. Fortunately, however, it could only thrive in an English atmosphere and thus would 'never be able to survive the shock of the disappearance of British rule'.

As predictions go, that is about as wrong as one can get. Britain's withdrawal from India the following year did nothing to obstruct or even slow down cricket's elevation to .the status of a national obsession. Indeed. as Ramachandra Guha suggests in this wonderful book, one could argue that as a national sport Indian cricket has no parallel in the world. It has the largest number of nationwide supporters (about half a billion) and no serious rival among other sports. Indian teams no longer dominate international hockey as they did in the last decades of British rule; and in the Sydney Olympics the country's 200 competitors managed to pick up a solitary bronze medal.

Indian nationalists and post-colonial historians sometimes tell us that the traces of British rule are fast disappearing and that before long the Raj will be seen as an irrelevant parenthesis in the course of Indian history. It is conceivable, I suppose, that the buildings will fall down and the railways disintegrate, that 40 million educated Indians will decide to stop speaking English, and that the country's administrative system will be reformed so that it no longer seems such an obvious offspring of the colonial civil service. But it is not conceivable that Indians will stop playing cricket, that little boys will abandon alleyways, cemeteries and almost any piece of flat earth where they can howl at each other to cries of 'Owzat!' and replies of 'Not out, says umpire'. As Guha insists,

Indians might come to drink Coke instead of tender coconut water, come to prefer Levi's jeans to the sari, but they shall never abandon cricket for baseball.

Yet British readers of this book will not come away patting themselves on the back for this particular gift to India. It was not one of the intended legacies, at least not at the beginning. The British wanted to play cricket with each other, as a relaxation from Indian duties, not against the people they were ruling. Since the game was supposed to embody such British virtues as patience, concentration and team spirit, they assumed the Indians would not be much good at it. In an early encounter between a Parsi club and an army regiment, they only agreed to play under the equation, `Officers with Umbrellas versus Natives with Bats'. Later, when Indians proved to be rather skilful at the game despite their lack of Victorian virtues, officials claimed that they were binding the rulers and the ruled in an Empire of Cricket. But some were wary of playing with `natives' on the ground that defeat was bad for imperial prestige — which is why Hindu teams were particularly keen on winning.

Ramachandra Guha is a liberal and moderately Anglophile scholar in a country where history is mainly written by Marxist, nationalist and post-colonial historians. But even an Anglophile cannot find much to say in favour of those who led or directed cricket in India. Guha brilliantly exposes the ludicrous Lord Harris, whose ineptitude as Governor of Bombay in the 1890s has been obscured by British and Indian writers eager to hail him as the 'Father of Indian cricket'. In fact Harris, who thought the game better suited to the 'phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon' than 'the excitable Asiatic', did virtually nothing for Indian cricket and was reluctant even to play against Indian teams. He also prolonged a most embar rassing injustice, preserving the pristine turf of the Bombay Gymkhana for the sole use of British players while permitting polo-playing army officers to churn up those areas of the Maidan where Indians were allowed to play cricket.

A Corner of a Foreign Field is, in its author's words, `not so much a history of Indian cricket as a history of India told through cricket and cricketers'. The approach is novel, penetrating and perhaps uniquely plausible: one could hardly write a modern history of Scotland through golf and golfers. But in the case of India it works because the divisions of caste and religion were long reflected in the structure of cricket. The result is an original, scholar

ly and highly entertaining work by a writer who combines the skills of biographer, anthropologist, cricket journalist and political historian.

Before Independence the centrepiece of Indian cricket was the communal tourna ment in Bombay, initially a contest between British and Parsis, then a Triangular with Hindus, and from 1912 a Quadran gular with Muslims. Outside Bombay the game was spread principally by maharajas, some of whom were good players (such as the Nawabs of Pataudi and the Maharajas of Patiala) and some so bad that (as in the case of `Vizzy', the Maharaja of Viziana

garam) they had to bribe opposing skippers to bowl long hops and full tosses. The Maharaja of Porbandar was said to own more Rolls-Royces than he had scored runs.

Cricket in India, unlike in England. was in origin an urban game partly because. as Guha points out, it would have been impossible for a Hindu village to produce an eleven that both Brahmins and Untouchables would accept. High-caste Brahmins were reluctant to select Untouchables for their teams even when they were the best players in the country. A special hero of Guha's is the great spin bowler Palwankar Baloo, one of four crick eting brothers and a man who later entered politics in the service of his downtrodden caste. The Poona Hindus chose Baloo for

their team and allowed him to touch their ball (as a bowler he could hardly avoid doing so), but they would not let him into the pavilion during the tea interval.

Indian spectators much preferred communal cricket, with its traditional sectarian rivalries, to matches between non-confessional provincial teams. But by the end of the second world war it had become obvious to everyone that the old system was simply exacerbating Hindu-Muslim antagonisms. Gandhi urged an end to the Bombay tournament and so, to their credit, did the best of the maharajas. The tradition of inter-communal cricket in India was finally killed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan.

Although he has more original things to say about the early development of Indian cricket, Guha provides an excellent summary of its progress since Independence, the emergence of an increasingly attractive Test team, and the problems of playing Pakistan with Kashmir on the boil and Hindu fundamentalism in the ascendant. Cricket in India today is more entertaining than it has ever been. We no longer have to sit through interminable drawn matches between India and Pakistan, neither team daring to risk defeat. Instead of groaning at the sight of Sunil Gavaskar settling in for a stolid two days at the crease, we can appreciate an Indian opener (Virender Sehwag) who does not know the meaning of defence.

There have been ugly developments of course, such as the corruption which ended the career of India's Muslim captain, Muhammad Azharuddin, who at his best was as sublime a stroke-player as Brian Lara. But the sport's popularity still grows, encouraged by the spread of television and one-day internationals. It is also being exported via the Indian diaspora. Guha reports that there is even an MCC (Microsoft Cricket Club) in the United States, its eleven composed of Indian software engineers. If only, one dreams, they could succeed where the British failed — and convert the Americans to cricket.