The Magic of Indian Cricket

Cricket and Society in India

Mihir Bose

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134249237
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios étnicos

In the last twenty years, Indian cricket has been transformed. With the arrival of global television networks, mass-media coverage and multinational sponsors, cricket has become big business and India has become the economic driving force in the world game. For the first time a developing country has become a major player in the international sports arena.

This fully updated and revised edition of Mihir Bose's classic history is a unique account of the Indian cricket phenomenon. Drawing on a combination of extensive research and personal experience, Bose traces the development of the Indian game from its beginnings as a colonial pastime to its coming of age as a national passion and now a global commercial powerhouse. This illuminating study reveals Indian cricket's central place in modern India's identity, culture and society.

Insightful, honest and challenging, Bose tackles the myths and controversies of Indian cricket. He considers the game in terms of race, caste, politics, national consciousness and ambition, money, celebrity and the media, evoking all the unpredictability, frustration and glory that is the magic of Indian cricket.

1

India – whose India?

Sometime in the 1930s Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister was addressing a large political gathering. He was then leading the Indians in their epic fight for freedom from British colonial rule and as he spoke that day, like so often before, the crowd shouted ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ (Long Live Mother India). It was the common political greeting of Indian crowds and Nehru had heard it often. But that day, as the cry was raised, he stopped speaking and, pointing to the crowd, asked ‘What is Mother India? What does it mean to you?’

The crowd were mystified. They were not used to their political leaders asking them questions but Nehru insisted on a reply and, slowly, some of them pointed to the ground to indicate that was Mother India. Nehru interrupted them with that mixture of impatience and haughtiness that so characterised him and told his audience that if Mother India, to whom they were wishing a long life meant anything, it meant them, not the earth on which they stood. ‘It is you, all of you together, you are India.’ The crowd cheered ever more lustily and the incident was to become famous – almost every Nehru biographer has narrated it. In later years Nehru, himself, would make that impromptu question and answer session part of his unique method of arousing and educating an Indian crowd.

But if Nehru scored an important, populist point, the question: ‘What is India, what does it represent?’ is not easily answered. India is as confusing to Indians themselves as it is to foreigners. Even the name India is not something given by Indians. The Persians and the Greeks, trying to define the people who lived along the river Sindhu, tumbled on the words Indian and Hindu. Sindhu, a Sanskrit word, seemed too much for the ancient Persians and Greeks. They corrupted it to Indus – which is what the great river of the Punjab is called – and then in trying to define the inhabitants of the region around the river Indus the Persian and Greek tongues diverged. The Persian word was aspirated and came out as Hindu, the Greek one was softly breathed and came out as India. In this curious, convoluted, way Indian history was made, India came to stand for the subcontinent beyond the Indus bounded by the Himalayas, while Hindu became the word used to define the religion of the people who inhabited the region. Sixteenth-century European travellers arriving in India had called the Hindus by various names, the Portuguese for instance called them Gentio, meaning heathen, which was corrupted to gentoos to distinguish them from the Moors, the name these southern Europeans had long used for Muslims.

Many centuries later the Orientalists discovering India added another twist. They realised the Hindus had no name for their religion. The Hindus knew it – and still know it – as Sanatan Dharma: The Eternal Way. But Orientalists now coined the term Hinduism to describe the complex beliefs that underpinned the religion. As Nirad Chaudhuri has pointed out, on that analogy, the Greek religion might be called Hellenism or even Graecism. The Orientalists could hardly have realised the consequences of their actions. In modern India the word Indian represents all Indians of whatever religion. The country is secular, every religious group has full religious and political rights, and Indian cricketers like Irfan Pathan and Mohammed Kaif would be most upset if you called them Hindus. They are Muslims and call themselves Indians without realising that they might as well call themselves Hindus since the two words are the same.

The modern name of India could very well have been Hindusthan, land of the Hindus. In 1947 when free India emerged many of the departing British, who made no secret of their loathing for the Hindus and their preference for the Muslims, called it by that name. Indeed on 1 July 1947, six weeks before Indian independence, a meeting took place in the India Office in London when opposition leaders from both the Conservative and Liberal parties met Labour ministers to discuss the Independence Bill that Parliament was about to consider. It was this bill that led to the granting of freedom for India and the creation of the new dominion of Pakistan. The note of the meeting reads:

Use of the title India for Hindusthan. There was a certain uneasiness about this based on a feeling that that it would antagonise the Muslims and was not justified on merits. There was moreover a feeling that the ‘Union of India’ should be kept for any organisation wider than either Dominion which may develop.

The documents of that period disclosed in the 12-volume British government’s Transfer of Power series – indicate that had Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the creator of Pakistan, objected strongly to the term India, the British may have baulked at its use. In that case there would certainly have been problems in the independent country being called India. But Jinnah did not care. He was more concerned with the design of the flag the governors-general of the new dominions would have. And so on 15 August 1947 the new dominion got the name India without any visible fuss.

What independent India did with its foreign acquired name was not change it but have two names, one for external consumption, one for internal purposes. In Indian languages the country is called not India but Bharat and the Indian government is called the Bharat Sarkar, Bharat government. Bharatvarsha, the land of Bharat, was, after all the ancient name by which the landmass we call the Indian subcontinent was known and, as the historian D. P. Singhal has put it, ‘the concept of Bharatvarsha was one of the country which lay north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains. Kings and emperors attempted to bring all Bharatvarsha ranging from the Himalayas to Kanya Kumari (Cape Comorin) under one authority and call themselves chakravartin’. Indeed it is significant that the highest honour in independent India is called the Bharat Ratna, The Jewel of Bharat, an honour that many Indians feel should be bestowed on Sachin Tendulkar (so far he has the Khel Ratna, the Game Jewel). The modern Indian cricket fans copying English cricket’s Barmy army call themselves the Bharat army. However, when it comes to singing at cricket matches they sing not Bharat but India’s name. So in November 2004, as India won a thrilling victory over Australia by just 13 runs in Mumbai, in the last Test of a losing series the chant was India jitaga, India will win, not Bharat jitaga, Bharat will win, which would have been more logical. It would also been in tune with the shouts of the crowd at Nehru’s meeting: Bharat Mata Ki Jai.

In this the Indians are different to the Greeks. The name Greece, too, is foreign in origin deriving from Grekos which came into use during the Turkish occupation. The original name for the country is Hellas and during the Athens Olympics in 2004. Greek fans watching the Olympics did not chant Greece, Greece, as Indians did in Mumbai but Hellas, Hellas. This chanting was particularly ferocious during the athletic events in the Olympic stadiums. Before the Olympics the Greeks had hoped to see their two stars in these events, Kostas Kenteris and Ekatherina Thanou, take the honours but a failure to provide a drug test led to their withdrawing from the Olympics amidst much controversy and the Greek crowds used the chants of Hellas to vent their feelings and reinforce their nationalist credentials. But then unlike the Greeks the Indian use of the word Bharat is somewhat selective. In Greece the Olympic Association, is called the Hellenic Olympic Association but the Board of Control for Cricket in India did not substitute Bharat for India after independence. Indeed in the Board there was no debate on this issue at all.

The problem for India is that, unlike Greece, while its history has had many glorious phases it has also been more torturous and, what is more, many aspects of its past are so controversial that even now there is no agreement about what happened. So much so that history in India can be literally lethal. This was gruesomely illustrated in December 1992 when a Hindu mob pulled down the Babri mosque in Ayodhya claiming that it was built by medieval Muslim rulers who had first destroyed a more ancient temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram. The religious Hindus believe Ayodhya to be the birthplace of Ram. This dispute, known popularly as the politics of the Ram temple, has shaped Indian politics since the 1990s, with no agreement as to whether the Hindu claim is justified.

More recently, there was such rage generated by a scholarly biography of the sixteenth-century Maratha King Shivaji that the Bhandarkar institution in Pune, where the American scholar had done his research, was vandalised and the Oxford University Press forced to withdraw the book from India. And almost every year the Indian History Congress, composed of some of the most eminent Indian historians, meet and pass anxious resolutions deploring the tendency of politicians and pressure groups to constantly rewrite and distort history.

Indians cannot agree on their history because in Indian history there are very few straight lines. Most of them are so jagged and curved that at times it is impossible to see round the corners. What makes it worse is that through much of its long existence the history of India has largely been written not by Indians but by foreigners. India, along with China, has the oldest continuous cultural traditions in the world, much older than the Egyptians, the Greeks or the Iraqis, heirs to the Babylonian civilisation. But India has nothing like China’s ancient historical records. The Indian historian R. C. Majumdar introducing The Classical Accounts of India – itself a collection of writings about India by foreigners such as Herodotus, Megasthenes, Arrian, Plutarch, Pliny and Ptolemy (nothing comparable from Indian sources is available) – wrote, ‘there was no history of pre-Muslim India written by the ancient Indians themselves, and consequently very little was known of its political history’. Before the Muslim arrival in the twelfth century, says Majumdar, ‘we possess no historical text of any kind, much less such a detailed narrative as we possess in the case of Greece, Rome or China’. Given that India can claim a history of 5,000 years this means that for 75 per cent of Indian history there are no known histories left to us by Indians. Myths and fables there are in plenty but nothing that would be considered historically authentic.

D. D. Kosambi, probably the most original, certainly the most innovative, Indian historian, responded to this lack of written knowledge by walking to Indian sites round his base of Pune to discover history, starting a new trend in Indian historical research. Since Majumdar wrote his lament in the 1950s others have followed the trail blazed by Kosambi and similar field work has been done all over India in ruins, rocks, bricks and other physical evidence left behind by the past to help reconstruct it.

Foreigners can often provide a historical view of a county that is both valid and instructive. The classic example of this is the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. First published in French in Paris in 1835 it remains a classic, much reprinted in America to this day. More recently, Bill Bryson, an American, has written very amusingly about Britain in Notes From A Small Island. Bryson would not compare himself to Tocqueville, but his book has much useful information on modern-day Britain and has been very popular with the British. However, if the only written works on America and Britain were written by a Frenchman and an American then we would get a picture of the country that is not quite complete. That is the problem we have when judging Indian history. In our times there has been no dearth of history books written by Indians but there still seems a very intriguing lack of appetite for the broad-canvas historical writing that is so common in the west. Indians are still content to let foreigners tell their story. So the one truly popular history dealing with how India got freedom, a bestseller in India, was written by two journalists: one French, the other American. And the film on Gandhi, India’s greatest son, was made by an Englishman.

The Muslim period did bring great historical writers to compare with anything the rest of the world, including the Greeks or the British, have produced. The first of them shows the remarkable way Indian history has come down to us. The first truly great history book on India, and one of the classics of world history, was written by Abu Raihan, popularly known as Alberuni. His book is called simply Alberuni’s India. A Muslim scholar, he came to India with the Mahmud of Ghazni’s forces in the eleventh century and wrote this classic while the master he served was either killing the infidel Hindus or making them slaves, looting their wealth by destroying their wonderfully rich temples in places such as Mathura, Kangra, Kanauj and Somnath and taking the treasures back to Ghazni, now in modern-day Afghanistan. Every winter for 16 years Mahmud raided India gathering vast wealth and many slaves which helped him build a rich kingdom in Ghazni. Yet amidst this carnage Alberuni calmly observed the world of the Hindus, so different from his own. There is merit in the comments of the editor Edward Sachau, who in his 1888 foreword to the English edition, wrote, ‘the history is like a magic island of quiet, impartial research in the midst of clashing swords, burning towns, and plundered temples’. Alberuni, in turn, profited from his work and his later status as a scientific celebrity in the Muslim world owed much to the Indian scientific and mathematical discoveries he had learnt from the Hindus and his mastery of Sanskrit.

India gives and India takes. If India took the art of writing history from Alberuni it also made him famous.

The Indians are, of course, not the only people who wrestle with their history, and make a hard work of coming to terms with their past, but they must be unique in having to wrestle with historical narratives bequeathed to them not by their ancestors but by foreigners visiting India, each of whom have had their own agendas.

No group of foreigners have had a more loaded agenda than the British and the legacy they have left behind, of which cricket is only a part, is a historical minefield as much for the British as for the Indians. Today, some sixty years after Indian freedom, there are many interpretations of British rule but very few conclusions to which both the British and the Indians can subscribe. Every now and again in the most unexpected of situations history can jar. In 2002, when the Queen Mother died, the British media made much of the fact that she was the Last Empress of India and during the mourning period her jewels, such as the Star of India, were much on display, leading to a certain amount of nostalgia about India, the Jewel in the Crown. This provoked a very pained response from Kuldip Nayar, a journalist and former Indian High Commissioner to the UK who came on BBC radio’s prestigious Today programme to complain that such British wallowing in imperial nostalgia was meant to remind the Indians that they were once a conquered people.

Contrast this with how the British and the Americans react to their shared past.

A few months after the Queen Mother’s death, Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, addressed a joint session of the US Congress – the first British Prime Minister to do so since Winston Churchill – and a reward for having supported George Bush’s policy on Iraq. During his speech he made a reference to the war of 1812 when British troops invaded the then young republic of the USA and burned down Washington. Blair apologised for that British action making a joke of it and the Americans joined in the general laughter. But that was an event in the midst of a war that the Americans had started. The British action could be said to be retaliation for the American destruction of public buildings in York (present-day Toronto).

I, personally, think such historical apologies are ridiculous and unjustified. How far back are we meant to go to apologise for what our ancestors did? But if ever an apology was needed it was for the Amritsar massacre of 1919 when the British general Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire at an unarmed, peaceful, Indian crowd killing or wounding more than 1,500 men, women and children. This, as opposed to killing during wars, was an unclean killing. However, when in 1997 the Queen and Prince Philip visited the site, the Queen did not apologise, merely signed the visitors book at the memorial. Philip, for good measure, questioned the figures for the dead listed on the memorial. As he passed the memorial which spoke of 2,000 being martyred he said, ‘That’s wrong. I was in the navy with Dyer’s son.’ Philip’s remarks angered the Indians and coming on top of other gaffes by the British turned this royal visit, meant to mark the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, into a disaster with much bad blood between the two countries. The then Indian Prime Minister described the British as ‘a third rate power’ and Indians cancelled a speech the Queen was supposed to make, which angered the British. A spokesman for the Indian Foreign Ministry Talmiz Ahmed, who had been press secretary in London some years earlier, reacted strongly to the British criticism, saying:

This is British ineptitude. I think they scheduled a speech for her in the programme assuming they would be able to bully Indians into acceptance of something completely without precedence. When they did not succeed, the thought they could find a way out by blaming bungling Indian officials.

British newspapers like the Times condemned the Indians saying ‘the government in Delhi had let down its people’. India, said the Thunderer, had abandoned its own deeply rooted cultural and religious traditions of how to treat a guest and ‘slipped back into the habits of awkwardness that Indians and the world believed that it had outgrown’.

The whole affair illustrated how very differently the British view their relationship with its two former colonies. With one it has a special, we are all one family relationship, with the other it is still, three hundred years after the initial contact, more often a case of strangers tiptoeing around each other.

One reason for this may be that the British interaction with India was unique for both the British and the Indians from the very moment it began. To say India is a land made for conquest is a truism and even the Aryans, from whom the Hindus claimed descent, invaded the country at some time in the distant past. But the British were unlike any previous foreign ruler of India. All of them, starting with Alexander, the first one for whom we have reliable historical records, came with the sword or as with the Muslims with the sword, the cannon and Koran. But in the end these foreigners stayed in India and became part of the land, even Alexander left behind Greeks who eventually became Indians. But the first British arrived with trading books, a begging letter from their Queen, and always made it clear that they were mere sojourners in India, never going to make India their home. And lest India trap the Britons, the rule in many British families in India was that every third generation should go back to England. This rule, arguably, prevented Douglas Jardine, that most English of cricket captains, who was the third generation of his family in India to come back to England and miss out on captaining India.

Let us go back to that begging letter written in February 1583 by Elizabeth I to Jalaludin Akbar, the Mughal Emperor. The letter was given to John Newbery, one of the first Englishman to visit India, and begins thus:

Elizabeth by the grace of God etc. To the most invincible and mighty Prince Lord Zelabdim Echebar, King of Camabaia, Invincible Emperor etc

The letter goes on to speak of Akbar’s ‘humanity’ and says the English Queen would be ‘beholden’ to Akbar if he would look after her English subjects. Elizabeth misspelled Akbar’s name and spoke of him being the King of Camabaia, Cambay, along whose waterfront a hundred and thirty years later British sailors first played cricket introducing the game to the Indians. But what is significant is the tone of the letter. Elizabeth comes across as the ruler of a small kingdom well aware that the greatest powers on her continent were Spain and Portugal with Spain trying to bring her kingdom back to the Catholic mainstream which Elizabeth’s father had abandoned.

But then this was no more than a recognition of the reality of world politics then. As the historian Paul Kenney has written in 1500, a betting man, asked to predict which power would became the truly global power in the world, would have said that the Mughals, then at the height of their influence in India, stood a very good chance. No European country, not even Spain would have merited a bet. England were not even at the races.

This remained the position for the next century and half of British involvement with India. Britain eagerly increased its trade links with India because India was an economic sup...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Sport in the global society
• The Magic of Indian cricket
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Series editors’ foreword
• 1: India – whose India?
• 2: Khel-khood as cricket
• 3: Middle India and the cricket Raj
• 4: The gully, the maidan and the mali
• 5: An English sporting Eden in India
• 6: Ranji’s burden
• 7: The besieged hero
• 8: The Nawabi legend
• 9: Vegetarians, fast bowlers and violence
• 10: Gods and boys
• 11: Shining India or poverty of ambition?
• 12: My India, my England
• Postscript