The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games [1 ed.] 0195653211, 9780195653212

Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British, says Ashis Nandy, defying history, in this delightful

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The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games [1 ed.]
 0195653211, 9780195653212

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The Tao of Cr i c·k et

To Uma

The Tao of Cricket ON GAMES OF DESTINY AND DESTINY OF GAMES

Ashis Nandy

OXFORD V NIV ERSITY PRESS

OXFORD UNIVBRSITY l'RBSS

YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New.Delhi 110001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paolo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India By Oxford University Press, New Delhi @

Oxford University Press 2000

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published by Viking 1989 Oxford India Paperbacks 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly pennitted by law, or under temu agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circtilate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this sam~ condition on any acquirer ISBN 019 565 3211

Printed by Jlashtriya Printers, Delhi 110 032 Published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001

Contents

Preface Preface to the OUP Edition Tradition, Transgression and Norms The Wistful Camel and the Eye of the Needle Victory, Defeat and the Future of the Savage Notes Index

v1 x1 1 52 90 123 146

Preface

. This book was originally conceived of as a waming to my wife, who wants Indians to always win in cricket. It has turned out to be m essay on lhe future of traditions and 6n the politics of cultures. As a student of political cultura I have written it with mixed feelings. My knowledge ofcricket is matched only by my skill in it. and my underslanding of the social context of cricket in different countries is mosdy secondhand. I can al best be called a keen lay observer of India's new national game. On lhe other hand, my interest1in the way the Orient lllld the Occident define themselves and each other in ow times is old and cricket has been, over lhe last one hundred years or so, a slale on which different cultures have written their intersecting self-definitions. Because it is a game. and a game is only a game. some cultura have been less defensive when defming themselves in relation to cricket than. say. in relation to literature, warfare or science. Cricket al this plane has been a 'truer' projection of cultura and ofencounlen of cultures 1hm m111y other forms of human self-expression. It is to re-read these projections in lhe case of India lllld imperial Britain thal I have trespassed into an ll'C8 so alien to me. I have been guided by the belief that some arguments about colonial, neo-colonial, anti-colonial and PQSt-colonial consciousness can be~ beaer in lhe language of international cricket than that of political economy. Henc:e, hidden in lhe following pages are thumbnail sketches of processes such as diffusion of innovations. b'ansferof technology. Third World nadonaliliD. Oriental and Occidental despotisms, development. social engineering, growth of professions and science. Readers may also diicover in 1he book indirect analyses of the subtle psychological processes involved in domination and deculturation-identification with lhe agresaor, intemalization, turning against the self, reaction-fommion, lllld ritual neutralization of imposed cultural ·calqOries. Unking the concerns with lhe two kinds of processes lie ac:oncem with the problem of dissent in a world where the idiom of di!lellt incraainalY being defined a1 the centres of conformity. Apart from the heavy kMld I have fon:ed crictet to any Ind the

is

vii TM Tao ofCrick.et panial treabnent I have meted out to some of the vital issues af our times, there is one other reason for my discomfort with this book. My original plan was to write a book comparing the problems of collective and individual culpability under three conditions: playful collective warfare (cricket), playful privale warfare (stories of individual crime and its detection) and proper, organil.ed, scientific violence (modem warfare). I had hoped to show that the emphasis in the first case was on trlditions as the ultimate repository and ar6i~ of norms; in the second. on scientific rationality and Weberian rational-legality. I wanted to round off the analysis by showing that it was through the expert •management' of transgrasions of the second kind of norms--thc ones auociated with scientific rationality and rational-legality-that we have sought a solution to the third and probably the most serious problem of our times: war. Yet these rational, scientific nonns arc the ones which have shown themselves particularly incapable of coping with the problems oflarge-scale modem violence. Implied in this mode of formulating the problem is the awareness that the escape route may lie through a return to the public morality associated with some forms af cultural traditions-a morality which recognizes the continuity between the aggressor and the victim and locates that continuity in the on-going struggle for cultural survival. I could not pursue these arguments to their logical end because international cricket turned out to be a particularly complex affair which invited serious compuison5 with some other human enterprises. Perhaps I shall now have to spell out my general argument more fully elsewhctc. In the meanwhile those interested in cultural encounters between the East and the West may enjoy this playful interpretation of a game which is men than a game. The interpretation is written with the awareness that cricket is a threatened species of play-a Victorian putime of leisUTCly seriousness and self-denying stoicism, about to die a natural death in the post-second-war-world . It is also written with the awareness that when cricket goes, it is bound to ~e awa)C with it something of the meaning of life of many of my generation. If on the other hand the game survives the vicissitudes of OtJr time-and many hope against hope that it docs 50-'.-it wiU perhaps survive as a defiance and critique of modernity in a world moving towards post-modernity. It is with that awareness that the game and its environment have been discussed in the following pages-as an interface between the .old and .the new, the fantastic and the real, the moral and the amoral, the. visionlry and the pnctical, the playful and the serious, and the informal and the technical. If I have tried to capture something of the c0mbina-

Pre/a« viii

tion of noscalgia. mqic. stoicism and play in cricket. it is not because 1.do not recogniu the interface or naively believe that cricket tnlditionaUy blMl no place ·for progress, hedonism. science, success-hunt and hard competition. It is merely to register my feeble procat against the efforts to tum international cricket into anocher area of life in which mis ancient civilization is being forci.bly fitted into the sWldardized model of a modem nation-state. One final ci:>mment for cricket fans and cricket ·scribes. This is an account of the game from outside. Iffor that reason it seems to some that I have imposed a new mythic structure on the game. I do not apologiu. The goal of mis book is exactly that. This is not a social history ofcricket and if I had not stumbled on cricket. I would have found some other excuse to make the points I have made in the following pages. But. perhaps, in mat case. I may not have enjoyed making them so much. In me event some venturesome cricket-loverdecides to plod mrough the book and if he or she happens to be unacquainted wim.my other writings, a word on the theoretical structure of the book to make the plodding less painful. In the following pages I view cricket as medium of self-expression at four planes: traditional English cricket ( whieh is in many ways a reflection of earlier social hierarchies but is also unwittingly a criticism of the values associated wim modem industrialism). modem cricket (increasingly an endorsement of the hegemonic. urban-industrial managerial culture and a criticism of the pre-industrial values now associated wim defeated ways of life), imported cricket (the cricket which was exported to non-western societies as a criticism of native life-styles from the point of view of the industrializing West but which, as reconstructed by the natives, brought out the latent function of the game in the West and became a criticism of the common cultural principles of capitalism, colonialism and modernity) and new cricket (the cricket which by its dose identification with the industrialmanagerial ethos is bccOming increasingly ·an endorsement of the ruling culture of the world and a criticism of the victims of history). This book derives its odd structure from my understanding of the interplay of these four aspects of cricket. True. mis four-fold classification is difficult to sustain in the case of a game as nuanced as cricket and I have often faltered in my analysis. But it is also true mat had it not been for this perception of cultural encounters in cricket. I would have considered this essay totally superfluous. A very large number of people have helped me wim this book, direcdy or indirectly. I am particularly indebted to Surapriya Mookerji, T.G. Vaidyanathan, Ram Guba. Arun Mehta, James Manor, B.C.

ix The Tao ofCriclcet

Plrekh. Premen Addy. Tejinder WaJia. and Maielte cwt. Val...._ secretarial help has come from Bhuwan Otandra. Anil and M.K. Riyal.

Parts of this essay draw upon articles published in T#w Tiwws tfIndia.

Tlrr lll11Stratnl Wrdly of India and in the India lntrrnational Crntrr Q11artrrly. Other parts draw upon papers presented at a meeting of the R11j11va11"' group at Mysore University. Mysore. in May 1985; al a colloquium on •Traditions. Transfers and Traductions• al College lntcmational de Philosophic. Paris. in October 1985; and al a seminar on• too Years of Indian National Congress• al SL Anthony•s College. Oxford. in November 1985. The section comparing cricket and poput. cinema in India was written fora book being edited by Yogendra Malik. An earlier version of the section on Ranji was given as the Third Punitham Tiruchelvam Memorial Lectun: al Colombo on 16 March. 1986. Extracts from it were published in Tlrr Stat~sman. 16 February 1986; Tlrr Island. 23-4 March 1986; Daily NR?s. 25-1and29 March 1986; and Frontlinr. ~17 May 1986. The elaborate footnotes should convey the idea that this work is primarily an attempt to put hundreds of micro-interpretations within 1 larger conceptual fnme. I am therefore especially pleful to my JRCursors who have made possible this work by ~ir insightful comments on a game which mirrors so faithfully the political psychology of cultural encounters in our times.

"Ei1her you know what lhe pne m cricket is. or you do not. If you do, you cannot accept the dicbun... that in cricket the end juslifies the means. It is a lie that cricket is a business. . • . • .

-C.B. Fry

•... all lhe bowlers wanted to hit me ralher than the wicket. They wmmd to make MR that I would not bowl for the rest of the match or the series. It was difficult to play the fast bowlers.'

-8.S. Clandrashekhar •Alas. having defeall:d the enemy, we ourselves have been defealrd. ••. This our victory is twined into defeat.'

-The Mahabharata

Preface to the OUP Edition

The Tao of Cricket is a statement on the politics of cultural choices and the politics of visions in South Asia, usin& the metaphor of cricket. Untrained in political theory and unversed in the discipline of cultural studies, I had thought that the story of cricket in India could be a handy trope for having my say on the tragicomic spectacle of an ancient society running breathlessly to become a developed, modem nation-state. I fcit the story worth telling since India's intellectual and media elite seemed to love that panting, perspiring race and eager to pay the price of the deculturation and homelessness that often went with il The diseases of the rich and the powerful can have a charm of their own. Precisely because its political analysis is unacceptable and painful, TM Tao of Cricket over the years has been read more as a cultural history of cricket than as a deviant political psychology of popular culture. As a result, many have been unhappy. Cricket lovers have felt betrayed because the book is not adequately sensitive to the nuances of the game; serious scholars have been unhappy because of the levity of my tone and cursory treatment of weighty issues like the state, nationalism, popular religion, development and progress. None, absolutely none of the issues raised, M. N. Srinivas laments in a lovable review, has been fully dcvclopCd. To a lot of South Asians though, my story of cricket might have been a disappoinbnent but not its politics. Cricket bas a way of taking over its South Asian fans, even when they self-consciously resist being taken over. Arjun Appadurai claims cricket to be a 'hard cultural form' with values, meanings and practices that arc hard to break; it changes those sociaJized into it more than it itself changes. No wonder even some of the bard-eyed cricket nationalists in South Asia seem to have secret selves. lbey want India to win all their matches, but they also enjoy the game's laid back, languid style, representing_the rhythm of a lost lifestyle and invoking an imaginary, idyllic homeland in the past that paradoxically serves, as in some Chinese traditions, as the blueprint of an alternative future. Sitting in Calcutta, cricket writer Surapriya Mookcrjce 'inhales the flavour' of the Victorian English countryside, ' unspoiled

xii The Tao of Cricket

by an 'advancing industrial age,' in the memoirs of W. G. Grace. That dissenting utopia seems to mock the· official utopia standardized to fit globally promoted political virtues and correctness. Perhaps something of that 'retrogressive' vision rubs off on the country's cricket team, tQO. For the more breathlessly it runs, the more it seems to fall behind. After all, the captaincy of India's cricket team has been for some time at the hands of a shy, reticent Hyderabadi. coming from that immortal city of cavalier, if serene lassitude and classical grace, trying terribly hard, as one of the new capitals of Indian cyberscape, to speak the language of acceptable virtues and-as it now seems in times of match-fixing and scams-secret sins. Since the book was first published, this inner tension of cricket has sharpened in South Asia. This is surprising, for cricket itself has been changing globally. As it has become a billion-dollar enterprise, it has softened as a cultural form. Spectator demands have begun to push it further away from its original cultural role as a typically nineteenthcentury game, enshrining pre-industrial values in an industrial society and serving as a critique of the latter. Even cricket's distinctive theories of time and style of archiving memories-the way cricket lore cumulatesare changing. Cricket lore is now trying to jilt its old heart-throb, literature, to flirt with television. Also, as part of the cost of being mediagenic and business-friendly, the game is showing a growing tolerance for nationalism as the new pastime of its atomized, uprooted, urban spectators. In the popular culture of South Asian cities, cricket today is less and less a tacit defence of traditional bushido; it is becoming an open celebration of productivity and professionalism. Even the fact that the Indian team is the world's best-educated cricket team-nly three of the national players, presently, are not graduates-has come under scrutiny. Some like Ayaz Menon believe that while cricket is the life of these players, their education socializes them not to make it a life-and-death issue. That is why they so frequently do not win. Some may argue that cricket has always been a spectator sport and,' hence, a part of the entertainment industry. lbey may give examples from this very book to show that international cricket, when shorn of its hypocrisy, has always been partly driven by nationalism. Others may say that, despite its nineteenth-century flavour and dependence on traditions, cricket's ability to supply a tacit criticism of the urban-industrial vision, too, has worn off with the introduction of the slap-bang dramatics of the game's one-day version. The dominant model of heroics in cricket today depends more and more on the values of the global market and

Preface to the OUP Editio11 xiii

the nation-state system and is designed to alleviate the routine and tedium of everyday life through a nationalist project drummed up, paradoxically, by transnational capital. Yet, while cricket is changing to adapt to the dominant culture, the game has also shown that it can defy its new well-wishers, keen to integrate it into the global entertainment industry as a new item of mass consumption. Unlike the heroes of cinema but like those of politics, the cricketer is doomed to betray the hopes and ambitions of his fans. He is always a flawed hero who, even after giving a superhuman performance, can exit on a note that reveals his human frililty. The hero in cricket is pennanently in a limbo, simultaneously more human and more superhuman. Odds or the laws of statistics always catch up with him, even when declining skills due to age or injury and accusations of unfair play do not. As an open-ended game, cricket offers one an enormous

number of excuses for failure-captaincy thrust on immature shoulden, technical flaws unattended in early life, or victimization by umpires. In India there is, additionally, insufficient nationalism and professionalism, the absence of the kiJler instinct, innate submissiveness (as a fonner world champion in badminton, Prakash Padukone describes it) or a 'nice guy' syndrome (as Imran Khan calls it). However, at some point one comes to ~gnize that the cricketer's form may dip once in a while naturally. Cricket involves playing dice with destiny and, in reaction, the game invites more desperate efforts to produce a perfect theory of individual achievement and agency that would explain all fluctuations in fortune as a matter of only skill, strategy, commitment and leadership. That is why when riding the crest of success, the cricket hero seems more superhuman than most other sportspersons; he take~ on and defeats fate itself. More about that later. South Asians love their cricket hero because he represents an odd mix of achievement and failure. Only after retirement does he become a figure that does not arouse anxieties in the spectator about the spectator•s own limitations and failures. That, too, if he primarily remains a retired cricketer like Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi or Sunil Gavaskar and does not become a politician or a cricket administrator, like Chetan Chauhan or Gundappa Vishwanath. The former cricketer is the only player who in retrospect seems to have been reasonably perfect. It is not the fickleness of the fan or the quick changes in fashion that make contemporary cricket heroes particularly vulnerable to performance anxiety and the lure of anxiety-management experts (whether they be the psychoanalyst, as in the West, or the astrologer, as in South Asia). It is the distinctive ideal of heroism that cricket endorses, which resists

xiv The Tao of Criclcl!t

and subverts the conventional ideal of the hero. In this ideal, there is a built-in appreciation of the ideas of fate and humility as principles that negate what Christopher Lasch caUs a culture of narcissism. '!Qis partly explains the vohnninous literature on cricket. Most writings on cricket can be read as a psychological.defence against the encroachments of probability in a collapsing world of certitudes. They are either a celebration of probability, an attempt to explain it away as a mere artefact; or a story of sont00ne's defiance of il In this respect, cricket is-a great but anachronistic nineteenth-century game that threatens to become a signpost to the future, too. With the collapsing edifice of certitudes that we have inbcri1ed -from thC last century, the twcntyfirst century may well turR out to be a chm'ter for experiments with cultures that have not been brainwashed by the earlier century's public passions. Can South Asia, after panting through the last two centuries to emulate arid equal the West in so many spheres, learn to identify not with the West's dominant self, but with the West's dissenting, underground, contraband self, .straying from the official line on sane, rational, constructi..-e dissent? I hope against hope that the answer turns out to be 'yes: I am encouraged by the observations of cricket writer Suresh Menon, ventured nearly a docade ago, on the basis of confessions made by some Indian and Pakistani li:st cricketers. Menon says that ilenior players in India and Pakistan are no longer takea in by the hype. They have realized that the much-trumpeted rivalry between the two teams is actually built up bj officials (usually hardboiled,politicians moonlighting as cricket administrators and mainly concented with gates) and the .media (perpetually looking for a good story).

new

The rare cricket news to adorn the front page Asian newspapers, since The Tao of Cricket was published, all reveal this double-edged nature of the game. The accusations of match-fixing in Pakistan and India, the two instances of vandalism at Bombay's 'Wankhede Stadium and Delhi's Firoz Shah Kotla when a Hindu nationalist party, the Shiv Sena, dug up the pitch to prevent the Pakistani cricket team from playing in India, the emergence of Sri Lanka as a significant force in world cricket, and Imran Khan's passionate, if cynical affair with electoral politics in Pakistanthey all raise questions about the controllability of cricket, the extent to which the game can serve the purposes of nationalism, and the changing nature of the hero in the expanding mass culture of South Asia. In the matter of match-fixing and bribing, after a rather clwnsy investigation, a retired Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court absolved

Preface to the OUP Edilion xv

the Indian players of all wrong-doing. The Australian and Pakistani Cricket Boards of Control have not fared any better till now. Both are trying to wiggle out of their embarrassment without rocking the boat overmuch. TilC Pakistani judge, given the responsibility of investigating the matter, for instance, showed more enthusiasm in speaking to the media than in producing a well-substantiated report. In the weeks before the 1999 World Cup, he quietened down so suddenly that one suspected he bad at long last discovered the beauties of discretion. Since then, his report has again been in news. But neither has it been published nor

have its recommendations inspired much confidence. In India, after the media hype and the hysteria, in which even some notodously corrupt politicians struck some outrageously moral pose, the cases of matchfixing are turning out to be cases of tax evasion, something in which the country's business elite, entertainment industry and politicians have always specialized. None of the protagonists has grappled with the core issues. For instance, why have some fonncr test players argued that cricket matches cannot be fixed at all or, at the most, they can be fixed only under certain exceptional conditions? Are they out of touch with contemporary realities? Is the game becoming more 'fixable' and, if so, what docs that tell us about its fate? Does the very fact that no clear case has been made out against any of the players tell us that in cricket it is not easy to fix a match and those who depend on such fixing do not get what they bribe for-a reasonably high degree of certainty about the Outcome of a game? 1bcre might have been attempts to fix a match, and that is reprehensible enough, but that does not mean the attemp&s succecldcd. Someone has to convince me that by buying off a few players or by depending. upon a few tips about ground conditions from players, one can control results in cricket. Even the recorded conversation of the one player who has admitted his sin shows that the game he was to direct towards a given end went totally out of his control, due to the genius of a single player. Even the Shiv Sena's attempt, on nationalist grounds, to subvert the series against Pakistan in 1999 was contextualized by the s·ame 'unknowability' and 'unmanageability' of cricket. The party had succeeded in keeping Pakistan out of the Hero Cup in 1993 by using the same tactics. This time, too, the Sena thought that, by digging up the pitch, it had made an aggressive nationalist statement and embarrassed its coalitional partner, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, trying hard to behave itself in power. Yet, instead of jeopardizing sports and cultural exchanges between India and Pakistan, the adventure at Firoz Shah Kotla only facilitated them. The act was seen as a sacrilege by all

xvi The Tao of Cricket

cricket lovers and stupid by the rest. Cricket is a religion in South Asia and India's matches with Pakistan have acquired the appeal of an annual Ramlila, with Pakistani cricket team having the right touch of the demonic. Ravana might be the epitome of evil, but how can you have a Ramlila without him? In 1999, the Hindu nationalists learnt that lesson the hard way when the Pakistanis won the first test at Chennai and went for a victory lap. The entire stadium gave them a standing ovation for nearly seven minutes. Arguably, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's hands were strengthened by such public responses when he accepted the invitation of the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, to visit Lahore. In opinion polls after the 1993 episode, when the Shiv Sena had successfully stopped Pakistan from coming to India, a majority had wanted the tour to go on. This time that majority asserted itself. Cricket has ways of subverting the best laid plans. However, nothing has endor~ the thesis of this book more flamboyantly than the experience with the 1996 World Cup. The co-hosts for the competition were India and Pakistan, two.countries divided by the same passions. In their reactions to victory and defeat in cricket, one is sometimes only a comic ve1sion of the other. One of the saddest consequences of the Partition, a letter to the editor of The Times ofIndia once complained, is that neither India nor Pakistan can enjoy even a cricket match as sport; they have to 'build it up as a grim test of national superiority.' After Pakistan's defeat in the quarterfinals at the hands of India at Bangalore, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto first said that in cricket one side had to lose for the other to win. However, she subsequently offered to hold an official enquiry into the defeat. Being a politician, she gauged the gloom that had gripped her country, not so much because Pakistan had lost, but because it had lost to India. Pakistani identity, heavily dependent on India, badly needed a victory at the time. The Pakistani cricketers were lucky; no one demanded that they face a firing squad, though a cartoonist in the Frontier Post hinted at such an ending to the story. To speak with Jug Suraiya, Pakistan needs a self-inflicted frenzy like an addict needs heroin. In the wake of their defeat, the crimes the Pakistani players were accused of were serious. Some said that the injury that prevented Wasim Akram from playing was not genuine; his effigy was burnt and his house attacked. Others were convinced that the players were bribed. Still others thought that, after the magnificent

Preface to the OUP Edition xvii

beginning of the Pakistani innings at Bangalore, the self-destructive impulsiveness·of Pakistan's opening batsmen was actually a calculated ploy to lose the game; the players, they suspected, had betted heavily on the results of the game. One Pakistani cleric claimed that Pakistan had done badly because it had opted, flouting the tenets of Islam, for a woman prime minister. Another insisted that the country had to lose because the victory song the Pakistani media had been playing did not include the word inshallah, 'god willing'. One fan committed suicide. Indians feeling self-righteous about the reactions to defeat in the neighbouring country were to be soon shaken by the crowd behaviour at Calcutta's Eden Gardens. But for such blatant jingoism, they would have conveniently forgotten that only the previous week the Indian Parliament had passed a resolution congratulating the Indians on their victory against Pakistan, even though the match was only a humble quarter-final. Nor would they have remembered that once earlier at Calcutta, supposedly the capital of sportsmanship, cricket spectators had reacted to an Indian debacle by misbehaving with .Gavaskar's wife and Gavaskar had vowed never to play in the city again-. In Bombay, supposedly the other citadel of sportsmanship, the Shiv Sena had. not only dug up the pitch to ensure that Pakistanis did not play in the city, the party's head, Bal Thackeray, always a comic relief in Indian public life, had even claimed that Mohammad Azharuddin, being a Muslim, did not do that well when playing against the Pakistanis. Much has been written about the crowd behaviour at Eden Gardens on that occasion. But if you think, as West Bengal's Chief Minister Jyoti Basu does, that it was only the handiwork of a small group of criminally inclined youth and had nothing to do with what I am saying, I can only request you to remember the two suicides that took place in West Bengal after India's defeat and the openly expressed moral indignation of those who thought that Azharuddin had taken bribes to bat second and score a zero in the match against Sri Lanka. A full 25 per cent of the respondents, according to a survey sponsored by The Times of India, refused to say that the vandalism should not have taken place and 18 per cent refused to join those who were willing to say 'sorry' to the Sri Lankans. And despite flooding Sri Lanka with apologiesreportedly 30,000 reached their destination-not a single apology was offered to the Indian team against which the venom and the violence were directed. For good or for worse, we shall have to learn to live with this 43 per cent of the Indian population. Historian and cricket writer Ramachandra Guha has recently narrated his encounter with this section of the people,

xviii The Tao of Cricket

while seeing an India-Pakistan one-day cricket match in a stadium. He describes the way overworked, overpaid, half-drunk yuppies among the spectators find in nationalism an excellent disguise for their communal sentiments. Reading between lines of Guha's story, one gets a chance "to gauge the passions-the free-floating violence and the sectarian ve.nom seeking targets-that constitute the underbelly of India's public life today. It is true that the shelf-life of such passions is brief in South Asia and they are often followed by as impassioned, maudlin, moral selfcleansing. Thus, the 30,000 letters of apology to the Sri Lankans did encourage many to take the outburst at Eden Gardens as one of those passing inanities to which the South Asian public life is particularly vulnerable. It is also probably true that Indian cricket is getting reconfigured as the script of a mediocre Bombay movie with its usual carnivalesque mix of crime, money, comedy, sacrifice, betrayal, destiny, and triumph of morality. One gets the impression that cricket is becoming not only a spectator sport, it is becoming for many a spectacle in Roland Barthes' sense of the term. It is also true that there are different strands within India's cricket nationalism. Journalist Rajdeep Sardesai has argued that the game symbolizes inclusive, secular Indian nationalism, not its narrow parochial version. He has spoken of cricket itself as a voice of sanity amidst the bizarre events of religious and ethnic chauvinism, a voice that c~ be a 'unifying form of mass social activity' when other unifying forces weaken. But one doubts if the reach of Sardesai's nationalism is that wide. Former cricket captain Bishen Singh Bedi seems more convincing when he says, 'I can vouch that cricket loses its sporting character in an lndo-Pak contest. Be it in India, Pakistan or Sharjah. And I dare add, with or without neutral umpires.· 1be nationalism Bedi talks about is no longer the patriotism of a colonized people resisting an imperial power, but its standardized version that has already taken a toll of more than 100 million lives during the twentieth century. It is the nationalism in which Europe has specialized for the last three hundred years. Gandhithe original one, with his 'silly' ideas of non-violence and a postindustrial society, and not the ones who supply designer-made prime ministers for India-openly called it another edition of imperialism. What prompts societies to behave like adolescent fan clubs? Why do nations vest their self-esteem in the performance of eleven young players, mostly in their twenties? I have raised the question in the book and I raise it here again. And I fear that the answer is painful. What the

Preface to 1he OUP Edition xix

politicians, bureaucrats and business persons cannot or will not do, the cricketers are expected to do. They are expected to be ideal citizens who, while confonning to the conventional tenets of citizenship, would get the success that eludes others in more crucial spheres of life. Civil rights activist and fonner High Court judge Rajendra Sachar claims that the modern Indians always want their neighbours to produce selfsacrificing national heroes to fight the ills of the system and their own families to concentrate on producing conventional citizens pursuing conventional success. Cricket heroes have become, for the increasingly uprooted, humiliated, decultured Indian, the ultimate remedy for all the failures-moral, economic and political-of the country. If India, according to these Indians, is constantly losing out to its erstwhile imperial rulers in the game of development and is unable to bend its recalcitrant neighbours into docility despite its newly acquired nuclear teeth, the cricketers should correct the nation's feelings of inefficacy and emasculation. These Indians believe that their team does not lose because the other teams are better; it loses because the selectors are faction-ridden, the captain is incompetent, the players do not have the killer instinct. and the umpiring is bad! Ultra-nati0nalism is not unknown to the rich and the powerful, though its logic in their case may be different. American sport is great not because American government tends it, but because the American market does. The American nationalists take it for granted that their team would do well. The games in which they are not good, they do not consider worth patronizing. The Europeans have their football nationalism, the most notorious of the genre; it is often associated with the hooliganism of unemployed youth. Even at the :zenith of England's imperial power, victory over the colonies in cricket mattered. Now, in post-imperial England, it matters even more. Captains of the country's cricket teams never win and in recent times there has been a clear shift in the culture of leadership. To trust William Rees-Mogg, the shift is symbolized by David Gower-that effortless, elegant amateur and cricket's Lord Peter Wimsey-giving way to Graham Gooch. the surly gamekeeper straight out of the novels of D. H. Lawrence. The communist bloc traditionally compensated for its pathetic political and social perfonnance by producing world-class sportspersons. It often destroyed the future physical and psychological health of its athletes by drugging them secretly and putting them through inhuman training regimens. Today for many of these sportspersons, totally unskilled in anything other than their specialization and abandoned by their families, suicide is the only

xx The Tao of Cricket

recourse, as happened in the case of Olympic gold-medallist Andrew Prokoffierr in 1990. Surplus value can be extracted in many ways. The oddity in South Asia is that it is an unpredictable, uncertain game like cricket that has to cope with the feelings of inadequacy and grandiose ambitions of the citizens. Despite the widespread belief that the ideal cricketer is the ideal citizen and, therefore, should 'naturally' win his matches for his country, cricket still remains notoriously in.s ensitive to training, preparation and talent. Despite the efforts underway for more than a century, it continues to be in South Asia, as Mihir Bose puts it, a tamasha-a mix of 'fun, fiesta, magic and glamour.' The game does not yield results commensurate with a team's skills either. For it is a game of luck that has to be played as if it were only a game of skill. I have argued in this book that you win in cricket when you negotiate your fate better than the other team does. Actually, you never win against the other team; you win or lose against yourself and your own fate. Nationalism in such a game is a liability, not an asset. Individual players know and acknowledge this, but do not dare to say so. The Tao of Cricket warns that in South Asia ultra-nationalism could well take over the game and destroy it, mindlessly and perhaps even purposelessly. For cricket can never, in response to national invesbnents, guarantee adequate returns in terms of national glory. Just when one thinks one has sewn up the future by producing the world's best team, some humbler team forces one to repeat the trite adage about the uncertainties of~ game. Cricket is a game of destiny that does not recognize men and nations of destiny. Cricket is not a good cure for emasculation either, though it has been built up as such since Victorian times. 'There has always been a difference between the masculinity in the cultures of cricket in former colonies and the masculinity associated with nineteenth century English cricket. When.the Victorians said that cricket was masculine, they had, strangely, a rather classical Brahminic concept of it in mind. The good cricketer was masculine because he had control over his impulsive self and symbolized the superiority of form over substance, mind over body, culture over nature. Above all, cricket was masculine because it symbolized serenity in the face of the vagaries of fate and it incorporated the feminine within the game's version of the masculine. The new masculinity of cricket is built on raw performance and the superiority of substance over style and of the physical over the mental. It further integrates cricket in the nationalist frame and in the entertainment business. Fortunately, those cricket teams seem to do well which allow their players to be themselves and do not push them prematurely and

Preface to the OUP Edition xxi

mindlessly into diplomacy or business or train them as willing or unwilling warriors defending national pride. That may be the secret weapon of the West Indian cricket team. Coming from so many independent countries, they carry only the burden of race, not nationalism. Which is one burden less. Cricket is after all a game and, other things being equal, young, unencumbered players always play better than prematurely responsible players, burdened with protecting the self-respect of drawing-room warriors. In any case, to be on the safe side, I did not root for India in the World Cup of 1999. Given the growing communal and ethnic chauvin-

ism in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the victory of any of these South Asian countries would, I felt, stoke hatred and jealousy. A word on the cricket heroes in South Asia. 1be issue has come to the fore during the last decade mainly due to two developments. The emergence of the Sri Lankan cricket team as a global power, playing scintillating, if 'irresponsible', Caribbean-style cricket and the emergence of the former Pakistani captain lmran Khan as a contender for political power in Pakistan. The story of Sri Lanka can be easily told as that of an outsider who, exuding exotic charms, wins the heart of a fickle princess and, then, bewitched by his own success, tries to hold her love by becoming a conventional prince. Sri Lankan cricket, abetted by its own success, has begun to suffer from all the ills that aftlict cricket in South Asia and many Sri Lankans seem happy that they now suffer from the diseases of the successful. Khan's story is more convoluted and comical. After seemingly moving close to power he has fortunately Jost his bearings at the hustings. But not before marrying Jemima Goldsmith and vending her as a simple, believing Pakistani Muslim and not before accusing Zia-ul Haq, the country's then military ruler, of setting spies on Benazir Bhutto when she was a student at Oxford, forgetting that the general came to power after she returned to Pakistan. In the meanwhile, ·the great helmsman of Pakistan's cricket had also antagonized many by playing footsie with some of the more notorious elements within the Pakistani . army. Predictably, in both Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the detractors of the heroes have turned out to be the same fans who had previously applauded them so lustily. All this is sad but not unforeseen. Heroes define a society as much as a society defines its heroes. And in a mass society, people live with the fantas6c and the mythic in a distinctive way. In such a society, epics, legends and puranas gradually cease to be sacred texts; they become

xxii The Tao of Cricket

literary genres, subjects of specialization, themes in academic debates or political platforms. Gods in mass societies are distant and inaccessible and heroes no longer mediate between heaven and earth. They are actually highly successful achievers, having a one-to-one relationship with their atomized admirers or fans. This loss of touch with the sacred or the transcendent and the increasing 'humanization' of the hero also mean that popular heroes of the worlds of sports and entertainment are expected to be exemplary social beings but they are also continuously suspected of being severely flawed. Hence, the almost pathological public curiosity about their private lives and the persistent attempts by the yellow press to unravel and commercially exploit their 'dirty' secrets. For such heroes not only represent the main concerns of the global mass culture but also the clandestine selves-the secret fears, anxieties, ambitions, hopes and, especially, the unfulfilled temptations to deviate from social norms-of ordinary citizens. In a world freed from gods and demons, from the sacred and the magical, such heroes are expected to redeem the killing banality and boredom of everyday life. But, at the same time, the ordinary citizens never forget that these heroes also live in a market economy, that they

also have their own secret interests and long-tenn business strategies. South Asia now has a small but expanding modem sector that is fast acquiring the features of a mass society. Along with other popular items of mass culture like blue jeans, hamburgers and cola drinks, a set of new heroes too have entered our lives in a big way. These new heroes and the role they have begun to play in our lives are in many ways preformatted. They are even shaping our expectations from and ambivalence towards our politicians and other public figures in a predictable fashion. They have already done so in other democracies. The status Qf the hero in South Asian public life is defined by the ambivalence in the middle-class culture towards its heroes, not, as the middle class loves to think, by the irrational tendency of the illiterate masses to attribute to ·the heroes in real life the qualities associated with the roles they play in the stadium or on the screen.

1

Tradition, Transgression and Norms

Cricket is an Indian game accidenrally discovered by the English. Lite chilli•.which was .discovered in South America and came to India only in medieval times to become an inescapable part of Indian cuisine. cricket. too. is now foreign to India only according to the historians and tJle lndologists. To most Indians the prnc now looks more Indian than English. They find it only natural that cricket today arouses more passions in India than in England. 1 These pusions find expression in many ways. For a long time, the most dnmatic expression of them was the size of the crowds which came to witness big cricket. These crowds often refused to disappear even when only dull draws were in die offing. The crowds still come but. with the advent of television, in some metropolitan centres they have begun to shrink. At the same time, the national obsession with cr¥:ket; panicularly international cricket. has only grown. So much so that one well-known humorist· lamented a few years ago that two centuries of British rule had left the' Indians famished and with noching but cricket. 'For six months in a year they watch cricket and for the next six they ralk about it. ' 2 When an important match is on, work in schools, universities and government offices comes to a virtual halt; all conversations veer around to cricket; and it becoriles difficult to even hold an uninterrupted meeting or seminar. As a result, in recent years, cricket has been blamed for almost every form of evil in lndiia-from delays in the passage of budgets through legislatures to bank robberies, from vandalism of street cricketers to the decline in Indian sports and the COl'Rlption of youth; from idleness and lethargy in public life to the wastage of time and the dccHnc of Indian TV.3 These accusations, reminiscent of puritanic objections to cricket in England in earlier times, arc often accompanied by earnest pleas to banish the game from India altogether; For example, in a letter tothe editor of a national daily, a reader once said,

The disgraceful pcrfonnance of the 400-sb"Ong Asiad contingent.

2 'l'lwT••Cridd

•. is not surprising when lbe llllion'1 IDlin apon is followina the cricket scon: on radio and television. The result is dwt city children t¥e to cricket md brcit window panes and DOlel••• .Village children also have now taken to the F.nglishman's pme and dropped fast the Indian games.... Unless cricket is banished from this country, the rest of the sports would not &et •Y encouragement. people would not do honest wort in their work place.s and youth would not get adequate excreiae.4

This obsessive coocem with cricket can be viewed in two waya.5 One can say that millions of Indians have become tolally captive to the colonial consciousness and taken to this anachronistic colonial pme like fish to water. This is the position of many wcstemi7.eel Indiana, aactively searching for exclusively Indian roots. and that of Indologists~ who define India only by its roots. To them, the truly Indian can only be the purely indigenous. Alternatively. one can say that cricket is a cultural import which has met~ vital need of Indian culture, trying to grapple with the modem world and to make sense of that world in terms of native categories. If one takes lbe second view. cricket can be given 'the cmlit for having introduced into Indian society a new and unique means of cultural self~xprcssion.6 It is from this second point of view tbal I shall use bcrc the metaphor ofa cultural accident~ an Indian game di1COVcred in Britain-to set the stage for a discussion of norms caught between traditjons and modernity. My comments on the.game however will be offered from oulSidc the world of professional cricket and sports critici5m. I am neither a cricketer nor an expert observer of the game. My commcnas will have to be that of a political and cultural psychologist who in his teens played the game atrociously butwho has ever since retained a love for its culture of anarchic individualism and for the·pccUliar, nonreprcssive collectivism based on that anarchy. I take heart from the famous saying of Neville Cardus that to fully enjoy cricket one must know something more than crickeL My analysis will have three facets. First. I shall try to show that cricket is basically what the clinical psychologists call a projective test; it reveals men about the players. the consumers and the interPretas of the game than about the intrinsic nature of the game. Cricket provides inchoate. open-ended. essentially ill-defmcd stimuli which invite such projection.' (It is of course possible for some readers to take this argument to its logical conclusion and read this book. too, as an interpretation of intetp1etations.)

Sec:ond. I shall argue that there wu once. perhaps till about 1he begimtin1 of World W1r I. perhaps up to the end of World War D. a comensua about the meaning of cricket because of the shared fantuies projected on to the game. 1be consensus cune from a consensus on the naning ofculture and from the felt need to cµ-c~be an ma of life where some particular cultural values could be sustained u a counterpoint to the compromise culture of everyday life. 1be second argument can be put another way. Cricket is not a synecdoche in the culture of its origin; it is so only in some ·of the cultures which have adopted iL When a Victorian said 'It is not cricket.• he did not mean is not life• nor even 'It is not society•. On the conarary. he assumed that many things which pass in politics, business or in life in general would not pass in cricket. Cricket for him wu a protected domain. even if it wu. u I shall show. often contaminated by life.' If cricket with its anllChic collectivism was a synecdoche for the Viclorian--dlat is. if cricket roughly stood for life for him-he would have ceased beina bitmelf. He might have even become a savage Asian or African. Finally. I shall argue that the ambience of cricket is under attack in the modern world which seeks to make the game more scientific. faster, more professional. more obviously thrilling, combative and decisivein other words. to make the game fit in with the dominant worldview of om times. Cricket is being turned into a synecdoche at lat. Not because society is.being altered to suit the needs of cricket but because cricket is being altered to suit the needs of contemporary conaciousness. This growing fit between cricket and modern life is destroying the rai.wn d'etre of the game. When the innovations~ designed to make the game modem succeed. they make the game more like many other games and deprive it of its distinctiveness. When the innovations fail. they burden the game with ornate rules and. re,U18ti0ns which. only erode its iplplicil norms. 1be latent argument here is that there are two types of games: the ones like chess in which the culture of play beyond the formal content of play is rudimentary or secondary and the ones in which such culture is the domiilant part of the game. The fonnal moveby-move details of chess tell one virtually everything about the game: the statistics of a cricket match tell one little bec•nse they are like notations in music. It takes something more than statistics to invoke a · great game ofcricket. exactly u it takes something more than the score ~ describe an .outstanding musical performance. 1be great cricketMiter Neville Cardus would have understood this; he was also a music critic. So would C.LR. James. who hu compared cricket and music in

·1,

4

TM Tao of Crid:~t

some detail in his autobiography.9 In the rest of this book, I shall develop these arguments through a somewhat chaotic, four-fold comparative analysis of the cultures of gon-modem and modem cricket, in England and in India. (I use the expression 'non-modem' not historically but culturally and by it I mean primarily a set of choices which refuses to over-emphasize organization, productivity, technicism, marketability. impersonality, control and competitiveness.) But before going further into that issue something more about the nature of the game.

Tlee Natun of Grace The origins of cricket are shrouded in legend and myth, and it is doubtful if we shall ever get a proper history of the game. This is not a loss; it is as it should be. Cricket does not deal with or satisfy the need for certitude: it excels in uncertainties and ambiguities. Thanks however to a number of recent writers, it is possible to reconstruct something of the past of cricket for the historically minded among us. It is said that by the end of the thirteenth century a crude, folk form of cricket was already being played in the English countryside. In its early form, the game probably became popular ooly in the fifteenth century and its rules were formulated in the seventeenth. By that time the English gentry had taken a fancy to the game and they either played it themselves or employed the lower classes to play it. During its folk phase. before it became popular ~g the gentry towards the middle of the seventeenth century, the game atttacted the hostility of the Puritans, who mainly objected to its being a counter-attraction to the church on Sundays and also disliked the unproductive pleasure and hedonism which went with it. It is said that cricket also had the honour, at about the same time, of earning the enmity of the early capitalists who, anticipating many twentieth century Indians, saw in the game only a justification for sloth, avoidance of prOductive work and wastage of time. With the gentlemanly classes taking to it, however, ~e game began to become more . respectable. Perhaps the ideas of wastage of time and avoidance of work did not seem.so pejorative when applied to the prosperous. As for the content of cricket at the time. it was invariably noisy and rough and attracted highly partisan spectators, bookies and gamblers of all hues.10 The.first cricket match was played in Sussex in 1697. It however took another ninety years to found the Marylebone Cricket Club or MCC al the Lords cricket growid. The club was, for nearly the first 150 years of its existence, the supreme law-making body as well as the

Trodilion,

Transgr~ssion and Nomu.

S

cultuial centre of the game. By the eighteenth century the game had become more sedafe. As its anstocratic patronS in southern England cons0lidated their bOld over" it in the nineteenth century, it even acquired a touch of ornate stolidity. These patrons brought about the elaborate ritualiutiell of cricket and; later on, made an ideology out of amateurism, perhaps in reaction to the earlier puritanic criticisms. Certainly the age ofan:>,ateurism ( 1870-1945), which sociologist Christopher Brookes describes, only panially bore an imprint of the earlier free-for-all culture of the gamc. 11 1bc age was more an affirmation of the superiority of controlled self-indulgence and controlled flair or style, combined with constant reaffirmation of a moral universe. 1bc nineteenth century was also the period when the various postUtilitarian theories of progress began to be applied to the new colonies of Britain. 1bc emerging culture of cricket came in handy to those using these theories to hierarchize the cultures, faiths and societies which were, one by one, coming under colonial domination. Imperial Britain now increasingly judged itself by the norms of cricket and the colonies by their actual ways of life, exactly the way it judged western Christianity by its philosophy and "Hinduism or Islam by the way real-life Hindus or Muslims lived. No wonder the culture of cricket was exported to the colonies as .t he basic model of sportsmanship, and as a 'healthy, active pastime' which would be 'a counter-attraction"to paisc and politics', as the Fourth Lord Harris, an ardent cricket fan and once the Governor of Bombay, put it in the context of lndia. 12 Once again it was the British gentry which took .the lead; they were the most enthusiastic promoters of the game in the colonies through British anny officers and bureaucrats. But the British middle classes were the most vociferous about the character-building potential of cricket in India. They were convinced that cricket typical Iy nurtured British virtues and the spread of cricket would promote, albeit indirectly, Britain's civilizing mission. This made the social basis of cricket a little different in the colonies, at least in the tropics. While in Britain cricket was by this time mainly a pastime of the English elite-the lower classes, the Scots and the Welsh preferring games like football-among the British in the colonies the appeal of cricket was wider. Possibly class and ethnic distinctions were harder to maintain in the colonies, given the limited numbers of whites there. Possibly the class differences that existed among supporters of cricket in F.ngland-in northern F.ngland cricket was less of an elite game-combined with the pattern of migration to the colonies to ensure th!lt the English elite's use of cricket as a principle

..

6

Th~

TQ(I ofCrirut

of social exclusion coul~ not be ·sustained in the col0nies. Poaibly ordinary British soldiers and lower-level British functionaries took to . cricket more consciously in the colonies as an index of their upward mobility, nationalism and British self-hood. In sum, the growth and spread of cricket was coeval widl lhe high noon of the British empire and derived pan of its legitimacy from its association with Pax Britannica. Even the sun did not dare to set on lhe British empire and if the English ruling classes had an elite game to which they gave full allegiance, and if that game emphasi7.ed cenain norms and virtues, who could dare deny that those nonns and virtues were the ones which ensured the political and economic success of Britain? The colonii.ed, under the circumstances, could do no better than emulate the British in their 'national game'. Nor could the colonizers escape the responsibility of playing their own national game. This often resulted in cricket being thrust down the throat of young boys. both in Britain and her colonies.13 All this may sound like another proof of the cricket-is-a-colonialgame thesis but it is possible to see the correlation in another way, tooas a reflection of the efforts by the peripheries and the undetside of British society as well as by the Indians to reaffirm, through cricket. velues in opposition to the colonial worldview. Let me explain myself. English cricket, as the non-westerners, particularly Indians, know it, came into its own a little more than one hundred years ago and it held its own till World War II. Even today when Indians speak of the traditions of cricket or of traditional cricket they have in mind mainly the age of amateurism. Adapting Cedric J. Robinson 's formulation of the role of cricket in English history, one could say that in India it was the cricket of the age of amateurism which symbolized the pre-industrial spirit. untainted by any corruption. 14 In India. too, cricket was a cultural mediation constructed by parts of the society as a response to the process of dislocation, sense of loss and alienation. Only the trigger was colonialism in combination with industrial capitalism. This interpretation is not entirely fair to western constructions ofthe history of cricket. Nor is it fair to post-war generations of viewers and players of the gapie·in England, who have made the game increasingly a part of mass culture. A living game, however, lives not in books of history but in contemporary ·choices reflecting shared memories. As a living game, cricket in the Third World is primarily a mode of selfexpression Shaped during the age of amateurism.15 That was the period when English cricket was most enthusiastically exported to-and had

Tratliliolt, TrtllU,,.nMolt Oltd Nonu

7

the closest encounters with--dle blacb and the browns in the colonies. For these outsiders, the culture of 'true' cricket ranains a peculiar Victorian mix of aristocratic amareurism and nineteenth century professionalism. I call it 'peculiar' because, in the Victorian culture of the game, neither was the contradiction between amateurism and professionalism properly ~lved nor was it complicated by the fully impersonal, technocratic professionalism which mass culture was to later endorse. It was this contrldiction which first made cricke~ a morality play for the Indians. To the Brahminic, the posture of moral superiority and selfcontrol of the gentleman cricketer was bound to be attractive. 1be Kshatriyas and the Kshatriya-like found him attractive for his defiance

of fate, emphasis on style and sense of honour. Both appm:iated the gentleman cricketer's emphasis on rituals or forms over·substance and his oven defiance of the professional cricketer's profit motive and performance principle, which were associated not only with the Bania and some of the 'low' cultures in India but also with the colonial rulers. This was the first sense in which cricket was a criticism of colonialism. I have mentioned earlier the ploy of many imperialist scholars and .educators who compared the philosophy of cricket with the everyday morality of Indians the way they compared philosophical Christianity with everyday Hinduism. Victorian cricket reversed the process. It allowed Indians to assess their colonial rulers by western values reflected in the official philosophy of cricket, and to find the rulers wanting. 1be assessment assumed that cricket was not the whole of F.oglishness but was the moral underside of English life which the English at the turn of the century, even with much of the world at their feet, found difficult to live down. The assessment tbus anticipated the nationalist and particularly Gandhian critiques of the British which judged the everyday Christianity of the British in.India with reference to philosophical Christianity. 1be complex relationship between cricket and coloniaman was most sharply mi~ in Douglas Jardine, who continues to serve as the popular stereotype of an unsporting imperialist ever since intimidatory bodyline bowling was used under his captaincy by an MCC team in Australia in the 1930s. No one could better Jardine in aloof, anogant class-consciousness and in hatted for the 'uncouth', 'unamtlemanly' Australians. Yet, more than one Indian has described how, in anocher colonial country, Jardine stood up to racist pomposity while captaining a visiting MCC team. Once he qgressively thwarted the attempt by a Viceroy as powerful as Lord Willingdon to exclude from the MCC team

8

Tlte Tao ofCridet

in India the Maharaja of Patiala who was a Member of the MCC and. another time, he insultingly refused to obey an official fiat to d8ncc first with the wife of tbe Governor of United Provinces at a fonnal ball. 16 Did Jardine have a change of heart? Was he ambivalent on colonialism? Perhaps neither. Perhaps the split was in the culture of cricket itself. which spoke out, in this instance, even through Jardine. Cricket, whether it was the greatest gift of the British to their Empire or not, did occasionally become the unconscious of the British trying to affirm itself against the tyranny of an imperial self-hood. Perhaps Rudyard Kipling, the arch imperialist that he was, sensed this when he attacked all cricketers as 'flannelled fools' .

• The first heroic figure or star ofcricket-as-we-know-it was W.G. Grace (1848-1915). l ·use the word 'heroic' here in Ernest Becker's sense-to imply that the career of humanity is the career of a frightened animal which must deny death in order to live and that 'societies are standardized systems of death denial; they give structure to the formulas for heroic transcendence.' 17 Grace was. the first to personify the ideology of immortality in cricket. His entry into the scene further institutionalized cricket as a war-like ritual for heroic emergence and as a purifying ritual of vietory over evil. A huge, bearded, colourful figure, patriarchal and child-like at the same time, Grace dominated cricket iil the second half of the nineteenth century. Given the social status of cricket in Victorian England, this is only another way of saying that he dominated Victorian culture. One can even say it the other way round. as Eric Midwinter does. Grace was one of those who defined the Victorian period. 18 He did so by redefining cricket to make it a representative Victorian game-at one plane a violent battle which by common consent had to be played like a genteel, ritualized garden party, at another, a new profession which had to be practised as if it was a pastime. Grace effected this redefinition by giving security and dominance to public sehool cricket. Up to 1865 the Gentlemen, the representative team of English amateur cricketers, were routinely defeated by the Players, the representative team of English professional cricketers, in their annual contests. Grace single-handedly changed the situation. Between 1865 and 1881, for 'the dull monotony of professional victory' he exchanged 'the dull monotony of professional defeat' .19 This finally consolidated the status of cricket as an upper-class game, for the Gentlemen would not have won the battle of Waterloo on the

Traditioll, TrO/fSgrtuion Olfd Norms

9

playing fields of Eton if they had continued to meet annual Waterloos at Lord's and the Oval.20 Grace was the son and brother of well-known cricketers and his ~r was to further populari1.C the idea of •great cricketing families'. He also had a formidable cricket coach in his mother, who monitored his career till the end of her life. Helped by this supportive attitude to cricket in an otherwise authoritarian family, Grace concentrated on the game from an early age and became a dominant figure in English cricket by the time he was an adult. He maintained this dominance till he was fifty-one-some would say till he was sixty-six. Duritig the period he

shaped much of the culture of cricket as we know it. So much so that at least one biographer has said that when Grace died, in a sense cricket died with him.21 1be conflict between cricket as a profession and cricket as a game was .already evide.lt in Grace. He wanted to remain an amateur and a gentleman and also wanted to-and di~e money through the game. He was known for his sportsmanship but he was also suspected of using an oversii.e non-regulation bat. accused of constantly browbeating the umpires, and of downright cheating. Geoffrey Moorhouse admits the contradiction when he says: W .G. Grace ... was not only one of the outstanding mercenaries ofall time, but one of the most conspicuous offenders against that spirit of cricket which became.glorified during his era and which he was supposed to represent. 22

As often happens in reconstructions of the past, through a complex process of displacement, this defiance of the values of cricket came to be associated with others. Thus, Cardus says at one place:

1be Australians brought to our Victorian pastime a terrible realism and cunning .... 'Ibey were not hampered by old custom . . . . 1bere has always been a certain dourness about .Australian cricket, an unabashed will-to-power, with no •may the best side win' nonsense. 23

One is tempted tQ point out that the terrible realism, cunning and will to win w~ ilready there in Orace and in the ·modem cricket' he falbered. 1be Austtalians, being unversed in the slibdeties of English upper-class life, merely managed to lay bare what was supposed to remain latent or could. be openly flaunted only by a larger-than-life,

10 The Tao ofCricut

heroic figure like W.G. Grace. But perhaps because Grace could have made his living by practising his profession more sincerely than he actually did-Grace was a qualified doctor-and perhaps because the culture of the game in his time was not ruled by ~e principles of professional entenainment, .the facade of cricket-as-only-sport could be maintained by Grace. Thus, the now-popular euphemism for unsporting behaviour, scientific and professional cricket, had to be used by a reviewer no less than K.S. Ranjitsinhji in connection with Grace. ··He revolutionized cricket', Ranji said of Grace, 'he turned it from an accomplishment-to a science. • • : 2:Ranji arguably had in mind the Utilitarian wisdom which guided Grace·s cricket; he recognized that Grace had 'made utility the criterion of style·.2~ Neither the Prince nor the subject of his eulogy would have howt;ver admitted that this homage to Jeremy Bentham was a doubleedged one; it subsumed both the new enthusiasm for applied science and the ruthless search for success many Victorians displayed in ocher spheres of life. There was another reason why Grace could get away with his version of amateurism. His biographies give the impression that, despite his majestic style and patriarchal looks, Grace somehow managed to invoke the latent association between cricket and childhood in the Victorian culture. The overt Victorian concept of childhood was oppressive and legitimized much of the exploitation of children in industrializing England. Exported to distant parts of the world by · British imperialism and sanctioned by the new theories of progress which viewed the savage as a child, the Victorian concept of the child established a homology between what was happening to the child and to infancy as a set of qualities in Britain and what was being done by Britain to the savage and to primitivism as a set of qualities abroad. 26 Yet. there had survived in England a more benign, pre-Calvinist, pre-modem concept of childhood in the arts and in leisure time activities like cricket. Grace's personality and cricketing style validated the role of cricket as a means of a controlled return to that ocher childhood, banished to the world of fantasy and myth by an overly socialized, adult consciousness. Cricket was a journey to immahlrity, spontaneity and play, and yet not to nature. It was a temporary return to a more magical domain of culhlre. Grace's lapses from amateurism, thus, were likely to look more like naughtiness than villainy. Gnce in this sense was, to borrow from Norman Mailer's description of boxer Muhammad Ali, the first practising psychologist of cricket.27 There is another way of looking at the issue. On the values ofcricket,

Trudition.

Trun.tRr~ssion

und Nonn.t

11

the Victorians often said, the entire edifice of a Christian civilization could be built. But the structure of the game remained disturbingly pagan to the Victorians. The controlled return to childhood-to play, to under-socialized, non-productive action, to a dependence on the clements-was a part of the paganism. As a result, Victorian cricket had a special place for anyone who by his style admitted the covert paganism of cricket while at the same time demonstrated the immense will-powct required to put the 'lid on the id'-to uphold the game's overt, puritanic Christian self. Occasional mored transgressions by such a person became forgivable ccccntricitics or minor slips in the career of someone waging a titanic struggle. James Morris has drawn a line between the two styles of rulcrship which characterized British ru~ in India at different times-one pagan. 'rich in gusto and a sense of fun', and the other 'stem, efficient and improving'. In Grace's cricket the two styles were simultaneously present and hierarchically ordered, with Christian moral sternness overlying the pagan sense of fun; The titan's aberrations were bound to seem to his admirers a natural outcome of the contradiction between the two styles and a result of the sometimes unavoidable success of paganism in breaking through the puritanic lid. We shall come back to the issue of paganism while dealing with the cricket of Ranjitsinhji later in this book. One can push this argu~nt further if one accepts Grace as the ultimate symbol.ofcricket-as-.wc-havc-known-it. The magic oferickct, one can say, comes from the interplay of two different kinds of magic: (I) the magic of the pre-industrial, pagan world, living with the concepts of an active, powerful nature and a mostly inscrutable destiny shaping human performance and (2) the magic of the expiatory Christian virtues such as stoicism, hard work and fierce concentration, which serve to oodo one's opencss to the first kind of magic. It is the dialectic between the cultural anthropologist.'s magic, oriented to cajoling fate, and the psychoanalyst'·s magic, based on obsessional virtues including undoing. which accounts for much of crickct~s appeal. And a clue to the changing culture of cricket lies in the shift from the pride in the magic of undoing in pre-World-War-II England, which went with a shared ~nccpt of a proper Christian civilization and a Christian will to keep in check one's pagan self, to the embarrassment of many English cricket-lovers when the same obsessional virtues were successfully taken over by post-war cricket, this time in the name of nationalism, science, self-interest and rational choice .



12 Tlv Too o{Crid:lt

The fatal flaw of Victorian character-and of Victorian cricket-might have been first portended in·Grace's cricketing style, but it reached its 1ragic denouement in the bodyline controversy during the English

cricket team's Australian tour in 1932-33. This WIS only one year after Lord Harris, one of the greatest cricket administrators of all time,. had said that cricket WIS 'more free from anything sordid, anything dishonourable, than any game in the world. ' 21 Fifty years after the event, with passions spent and most ofthe actors dead, it is now possible to argue that the controversy was precipitated not only by the personality of Douglas Jardine, as is commonly believed and has been said in a number of books on bodyline, but by the social forces which pushed the stoic, Victorian moralist Jardine towards his nemesis IS a cricketer and a cricket captain. These forces included not only the Cricket establishment.but also the logic of colonial politics, caught in a whirlpool of globaJ recession and feeling increasingly surrounded by restive colonies trying to self-assert. In the final analysis bodyline expressed, as James recognizes, not one person's moral failure but the sickness of an era. 'Bodyline was not an incident, it was not an accident, it was not a temporary aberration. It was the violence and ferocity of our age expressing· itself in cricket. ' 29 Historians of crjcket may never fully admit this but at least one popular movie on the bodyline series has done. The self-hood of Jardine was the slate on which the Victorian personality wroce its inner agonieg. The bodyline strategist was the instrument as well as the mirror. That double role was foreshadowed in Jardine 's childhood and adolescence, which were marked by a number ofcontradictions-between the East and the West, the traditional and the modem, the androgynous and the masculine, and the pagan and the puritanic. But these contradictions in tum must be offset against the awareness that Jardine expressed the deep discomfort of the Victorian personality when facing persons too keen to succeed or too fearful to lose. His own amateurism had a hard professional touch and a will to win; they gave his hostility to the killer instinct in others a sharper edge. It was a classical instance of projection-a marginal Brahmin's fear of contamination and anxiety about loss of purity when living at the peripheries of Brahminism. Throughout his cricketing career Jardine was tu. grapple with these inner tensions, sometimes in public, sometimes in private. 'There was nothing so clear about Jardine's personality', one cricket writer has said, 'as its complexity.'30 It is to this complex self-hood of Douglas Jardine that we shall now briefly tum. Douglas Robert Jardine ( 1900-1958) was born in Malabar Hills in

Truditi1111. Tru11sgre.t...U1111 u1ul Norm.~

13

Bombay at the high noon of empire. He was a Victorian only technically. for Queen Victoria had died within three months of his birth. But. as. his sensitive biographer. Christopher Douglas. points out. . . . in almost every respect-intellect. morality. even appearance--he was a nineteenth century man. His childhood was Victorian, his schooling fiercely so, and it could be argued that the controversial 'modernity' he brought to cricket was in keeping with the Victorian passion for innovation:'• Jardine came from a Scottish family which had virtually settled in India. His grandfather meted out justice to the natives at the Allahabad High Court and his father Malcolm Jardine was a professor of jurisprudence who later became the Advocate General of Bombay. All his life Douglas Jardine was to remain proud of two things--his father, a cricketer of some talent whom he. Douglas, resembled in looks according to available photographs, and the role of the British gentleman outside his own habitat, imperturbable, law-abiding, sporting, patriotic and delivering their just deserts to his less civilized brethren. It is not clear ·if young Douglas showed in his early years the contradictory qualities of his later life-the peculiar combination of shy. tense sensitivity and rigid, harsh, moral arrogance. But we know that he had a lonely childhood, being the only son of his parents, that he was a distant, inscrutable, difficult boy who seldom played with others of his age. Perhaps Jardine also picked up a touch of the cultural anxiety his family lived with. One biographer has mentioned that after two generations in India, the Jardine family was burdened with fears of losing its British identity. The fact that the Jardines were Scottish and had relations. who were in commerce may have given &heir fears aJdcd weight. Perhaps this fear had also something to do with Douglas Jardine's passions later in life, cricket and the classics..Both thrived in Victorian England on an exaggerated concern with cultural tr.tditions ·and on the survival of the unique moral universe which went with classical $tudies and amateur cricket. As was usual with families having such fears, the Jardines sent young Douglas 'home' for his sc~ling when he was nine. After a year's sojourn at St. Andrews in Scotland, where his maternal aunc softened the impact of his separation from his family, Douglas went to a ·preparatory school called Horris Hill in 191Q. It was there that he first began to learn cricket under a retiredlirst-class cricketer. In 1914.

14 T#w. Too of Cricut

Douglas went to Winchestet, an elite school piown for its discipline. emphasis on austerity and manliness, and its reported capacity to produce a 'master race'. 1be atmosphere at Winchester can be sensed from the fact that the school did not call its students •boys': it called them 'men'. The daily routine at the school was gruelling: there was no privacy: and the 'discipline was dreadfully harsh and was often merely licensed sadism. ' 32 lbe lack of privacy and the rigid discipline must have tasted particularly bitter to Jardine, given that he was a shy boy who had experienced for many years the protected. easy life of British children in India, served and brought up by a large number of kindly, often dotiqg, Indian servants having entirely different concepts of discipline and child rearing. One is struck by the remarkable parallels between the life experiences of Jardine and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936 ), another shy, sensitive, British child brought up in India, and one is tempted to guess that the cricketer's ador~tion for the writer-Jardine loved to quote from Kipling on the slightest pretext-had something to do with his exile at an English school and the painful process through which he internalized Victorian and imperial values. Like Kipling. Jardine. too. was forced to hold on to these values with a clear touch of desperation. They were his lifeline to what his English environment handed him down as his true coltural self:' ·' Winchester was, to use a tenn which was to become popular some fifty years later, a total institution.'14 Within its walls. socialization was often an euphemism for regimentation. and disci'pline another name for terror. Unn. Tran:sRrtssitHI and Nt1rni:s

17

cricketing morals. And at·least once, T.G. Vaidyanathan says. Jardine was seriously considered as a possible captain of the Indian team. (Moral choices are easier when morality is backed by pragmatics. Jardine's gOOd behaviour on the cricket fields of India was also helped by his inability to use the bodyline strategy during the series. The culture of Indian cricket at the time was dominated by the princes and slow bowlers were considered sissies. As a result, India had a plethora of fast bowlers who check-mated the English speedsters.) After saying all this. howe~er, one must recognize that India had to remain for Jardine a magical world to which he could only once in a while retreat. For him India was never a serious criticism of his version of the puritanic vinues of cricket. India softened him towards the defeated pagans, not towards the lower-class Christians who could not live up to the austere, stoic codes of a game which symbolized Christian values, nor towards those who 1fere not manly enough and asked for respite or cried off from .battle out of cowardice. It was .conformity to rules which brought to a head the bodyline conflict, and the conflict had to come to a head in someone whose allegiance to the Christian vinues was mixed. Jardine was puritanic with a vengeance because he brought to his puritanic austerity the fanaticism of one who, to.start with, was somewhat marginal to it. His childhood memory of a more relaxed way of life had never quite died. Jardine had to fanatically reject the pagan self of cricket~ he had to fight its dangerous, haunting enchantment within.

The establishments at Lords and at Whitehall took advantage of these inner tensions of a moralist. When they subsequently retreated and made a scapegoat out of him, it was partly because of the anxieties and anger he aroused by the directness of his style. He made things too obvious, and for those in power that was not cricket. That is why they first supported and then .banished him from cricket. Otherwise, not merely the cricket authorities of England but even many English cricket lovers would have loved to win tests with him. After all, even the Daily Worker Crickei Handbook ( 1949), distraught at the Australian ability tQ knock the stuffing out of England, once bemoaned the absence of men like Jardine.41 Perhaps the final word on the war-affectedWinchester boy was said by Wisden when it wrote in the obituary of Jardine's father M.R. Jardine:

His son, D.R. Jardine, captained England during the Australian tour of 1932-33 when the Ashes were reco.vered in the series of

18 Tlw Tao ofCriC'ut

five matches made nolable by the •bodyline' descripcion of specially fast bowling, introduced in a manner since copied by Australian teams without objection by England or adverzcriticism.42

The days of cricket-as-warfare have finally made Jardine a nonnal captain, even if they have done so retrospectively,.For his novel on the bodyline series, published in 1983, Paul Wheeler has invented a conversation among Australian players in which they wish that Jardine was their captain and express the awareness that the 'J~ine approach' was going to be the rule rather than the exception in cricket.43 Life hu anticipated fiction in this i'nstance. Many cricketers with the right strength of the killer instinct in them, like the great West Indian player George Headley. had already declared that they would have loved to play under Jardine.44 When they say this, they do not have in mind the sense of moral and intellectual superiority the shy, touchy, fiercely patriotic, Scottish boy projected to cover up his uncertainties; they have in mind Jardine's proven capacity to deliver results in the form of victories, through efficient, disciplined ruthlessness. Some of therri like the Daily Worker and Headley are even willing to forget in this connection that the wog-hatingJardine's ultimate inspiration was the colonial theory of dominance. It is in fact possible to argue today that if Jardine's was ultimately a pathology of normality, he at least did not justify himself as self-confidently as has the culture of modem cricket since justified him.

• Obviously, Grace was not the only cricketer to live with the inner conflicts of cricket. Nor was Jardine the only one to push to pathological conclusion Grace's self-definition as a sponsman. There were other cricketers who lived with the same ghosts less conspicuously. It is more .imp0nant to note that, already in Grace's time, there was a growing band of crick~ters who had quietly and successfully internalized the new legitimizing principles of the game. Thus. we are told that even in the golden age of cricket, much of the chivalry in test matches came from the lowly Australians.~~The English evidently had already learnt to blend their sportsmanship with science. However. even as late as the inter-war years. even as an Oxford man was setting new standards of unsponing behaviour by guiding the bodyline strategy of the MCC

TraditiM, TratUK"UiOll t:11td Nonm

19

team in Australia, in the citadels of culture of lhe English gentry like Oxford and Cambridge Universities. the traditional standards ofsportsmanship were still probably being maintained.46 I have explained the contradiction between amateunsm and professionalism as part ofa larger cultural process. But it was part ofa politics, too. Brookes has identified the years betwee11 1873 and 1962 as the period during which the social stratification between gentlemanly amateurs and professional players crystallized and then finally b.roke down."' 7 He has traced the stratification to the growing partiCipation of working class. cricketers in county matches in Engl.and towards the middle of the nineteenth century. It wa.~ to keep these cricketers at bay thilt ~ cultural hierarehy between the Gentlemen and the J>tayers evolved in cricket. The class discrimination in cricket legitimized the cla~s discrimination in society by ranking sportsmanship, individuality and flair, report~ly the qualities of the gentlemanly amateur, higher than cPl11petitiveness (defined as an over-eagemess to win); application and consistency. all reportedly the qualities of the professional player. Using a distorted version of Hannah Arendt's famous classification. one can say that while the amateur was expected to oscillate between work and action, the professional was expected to do so between labour and work.411 James describes the differences even better. The professional 's style is the one in which Bradman usually batted and

'accumulated' his runs: the amateu(s is the one in which he only rarely allowed himself to bat but, by his own admission, would have always liked to have batted..w Cricket thereby epitomized the basic problem-the fatal flaw of character-in the Victorian personality. The Victorian had to see the lower classes as carriers of those 'vulgar' or 'diny' modem qualities which allowed the upper classes to uphold the traditional vinues and yet enjoy the benefits of modernity. Put another way, the Victorian wanted to have the advantages of r~alpolitik while being above r~alpolitik. England had to win its international matches in a game as unpredictable as cricket and gentlemanIy quaIities were not sufficient for that. But the victories had to be legitimate and appear as incidental products of moral and skilful play. The way the culture of English cricket handled this prohlem was no different from the way the culture of British politics handled it. The gentlemen cricketers, one cricket writer says. used and tteated professional players as their dogs;'°the latter did the dirty work of their social superiors who could then condemn the di.rtiness of the enterprise and sit back and enjoy themselves. Thus, the Jardines could talk of 'leg theory' when they meant 'bodyline' in their crisp upper-

20

Tit~ Tao of Cricut

class accents; the Larwoods from the wortcing classes had to fell enemies silently, without self-justification. Time may not take revenge but it can over-correct. The professional in all fields, not only cricket, was to truly have his day in the West when in the name of competition, consistency, application and science, within three decades after the demise of amateurism, traits such as competitiveness, organization, technicism, and rtalpolitik were to be ranked over all other human qualities. In cricket that open, full-scale professionalization ofthe game, however, was to come much later, after World War II in fact. It was only in the 1970s that the great Indian cricket commentator A.F.S. Talyarkhan bluntly said that cricket was a great nineteenth century game which was already dead, echoing that other sensitive commentator on cricket in our tiines, C.L.R. James.~• And only in the eighties has an Indian systems analyst, collaborating appropriately enough with another Indian settled in the United States, devised an Clectronic system to eliminate controversies over bat-and-pad catches and lbw appeals.~2 He has sensed that the days of sportsmanship are finally' over. One need not any more pay it any lip service even hypocritically or ritually.

Tlw Slrrletlln of Fate To understand the logic of this development, one must identify the distinctiveness of cricket for those who neither play the game nor take any interestjn it. Cricket is played between two teams ofeleven players. One team goes out to bat two at a time, tum by tum, facing two bowlers from among the opponents while the rest of the opposition is out in the ·field, trying to help the bowlers send the batsmen back to the pavilion. Thus, there is no.situation when all the twenty-two players are in the field at the same time. The weather and the playing ground, for instance, affect the two reams differently. So does the local environment and food. The latter may seem an afterthought but only recently, in 1986, the Indian cricket team in England grumbled about their food in a tone which suggested that all English food was an attempt to poison them. And every reader of cricket books knows of the English fast bowler in Lord Tennys0n's team who, when he fiercely ran down to bowl to an Indian batsman in a match ma small Indian city in 1937' had to run pasl ·the cringing batsman straight to the toilet in the pavilion. All this is in sharp contrast to games .like football and hockey in which environmental factors are roughly the same for the two-teams, as a,result of which the 'true' playing skills of the teams are revealed in a competitive situation and are mostly reflected 'in the results of matches.

Tradition. Trqug"uion Md NOf'rlU

21

Cricket is not like baseball either. contrary to the conunon American belief that cricket is a slower version of baseball and the F.nglish belief that baseball is an idiot child of cricket. Bascb8ll. too. equaliz.es the weights for both teams more thoroughly than cricket can ever hope to

.doY To put it sharply. fate is the first identifier of cricket. Even before he has learnt to bat. bowl or field. the cricketer must learn, self-consciously or otherwise. how to cope with fate. how to confront or cajole it or. if necessary. yield to iL Not &hat he has to tum a fatalist. But he has to learn the dialectic that is natural to many apparently fatalistic traditions; he has to learn to maintain an inner balance by being simultaneously a firm believer in fate while all the while acting u if it did not exist. The apparent slowness of cricket is also a pan of the game. In international matches lasting five days. each day from morning to evening. the slowness immediately opens up possibilities which it cannot in other games. For instance. the duration ofa test niatch, lasting up ro thirty-three hours and even then often ending in a draw. would tax the patience of most peoples except the Gita-devouring ahistorical Indians. who continue to try to see it as pleasunble and as an epitome of desireless, Jeannie life; the savage, frolicksome West Indians, allegedly innocent of the idea of the productive use of time; and England's antiquated Victorian gentry, still trying to see cricket both as pleasurable and as a Calvinist morill lesson. Above all. the slowness of cricket. the absence of hurly burly, as Cardus puts it,.allows time for character to reveal itself. There are games which are better than cricket as games. Cardus adds. but cricket is distinctive in that in it we 'remember not the scores and the results in after years; it is the men who remain in our minds, in our imaginatioo. '54 In such a game. long-tenn strategy, morale, and span of concentration have immensely im~t roles. Especially as the odds are not equalized for the two teams. One has to learn to judge a player or a team on its ability to cross different and random sets of hurdles and on its ability to take advantage of different and random sets of opportunities. In this respect, in top-class cricket. when two teams engage each other most intensely, the confrontation is not between the teams at all. The teams and the players play against their respective fates. In true cricket. one incidentally wins against one's opponent; one mostly wins against one's fate. That is why a drawn match can be such an enriching. exciting result in traditional cricket. Fate is too formidable an opponent for a good draw to go unappreciated. That is why the Indians, Pakistanis and

22 Tlte Too ofCririet

r..

Sri Lankans. who have a parer cultural respect for haw also usually shown a gieater tolerance for draws. I have said that in cricket judgement on quality bu to be ~ on die ability of a player or a·team to cross nndom hurdles and make die most of set of random situations over a long period of time in styl~ some may say. ritualii.ed-form. It is. po15ible thar the use of the wont 'random• is not fully justified. There can be statistical tendencies even stochastic processes--in each situation which could be idenlified by the shrewd cricketer on the basis of past experience. his knowledge of.the opposing side and the playing c00diti°"5. Yet. Q11 the whole. it is a random combination ofopposition, weather. form and team work that he encounters. For in5tance, the i11ferior team may have the chance to bat through perfect weather on a pitch favouring the balsmen and. then. the better team may have to play on a panly-rain-sodden pitch or in a heavy atmosphere where the ball swings fabulously. Because the pme is played in sequence, the effects of the weather are not the same on die two sides, as in the case of, say, hockey or tennis. Fate or chance plays a third crucial role in the success or failure of one of the main skills involved in play: batting. The bowler usually his some scope to correct or improve his play or change his style. He learns from ball to ball. If he does not or if it is one of his bad days, he cm be taken off by his captain after a few overs. The batsman gets exactly two chances in the two iMings, unless he is lucky and is given additional chances by the fielding side or by the umpire. Officially, he has one life and the possibility of a reincarnation, as philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi puts it, in the second innings. In this respect, the world of the batsman differs fundamentally from that of the bowler. The bowler at worst can be belted badly by the batsman for an over or two, as happened with the Glamorgan bowler, ~.A. Nash, who was hit for six sixes in an over by Garfield Sobers in 1968. But it is not possible for this to go on. No bowler is likely to be continued after being hit for thirty-six runs in an over by a batsman. In other words, abowlercan correct himself. If he cannot and is too erratic, he can be rested. The best batsman in the world on the other hand. if he makes a mis*, can be out on the first ball and has no chance of correcting his play or changing his style at a low cost. This probably accounts for the impression that cricket is basically a batsman's game; he is the'one who confronts fate most directly and dramatically. That laeit awareness may be the reason why a great majority of the cricketers knighted until now have been batsmen. 5~ Fate intervenes in many ways in cricket. The element of chance in

TraditiOfl, Trt11U1rUliolt llltd Nonru

23

.,_,..,!!hip cm be offset against the role of the fielders, be they of one's own side or of the oppolition. If you arc a bQwler, a team-mate mnding II slip or behind the wicket can let you down. If you arc a bmllman, a fielder from the opposite side can give you one or more lives. And the mistakes of a fielder are not complllble with that of the goalkeeper in football who may, for instance, dive the wrong side and concede a goal or that of the defender who may err in judgement and score a goal against his own side. While there can be goals against the run of play in football and hockey and while the better team does not always win in these games, there is a strong correlation between the quality of the team and the results of a match. This correlation is much weaker in cricket, it being much more of a collective expression of anmdlic individualism. You may be a good slip-fielder playing against one of the world's weakest baning sides which includes a brilliant balsman and you may just happen to miss a chance given by that very balsman. He may then go on to make a double century to spite you fw1her and to steer his side out of cenain defeat. Fate also intervenes in the form ofall-too-human umpires who have to supervise a game for five whole days. The umpires are generally older men with less than perfect reflexes, eyesight and hearing, and they arc constantly under tension with two keyed up international sides confronting each other. Things are made even more difficult by partisan crowds. The umpires can be subject, without knowing it, to the social pressures to conform, as shown by SOiomon Asch' s famous series of experiments."Yet, one mistake by an umpire can change the complexion ofa game altogether. It may make the difference between a zero and a century for a batsman and between a wickctlcss toil and a record crop of wickets for a bowler. The popular belief is that an impartial umpire making mistakes in, say, five per ccn~ of his judgements throughout a march or a series equalizes the handicaps of the two teams. This is just not true.

Fint of all, apart from a susceptibility to pressure exerted by a partisan crowd, some umpires do have or arc seen to have a certain 'palriotism'. Indian players feel that Sri Lankan umpires are the most biased in the world and at least one Pakistani captain has said that the honour should go to the New Zealanders.~' Many English players believe that in Australia the English team has always played against thirteen Opponents and now most English players arc convinced that Pakistani umpires have been cheating English teams for the last three decades, Olhers say that nationalist bias ~n cricket umpiring is universal. They point out that in I03 years of international cricket contests

24 Tlw Too o/Crid:~t

between England and Australia, the proportion of visiting players given out lbw is 13.1 percent. the corresponding figureforholne·teams being 8.6. The same survey also suggests that Indian umpires are the worst in the world in this respect." (Partisan or not. Indian umpires are not heartless. At least one visiting English team in the 1930s found to its utter amuement that the umpi~s not only jumped in joy when they gave English players out, but also broke into tears when they had to decide against Indian players.~) On the other hand, some retired Indian players say that Indian umpires are so brainwashed by the colonial experience that they bend over backwards to establish their credentials in the eyes of the white man. These players claim that Indian umpires have bceri, if anything, partial towards visiting teams. Edward Docker writes at one place in his history of Indian cricket, Lawry (the Australian test player) was at great pains to praise the umpires in India, which only made their critics howl the louder, alleging that Indian umpires would stoop to any lengths in order to obtain 'paper testimonials from a fair-skinned captain'. A Test umpire, it was pointed out, was paid only 300 rupees for X1'1, hours of duty compared with the 750 rupees received by a Test reserve. No wonder umpires tended to be sycophants; to 'run to Hadlee to take his cap, while remonstrating \\tith Hardikar for the cap not being properly folded' .perties. Though I have discussed theMJ properties elsewhere in some detail. later on in the book. afraid I shall not be able to resist the temptation of making a brief comparison between cricket and popular films in lndia.70 But to return to cricket and Victorian crime fiction. First, like Victorian cricket. Victorian crime fiction reflects the modem faith in three interrelated values: individualism. science-andtechnology, and professionalism. Individuals like W .G. Grace, Ranjitsinhji and C.B. Fry became the heroes offin tk siecle cricket-die first time such figures were produced by the game-because they sccmcd to explore the scope of individual heroism. make the game scientific, and establish a new profession not as mercenaries but as well-paid or unpaid specialists. In this respect they were not different from the mythical heroes of the detective novel such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Peter Wimsey, whose occasional eccentricities. human foibles and ambivalence to science only underwrote their commitment to these values. Unlike cricket, however, Victorian crime fiction does not fully exploit the inner conflicts around these values. It is more concerned about being a proper puzzle.71 As a result, the very structure of these thrillers seems to argue that the problems created by individualism, science and specialization can be handled by larger doses of the same medicine. 72 So the conflicts which exist in cricket at a fundamental level-- ensure, for instance, that once in a while Holmes and Poirot · fail to solve their cases or that the solutions come from the humble uaistants after the super-sleuths have failed. To become cricket. a game must keep open the possibility of the meek inheriting the eanh. The other main antagonist of the detective is the proper professional criminal, also committed to scientific rationality but lacking in common morality. He is someone like Professor James Moriarty, Conan Doyle's concept of the ultimate criminal, the Napoleon of crime.78 It is thjs opposition between the sleuth and his prey which turns the classical thriller, like Victorian cricket. into a morality play-into what I have, following Ernest Becker, called a purifying ritual of victory over evil. One does not have to be a psychologist to rccogni:ze that Moriarty is a double of Sherlock Holmes, even though, unlike R.L. Stevenson's Mr. Hyde who resides within Dr. Jekyll himself, Moriarty apparently has a separate identity. Cenainly MoriMty's physical description, as given by Holmes himself, is very nearly a self-description and his life parallels that of Holmes in many respects.79 To go by a fictional autobiography of Holmes, Moriarty like Holmes is an ascetic bachelor who avoids all association with women. As an academic mathematician, he is the independent discoverer of the fonnula E =m~ and lives with the faith that his devotion to a career of crime will advance the cause of science. Holmes in tum is also shown to have a strong criminal predisposition.'° Most revealing is the fact that many contemporary artists have wiwittingly drawn Moriarty as an older version of Holmcs.11 At some plane, the unconscious of the illustrators has marched the unconscious of the author. But even such doubling does not constitute a fundamental criticism of modem science, for it offers a choice between moral and immoral science, not between science and .morality. Nodling reveals the relationship between science and detection more clearly than the very first case of Chesterton's Father Brown, a Cadlolic priest doublmg as a sleuth.12 Given the history of aruagonism between the church and modem science in European Christendom, the reader expects Father Brown to be less enthusiastic about scientific rationality. But the Father detects the master criminal and genius of disguiscs4 Flambeau, masquerading as a Catholic priest attending an Eucharist Congress, because Flambeau as the fake priest makes the mistake of attacking scientific rationality.

36 Tift Tao o/Cricut

Though he often uses the word 'deduction', Holmes usually employs the method of induction preached by Francis Bacon (1561-1626). The demarcation between data tennsand theory terms is sac~ to Holmes; he considers it a capital offence to theoriz.e before one has data. So the first thing he does is to build an enonnous archive. The data on crimes and criminals amassed by him at his Baker Street apartment would be the envy of any police department. (Though, when described as the coi:e of his scientific method, this -crude empiricism could be an embarrassment to sensitive philosophers of science today, from Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper to Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend). Ev.en Poirot and Wimsey: otherwise so contemptuous of leg-work and laboratory experiments and trying so hard to be different from Holmes, would respect Holmes for his order and his specialist knowledge. They may object to his simple-minded empiricism but not to his -scientific vision, exactly as Holmes would blame Moriarty for misusing modem science but not modem science for being open to such misuse. Victorian crime fiction is above all a homage to the conventional idea of science. The most it allows by way of a criticism of the idea is the admission that science need not always be a matter of modern expertise (as is the case with Holmes and Poirot) but can be part of a premodem vocation (as is:i Father Brown who sees it as an extension of his priestly duty) or of.folk traditions (as in Christie's spinsterish, apparently plain Jane Marple, who uses her experience of village life and her 'natural' shrewdness to solve crimes). Finally, in the classical Victorian crime story, detection is mostly a chess-like game of pure skill. As is usual in such games, the sleuth must prove himself by showing results every time. It is a game in which the quality of the play·is judged only by its results, howsoever hard the. author may try to give the style of detection some importance in the story. All the four authors mentioned, -especially Chesterton and Sayers, write with elegance and tty to give their heroes identifiable personalities. Christie tries even more desperately to make her hero exotic. But there is something in the nature ofdetection which perforce emf>hasiz.esthe end-means priority over the means-end priority. Detectioo, all said, is technol0gy-as-science; and though the detective may speak of the beauty of order and systematics, as Poirot ritually does while investigating a case, it is the order and systematics of Thomas :Edison, not Max Planck. f\t this point. the problems of scientism and professionalism converge. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street was not only the world's first scientific detective, he was also lhe world's first full-time, consulting

Thomu

Traditiofl, TrtUUgru1ioll and Norwu

37

detective, as the title of one of bis fictional biographies puts iL13To hint at the cost that had to be paid fOJ' this powerful mixture of scientific rationality and professionalism, Conan Doyle not merely gave Holmea the personality of an eccentric scientist, he made Holmes hostile to and uneasy with human emotions and relations. But this subtle comment on modem science and technical expertise was not well-developed and it was missed by most readers. Nor did readers notice that once Holmes retired from his work to live in the country and keep bees, he began to toy with the idea of writing a textbook tided, of all things, The Whole Ar( ofDtttction. As in the case of science officer Spock in the American TV serial Star Trtk, a popular fictionai hero ·with a quasi-Victorian personality, the affectless cognition and obsessively logical praxis of Holmes seemed to contribute to his appeal.14 Conan Doyle did not forgive this lapse on the part of his readers and some of his chagrin rubbed offon Holmes. As the popularity of Holmes ~. Conan Doyle, practising mystic and critic of science, developed a deep, homicidal ambivalence towards his brain-child. He tried to kill off Holmes in one of his stories and, then, under public pressure, reluctantly resunected him in a subseqlient story. In what Ivan lllich calls the age ofdisabling professions, it is not easy to convey the romantic appeal which the idea ofa brand new profession once conveyed. But for that very reason, in the non-modem world facing the challenge of an Qver-professiOnatized modem sector, the simple faith in professionalis~ of Victorian crime writers is unlikely to be attractive. This does not make their genre an inferior mode of selfexpression in the popular culture. It merely allows one to guess why the genre, though a product of the same culture which nurtured cricket, has not been able to satisfy the same cultural needs cricket does. U..16 ofCulptl/IUlq One of the cultural attractions of cricket in India is the moral universe that it invokes and sustains. Within the universe there is both a hierarchy ·of norms and a challenge to close moral options in a situation of openended moral chOices. Let us first tum to the subject of hierarchy. The over-arching value, which gives structure to many of the higherorder norms. including conventions or folk-".Vilys, of cricket, and connects the two kinds of norms which face the cricketer-the traditional and the rational-legal-is sportsmanship, a word the British, especially the Victorians, particularly made their own and, then, exported to the rest of the world.8~ Sportsmansh~p does not preclude competition or even aggressive competition, ·but sets limits on it,

38 Tlte Tao ofCricUt

mainly by overtly valuing an unsporting victory less than a sporting defeat. Hence the traditional ordering of perfonnance in the culture of cricket: Sporting

victory

>

Sporting . > defeat

Unsporting > victory

Unsporting defeat

It is as if the culture of cricket was ambivalent towards competition and perfonnance, and sought to contain the ambivalence by maintaining the Hlusion that success was not.the goal of cricket; sportsmanship was. Cricket in its purest fonn can be seen as either a display of sportsmanship through the instrumentality of competition and perfonnance, or as a display of playful competition and playful perfonnancc in which the playfulness of the exercise is made clear through sportsmanship. 'The game thus reverses the means-ends priorities of modem life which makes sportsmanship the instrument and serious competition and success the goal. This illusion of cricket-and this attempt to sustain a hierarchy of values to defy modernity-is of course endorsed by English usage. Contrary to what I have said earlier in this book, in a limited sense the phrase 'it's not cricket' can be read as a synecdoche; a part (cricket) does sometimes stand for the whole (sportsmanship). I hope I have not given the impression that there was no one-upmanship or gamesmanship in traditional· cricket. Of course there was. But it was gamesmanship in Stephen Potter's sense,11t>not in the sense in which the tennis used by most modem stewards of the game, by the new breed of cricketers, and by the critics speaking of professionalism and killer instinct. It was the gamesmanship of W.G. Grace, not .She amoral, Machiavellianism of bodyline or the theatrical. perhaps partly feigned, blood-lust of Jeff Thomson. At its best, the traditional gamesmanship in cricket is expressed the way Mike Brearley describes an unnoticed, unspoken encounter which once took place between him. when he was baning. and the Indian spinner E.A.S. Prasanna.K¥ At its worst, traditional gamesmanship tak~s advantage of the sporting spirit and allegiance to i\onns in others-and one's own partial commitment to the nonns-to advance the cause of individual or team success. But it still presumes an overall culture of sportsmanship. In fact, without that presumption. Potter's gamesmanship and Grace's moral elasticity could not work.KM Gamesmanship cannot work with a person iike Dennis Lillee who bluntly says. ·1 try to hit a batsman" in the rib-cage when I bowl a

purposeful bouncer and I want it to hun so much that the ballllDan doesn't want to face me any more.' Nor can gamesmanship wort with Jeff Thomson who once said 'I ·enjoy hitting a batsman more than getting him out. It does not worry me in the least to see a balsman hurt. rolling around screaming and blood on the pitch. In fact. it makes me happy.' Compare these statements with Harold Larwood's. Purely defensive batting reduced the speed bowler to panting futility. That is why he must drop a few short... intended to intimidate, to unsettle. to test the batsman's combination of skill and nerve.... I have never bowled to injure a man in my life. Frighten them. intimidate them, yes. 119 'There is a clear difference between the two attitudes. one vaguely representing post-war pro.fessionalism. the other its pre-war version. Even if one takes the statements as two forms of public relations, they neally exemplify two distinct cultures of cricket and two different modes of catering to consumer tastes. The one-upmanship in new cricket is increasingly the competitiveness and success-hunt of the culture of modem management and business. In it, as long as you obey the letter of the law. no hold is barred and no quarter given; none is expected either. Cricket is now increasingly a game which could well be taught in an institute of management studies. In the city in which I stay. the Delhi District Cricket Association Limited, looking after cricket in the most entrepreneurial area of India, has sensed this logic. 'The Association is registered not under the Societies• Registration Act but under the Companies' Registration Act. Under such dispensations. the rules are slowly elbowing out the . conventions in cricket. As in the case of a legal system based on the adversary principle (that is. ori the expectation that two lawyers fighting tooth and nail will manage to bring out the truth and the nature of true culpability and, thus, ensure justice), the discovery of the better player or the better team is now assumed to take place only when both sides know how best to extract the maximum advantage out of the existing laws and how best to bend the. laws to one's own advantage. ~ has brought to the centre of the culture of cricket a sub-culture which was once at the periphery and has made cricket look more and more like the majority of modem spons--only slower and duller. The rules, instead of being a part of a frameworlrwithin which the conventions or traditions dominated. have now become supreme. 'The rules now rule by themselves. 'The goal is no longer to display one ~s superior

40 Tlw Too Draw > Defeat Victory> 'Grand' defeat> 'Tame' draw 'Grand' Defeat> 'lnglotious' Victory> 'Tame' draw

42 Tlrt Tao o/Cridtt

The interplay of these orders gave cricket its chann, even though the allegiance to the second and third orders was often hypocritical. But the hypocrisy was an admission that more than one order existed and that homage had to be paid to the values of cricket even if dishonestly. As a matter of fact, it was not all a matter of affectation either. For it was following the second order that Sobers, captaining the West Indians against England at Pon of Spain in 1967-68, declared and lost not only the test but also the series. Many cricket-writers criticized his •amateurishness' but some praised his sponing generosity, too. The criticism was based on the first ordering, \he praise on the second. Amateurs were supposed to ensure the survival of the second.and third orders, professionals were supposed to play according to the first. The game has acquired its new hardness by vinually eliminating the second and third orders.92 There is today a close bond between the idea of monetized entertainment and the idea of the successful competitor. And because in serious cricket, the competition is international, things such as.nationalism, successful performance, spectator appeal, competitiveness and finances are now inextricably intertwined. Traditional cricket could not have carried this heavy a load. We shall return to this theme of sports as a consumable commociity towards the end of this book.

• I have already said that cricket is a projective test. What the Rorschach or the Thematic Apperception Test in clinical psychology achieves by the open-ended stimuli it presents to the patient, cric.ket achieves by the many-faced un~ictability and anarchy it offers to its spectators and expens. No wonder cricket has invited new kinds of projections by a new set of players, spectators and expens who have joined the game during the last hundred years. To grasp the nature of these new •projective bondings' we shall have to turn to responses to the game in colonial and po:;t-colonial India. To set the stage for that we shall, however, have to first understand the way cricket c9njures up dramatic confrontations between good and evil in a ~ituation of moral ambiguity. A compttition between cricket and popular Indian film should allow us some insights into that process. Tiu Di•iMd H•ro The links between cricket, which, apart from Parliament. is India·~ most popular and successfully domesticated cultural impon from the

Tradilion, Tnuugreuion Oltd Norms

43

outside world. and popular films, India's most desired cultural export to the outside world. may seem tenuous. But they are deep and obvious to a large number of Indians.93 In this section I shall explore the nature of these links and the reason why they 190k 50 obvious to so many Indians. Ideally, I should have made this a three-way comparison 11nODg cricket, film and politics. I have been restrained, however, by the awareness that to do justice to politics will require too long a digression. Content~wise, cricket and mass-produced, commercial cinema in India handle similarly a basic psychological ~tradiction.94 The contradiction involves acting not merely as if fate did not exist while knowing all the while that it did. something I have uready acknowledged as the bean of the psychology of cricket, but also its reverse: knowing that fate arbitrates and blurs the lines between good and evil, and yet operating within a moral universe where good and evil are neatly marked out. The formulation may seem too abstruse but, . fortunately, T.G. Vaidyanathan bas brought to my notice a perfect illustration of this inner contradiction in the management of fate. It is a quote from retired Indian wicket-keeper Farokh Engineer's essay in a book published as a tribute to the Indian team after it won the world championship in oneday cricket. Engineer says, If you analyse all these different aspects of one-day cricket-the dos and the don 'ts-India have been doing things right and that is why we have been winning. It is no fluke at all. In one-day competition you need a lot of luck. Indians have certainly been blessed in this respect. They have ridden Jbeir luck and made the most of it. But it has not been luck either. It is skill to a great extent and the boys deserve the credit that is being showered on them ."~ Cricket is an important component of Indian culture preci~ly because it invok.es such. ambivalence towards fate. The ambivalence is shared by virtually every urban, middle class Indian and now perhaps by a majority of society. It is this ambivalence which has prompted many, like freedom fighter and political thinker Ram Manohar Lohia (1910-1967), to denounce cricket as a colonial relic and yet eagerly go to watch test matches.96 The good cricketer knows good cricket from the bad. He also knows that cricketing skills can be learnt. Yet his career line constantly reminds him that it is notall a matter of human effort orpurushakar, that

44 T/w Tao of Cric~t

there is only a thin line between him and the talented cricketer who never fulfils his promise, the team-mate frequently out c:A· fonn .or injury-prone, or the club cricketer eking out his years in obscurity because he never had the right breaks. Similarly with the successful actor or film-maker. What .the cricketer and the film-wallah face so clearly in their careers, a large number of ordinary Indians have begun to face in a less dramatic fBshion in their everyday life under conditions of accelerated social change. Cricket and popular film bridge the lifeexperiences of the cricketer, the film-person and the spectator through a mythic structure reflecting their common concern with fate. In popular film, the concern is often handled by means of a double.97 What is latent in the doubling favoured by the crime writer (in Holmes and Watson, for example) and what is manifest in the inner tensions of the cricketer (he is expected to be Holmes and Watson, the scientist and the critic of science, at the same time) becomes dramatically explicit in film. Doubling is one of the most popular cinematic devices iri India, evidenced by the fact that in the last forty years India has produced~ than one hundred films incorporating a double role for an actor or an actress. 1be figure will be many times more if we use the broader meaning of the double as the other self used by many psychoanalysts.911 Nothing illustrates ihis fascination with the double better than the twenty odd film versions of The Prisoner ofZenda made in India, as opposed to the four or five in English, the original language ofthe novel. One suspects that Otto Rank's interpretation of the double as a defence against theloss of self has something to do with this fascination."" The popular Indi.afl film, being less constrained by traditional modem poetics, has unknowingly· taken upon itself the responsibility of expressing-perhaps also manipulating and containing-the fears and anxieties of the Indian self, threatened today by theconflictingdemands of numerous life-styles and normative frames. The medium provides, as an organi.i.ed fantasy. a partial defence against the deeper schisms produced by social change, probably even against the depersonalization associated with what Erich Fromm used to call low-grade mass schiwphrenia. In The Prisoner of Zenda the double establishes a continuity between .a king and a commoner and, less ovenly, between a commoner-who-is-moral and a king whO-is-less-than-moral. In popular Indian film, the doubles are even more dramatically contiguous and dramatically disjunctive. And they satisfy even more flamboyantly some of the criteria of European romanticism, whjch is supposed to be closely linked to the idea of the double in West. 100 Twins, separated at

Tradition, Transgression Oltd Nonu

45

birth by f~ storm, a ttain accident, or a villain extravagantly villainous---gow up separately and become very different persons. One becomes a police officer, the other a robber;' one grows up tO be an ~· westernized, business tycoon, the other a rustic peasant; one a middle-er were schooled in the •sponing ethos' of Rajkot and both probably went out to the world with ideas of British sportsmanship which they had intemalii.ed at the College. 17 As we shall see later in this section, the paths of the prince-turned-pauper and the •pauper'-turned-prince would again cross, but only indirectly. It was in Rajkumar College that Ranji firlally decided to concentrate on cricket. Perhaps, cricket's ability to combine an oven placidity with coven violence, a collectivist ethos with respect for the loneliness of the individual cricketer, and a gentle pace with moment-to-npnent living touched a chord in one who was no stranger to these .themes in his personal life. The far-sighted principal of the College, Chester Macnaghten, also played an imponant role in the decision, though in a different way. Being an enthusiastic cricketer himself, Macnaghten taught his pupil many of the subtleties of the game and encouraged him to take seriously the an of fielding, by common consent in feudal India the lowliest pan of cricket. Fielding involved manual labour. worse, it oriented that labour to someone else's-the batsman's or the bowler's-glory. In 1889, Ranji went to England to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, a college always open to good scholarship and, in its absence, to good birth and money. Macnaghtcn went with him, presumably to soften the.culture shock of his pupil but also probably to introduce his ~ge to the larger world of cricket. Ranji arrived in England th~year Gandhi did and, like Gandhi, he westernized quickly. Unlike Gan4Jli, however, he managed to combine his westernization with high living. He bought the first car at the University town, hired a handfuJ of servants, took to entenaining lavishly, and talked about the injustice done to him in distant Nawanagar to whoever was willing to listen. At first, he was also drawn towards·liberalism but the affair did not last. And he soon picked up sonic of the imperial attitudes which were to be

such a noticeable feature of his adult self. An indication that he integrated fast was the nickname Smith that he acquired at about this time. The name significantly was to outlast all the other nicknames given to him in England-from Ramsgate Jimmy to Rum-gin-andwhiskey. Ranji actually entered Trinity College only in 1892. Predictably, he

62 Tltt Tao of Cricktt

turned out to be a bad student and Reverend Louis Barisow, his guardian at Cambridge, described him as 'lazy and inesponsible'.a However, Ranji had brushed up his cricket, mostly by employing professional bowlers for a month at a time. His batting had by now · acquired a sharper edge and people had begun to take note of his cricketing talent. However, his chance to play first-class cricket c~ late. There might not have been an official colour bar but there prejudices galore. Specially so, given that he had a rather unorthodox style of play. Thus, at first, Ranji found it difficult to even get into the

were

Cambridge eleven. Even the fact that he had once scm:ed in club cricket three centuries for three teams on the same day did not help. However, he did enter the University team in 1893, reportedly because a visit to India wi,th an unofficial cricket team had widened the horizons of the Cambridge captain. Though at the beginnjng Ranji had to often sit in the pavilion alone and friendless, he gradually made his way into the world of cricket. Within a short time, he also managed to join the county circuit. The world of cribket now opened up for him, and soon he became a household name in England when he scored, along with W .G. Grace, 200 runs in two hours for the MCC. This was in 1894. Ranji made his test debut in 1896 at Old Trafford in Lancashire when he played for England against Australia. He would not have played but for the local cricket authorities. At the time the county which hosted a test had the right to select the home team and Lancashire defied the England selectors, especially tho redoubtable patriarch, the Fourth Lord Harris, by including Ranji in the English eleven. Ranji justified the trust placed in him by scoring a century on debut ( 154 not out in the second innings) and 'saving England from ignominy'. 19 1be feat was vociferously hailed by the Indians as a manerof great national pride and the political leader and social thinker Dadabhai Naoroji called it 'a new discovery of India'.20 It soon became obvious that something of Ranji 's early less-thanscientific training in cricket had· persisted. Clem Hill said, as one is likely to say of Indians when they do well in things like cricket, 'he is more than a batsman; he is a juggler'.21 Others, too, read in Ranji's unonhodoxy .cultural meanings. 1be Daily Telegraph described his cricket as 'an Oriental poem of action'; Alpha of the Plough spoke of his 'Oriental calm'; and Ted WainwrightaffinnedthatRanji had 'never made a Christian sttoke in his life'. 22Cardus was to return to this theme of Oriental magic and 'magical divergence from type' years later. Ranji, he said. 'belonged to the land of Hazlitt's Indian juggleri'. 'A strange light of the kind not seen on English cricket fields shone wbCn

Tlw Wistfal COIMI llltd tlw E~ of tlw Nttdl~ 63

he baaed', Cardus added, •a light out of his own land. a dusky inscrutable light'. 23 A few like Gudiner however diffeml. •Jt is not jugglery or magic; it is simply the perfect econorily of means to an end', he said.24 It was the old deblre between cricket as intuition or an and cricket as science. Apan from magicality, the other feature of Ranji noted by his English fans was his slender build and delicate constitution. Like many Indians, Ranji looked weaker lhan he really was and his freq1.1ent illnesses made him appear even more vulnerable. Both conttibuted to his popularity. That a man of his physique 'so completely mastered the an of batting', nwty like the legendary Grace thoUght was 'simply wonderful'.~ Ranji, they found. relied more on skill and subtlety to give his shots a 'delighted and enhanced momentum'; he did not seem to rely on physical power at all. In this respect, he was to invoke some of the feelings which the Indian spinners were to fovoke half a century afterwards. He made cricket look like an an wholly independent of physical strength and dependent on human will and innovativeness. And he did so using his 'natural' assets: magicality born of insufficient training, physical vulnerability, and what from the English point of view can only be described as effeminacy. In other words, Ranji's appeal and defiance of the textbooks of cricket were not different from Gandhi's appeal and the Gandhian defiance of the textbooks of politics. But what did Ranji himself think of his cricketing style? Did he see himself as a rebel in England and ~fonnist in India-the obverse of Jardine who was a conformist in England and a rebel in India? Did Ranji see himse.lf as a pagan who had successfully integrated or as a successful pagan who had resisted integration? We have no direct means of knowing. However, given that he was votary of the science rather than the an of cricket. given his admiration for the world of Englishgentleman-cricketer, he probably never guessed that the source of his appeal was his cultural distinctiveness, not his successful integration into the mainstream ofcricket and English social life. In fact. there is scattered evidence that the more he was appreciated for his oriental magic, his artistic and androgynous touch, the more he. was convinced that the source of~ appeal was his western manners, scientific spirit, painstaking practice and manliness in cricket. Though he once claimed that the people of his race had a quicker eye and a shorter response time than the English, this biological explanation, as will be soon obvious, did not fit his known views on the future of Indian cricket.26

a



64 Tlw Tao o/CricUI

This in~tation of his self-interpretation is suppor1ed by Ranji'a relationship with his closest friend and adviser, C.B. Fry (1872-19'6). Fry, a brilliant all-rounder in cricket, wu also a record-breaking adlleee. a gifted classics scholar and a proud member of the English gentry. Handsome, sophisticated, politically alen-he could have •stepped straight out of the frieze of the Parthenon', H.S. Altham at one place says-Fry was to remain for Ranji the ultimate symbol of the English ruling class. The two were vinually inseparable and their mutual dependence was only underlined by the occuional storms in their relationship. Having previously worked on another such complicated collaborative relationship between Indian natural genius in mathematics, Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), and a gifted but ptoper, well-trained English mathematician, G .H. Hardy (.18TI-1947), I am tempted to compare the two dyads, in effect functioning as two sets of doubles. 27 In each c~. an Indian with an androgynous touch to bis natural, untrained, under-socialized gifts upset the steady rhythm ofa discipline and opened Up unforeseen possibilities. In each case, their closest friend and private philosopher was a highly accomplished, intellectually gifted, remarkably handsome, English gentleman with a distmctive set of personality traits-sttong homo-erotic tendencies; conflicts centering around narcissism, often handled through elegant, witty conversation compensating for a touch of loneliness and even shyness; an ambivalent fascination with the mysterious and the unscientific that bad to be moderated if not diso~; and an uncanny knack of spotting one's •other' in an Ol''.Sider. In both cases, the Indians showed, within the life-worlds of their English friends, an easy ability to integrate their femininity within their maleness, to have access to their less socialized, primitive selves (what psychoanalysts may call the capacity to regress in an ego-syntonic manner); and the ability to retain their authenticity by maintaining a certain distance from their own public im,age and success. There were fascinating overlaps and contrasts among the early interpersonal environments of the four. Fry and Hardy came from typical Victorian middle class families, patriarchal but with a significant presence of the mother. In Fry's case, there also was parental carelessness if not neglect, and an oppressive early school life of the kind which shaped so much of Rudyard Kipling's and Douglas Judine's personalities. Hornbrook House, the institution to which YOUD& Owles Fry WIS sent, was run by a coupe but WU dominated by the wife, one Mn. Humphrey. She w11 •a ai1t-fooeer who uaumed the

an

TM Wi#JW C--1 tlltd tlw £~ ~- Nm6 65

popoitionl .of.a

P.at.for the 1arified pupils in ber.chuge'.21 Her

~~style, sbmpened by her special dislike for young awtes,

mm4c Hm:nbrook lfowie a house of misery for him. ~gh Fry lata claimed lhat.Mn. Hl,ID'lphrey was the only woman

he bad ever feared. the relationship probably reflected deeper continui~ tics. It was on his mother's complaint that·his father had sent Charles to the Humphreys. And it was~ mother, Fry in later life hinted. who knew less about the son's concerns and miseries in the school The distance between the mocher and the son must have been given a peculiar ambivalent rouch by the fact that, like Ranji 's mocher, Fry's too showed a certain receptivity to the mystical ~ unworldly. Fry wu to show.the same receptivity from an early age and it was to organize an important part of his adult life which often involved walking on the edges of sanity. Ranji and Ramanujan came from typical Hindu, upper caste houleholds-ovenly patriarchal but with a clear substratum of matriarchy and, in both cases, subtly dominated by the presence ·of formidable ~n. seemingly having direct access to the occult and direct control ~the fates of their s.ons. But the domination was of a subtler kind in lt-e case of the Indians. 'It was mediated by a more open-ended, easy style of child-rearing as well as by the existence of a legitimate cultural SpllCC for the interplay between femininity, magicality and the mysteries of the cosmos. Despite the conunon feaaures, the doubles differed in two important aespects. There was· fint of all the political fact that Ramanujan and Hardy were demonstratively anti-imperial while Ranji and Fry were blalantly imperial. And secondly, there was the psychological fact that ~ was an ultra-positivist and, after a brief enchantment with Ramanujan's exotic quasi-mystical self, reverted to interpreting his Indian friend entirely in terms of the dominant categories of his culture. Ramanujan. on the other hand, lived out his life more or less oblivious . of these categories, complete and fulfilled within his traditional, Brahminic self. In the case of the cricketers, the roles were reversed. Ranji publicly swore by the western way of life but Fry showed greater sensitivity and ·openness to Ranji's cultural self. He might have been a pupil of Ranji in