Indian cricket—more than a game

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2004 by Alex Ninian

WHAT is it that makes people think of their nation as a nation? It is a question to which politicians, philosophers, sociologists, democrats and dictators have been applying their minds for centuries and have never come up with anything like simple answers. The state is easier to think about than the nation, because the state is defined by boundaries of geography, citizenship and law and is sometimes simplified down to an entity which can issue of a few sheets of paper in the form of a passport.

But the concept of a nation is infinitely more arcane to the point of mystifying. The state has borders, has laws for those who live within them, levies taxes, provides benefits, raises armies. But what of the nation of Scots who live in England but are still Scottish, the Irish who live in, and may be naturalised in, the U.S., but are still Irish, the Indians in Europe or the U.S.? What goes through their heads when they think about the subject? Or what goes through their emotions without thinking about it? Sophisticates may point to history and religion but Arabs are more than Muslims, Indians are more than (and may not even be) Hindus.

To ordinary people it may be a spoken accent, a dish, the sound of a sitar or a bagpipe, or the colour of a rugby shirt. Or, in the case of India, a cricket team.

When India play a test match, especially against Pakistan or England, there can be very few of the billion in India or the countless millions around the world who do not follow every day, every innings, if not every session of play. Cricket crosses religion and geography--Tamils in Chennai share their passion with Marwaris in Rajasthan, Sikhs in Amritsar with Muslims in Hyderabad. It is the same with classes, tribes and castes--businessmen in Mumbai, labourers in paddy fields, or Dalits scrubbing floors will either know, or want to know, the latest score.

A country which has over one billion people and which stretches over a thousand miles from north to south and nearly as far from east to west needs all it can get in the way of pulling people together. There is a President, a Prime Minister and a Parliament, of course, along with national armed forces and (at least putatively) a common enemy, but with 17 major languages, each spoken by a population larger than Britain, 5,000 gods and six main religions, these institutions have their work cut out to make common ground for so many diverse and competing and even hostile elements.

Cricket, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is more than any other, the most common ground for all the multiform and opposing elements of the global Indian nation. My own personal experience of the integrating power of cricket takes in the mid-1980s when Ravi Shastri was the second man in first class cricket history to hit six consecutive sixes off one over. (Gary Sobers had been the first). Within hours, gigantic posters, metres high and metres wide, were being posted up on hoardings in cities from Punjab to Tamil Nadu, from Gujarat to West Bengal and loud speaker vans broadcast the news in the countryside.

Illustrative of the depth of knowledge and sophistication among followers, a letter appeared in the newspaper the following morning. It was from a man who said that he had been present at the Shastri feat as well as at the first feat by Garfield Sobers in Cardiff. He opined that, of the two achievements, Shastri's was just the finer because Sobers did not quite middle the fifth ball!

Bollywood has for decades been one of the few social forces which have, perhaps not deliberately, and maybe even unwittingly, identified India as India and Indians as Indians. The unmistakable themes and colours and sounds of the Bollywood movie have been a talisman which was common not only to the hundreds of millions of Indians in India but to the diaspora of further tens of millions of Indians in Europe, America and the third world. (See Contemporary Review, October 2003.)

Cricket v Bollywood

But now that more than half of the revenues of the film industry come from these overseas paying customers, very basic changes are under way. These overseas residents are becoming more and more Westernised and adopting more and more the tastes of their host countries so that the movie makers back home are making more and more diverse types of film. While diversity and innovation are necessary and commendable, the trend in this direction is taking away one unique element of Indian film--its power to unite. Now that it is finding ways to be more profitable and more international, it is losing the unifying power it once had. And, of course, cricket provides forces which Bollywood never had, including the force of passion.

In Eden Gardens, Calcutta, in 1999 at the first Asian Test Cricket Championship, I saw something of this depth of passion. Tendulkar hustled to get back to his create and put his bat in, but then stumbled in collision with Shoaib Akhtar, and lifted it off the ground just as the throw-in from Nadeen Khan hit the stumps. The umpire, supported by the third, TV, umpire, correctly gave him 'out', but 90,000 spectators disagreed and proceeded to riot until the game was stopped. Tendulkar walked all round the boundary signalling to the crowd that he was correctly 'out' but it did no good and the riot continued until the police emptied the ground. Needless to say, the opponents were Pakistan.