Main ne maana ki kuchh nahin Ghalib
Muft haat aye to bura kya hai?
Muft haat aye to bura kya hai?
In these darkest of days for
Indian cricket fans, I had the pleasure of reading two outstanding books about
Indian cricket. Pundits From Pakistan, by Rahul Bhattacharya (Pan Macmillan,
2005, 352 pages), is older than the date suggests. The other – Samir
Chopra’s Brave New Pitch (Harper
Collins, 2012, 224 pages) – is very contemporary indeed. That time-lag between
the two publications is actually very apt, because Pundits From Pakistan was written when Indian cricket was soaring. India had beaten
England in England, Australia at home, tied Australia in Australia, and then
beaten Pakistan in Pakistan. Chopra’s book, on the other hand, has come after
an altogether pyrrhic World Cup victory, in the midst of the dead embers of
Test cricket in India. The two books are, in that sense, eloquent bookends.
These are very different volumes,
and Bhattacharya’s book fits more easily into the template of ‘good cricket
literature.’ The writing is clunky in places, but there is nevertheless a touch
of Cardus in how the author imagines the game: that unmistakable touch of nostalgia,
in which even the present comes to be seen through a sepia curtain of
late-afternoon sunshine, or filtered through the crackle of the radio on a cold
winter morning. Without that nostalgia, that slight confusion between being
awake and dreaming, cricket would not be worth following or even playing.
The trick, when writing in that
spirit, is to avoid slipping into the maudlin even as the writer teeters on the
edge of sentimentality. Bhattacharya pulls it off. He knows that he is writing
at a peculiar moment in the history of Indian cricket: the near-miraculous
convergence of Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman, Ganguly, Sehwag, Kumble and Harbhajan,
the dizzying promise of Irfan Pathan, the presence of a talented and nearly inexhaustible
supporting cast in Zaheer, Balaji, Nehra, Agarkar, Shiv Sundar Das, Wasim
Jaffer and Mohammed Kaif. He knows that Ganguly’s captaincy and John Wright’s coaching
has added something unprecedented to the mix: a magic cocktail of swagger,
cool-headedness and professionalism. And he knows that it will not last
forever. He is out, therefore, to relish the meal while it lasts. In the
process, he treats the reader to the high drama of the matches as well as the throwaway
details of a great team on tour: the small encounters in the hotel lobbies and dressing
rooms.
The other star of Bhattacharya’s
narrative is Pakistan. Bhattacharya is quite aware that he is writing about a
team that has lost its superstars: this is Pakistan without Waqar Younis and
Wasim Akram, to say nothing of Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and Zaheer Abbas. He
compensates by giving us intimate portraits of ‘lesser’ players like Mohammed
Sami and Danish Kaneria, and a grand little epic of Inzamam-ul-Haq, who sinks slowly over the
course of the series like the Titanic after a collision with a floating
mountain of halwa. Bhattacharya’s admiration and affection for the Pakistan
captain are palpable. But just as importantly, the retired stars – the Javeds
and Imrans – keep intruding into the pages, hotel lobbies and interviews. They
are gone and have never gone away: in the best traditions of cricket, the past
hovers over the present like a stubborn ghost, imparting continuity between
childhood and middle age, supplying that old crackling-radio feeling.
Then there is Pakistan the
country, beyond the dressing room. Here, we find another flowering of the stubbornly
Romantic nature of cricket writing. Those who follow the sport know that within
the small world of Test-level competition, some relationships and rivalries matter
more than others. The Ashes, for instance, have taken on a distinctly racial
significance: whenever England play Australia, their journalists,
fans, players and administrators behave as if they are engaged in a
holy and altogether superior ritual, floating high above the world of bloody
natives. (The spectacles of Jardine-as-Dracula and Larwood-battering-Woodfull
have been replaced entirely by the image of Flintoff making out with Brett
Lee.) The India-Pakistan cricket relationship is more fraught, being subject to
the actual hostility between the two countries, frequently interrupted sporting
ties, the fulminations of Maharashtrian fascists and a beheading or two. It has, nevertheless, its
own tragic intimacy, at the heart of which is the opportunity to cross the
barbed-wire fence and discover a lost home and a lost half on the other side.
Bhattacharya describes banners reading “One Blood” being held up by the crowd.
He reminds us of the stitched-together flags and the faces painted in the
colors of both countries. In the narratives of spontaneous hospitality and
late-night feasts in the bazaars of Lahore, the stories of visas granted and
denied, there is the Romantic longing for wholeness that is at the very heart of
modern Indian and Pakistani identity; it is more meaningful than victory or
defeat in cricket but is, of course, more enjoyable when you win.
This brings me to Samir Chopra’s
book, which comes at a time when the victories have not only dried up, but
quite possibly become extinct. Fittingly, then, whereas Bhattacharya speaks to
the fan in a poetry of sorts, Chopra delivers a cold blast of prose in an age
when considerations of blood and bootleg Scotch have been overshadowed entirely
by dollars and cents. Less than a decade separates the two books and
situations, but Brave New
Pitch comes to us in the era of the Indian Premier League. It is largely
about the IPL and the giant shadow it has cast upon the game. When Chopra began
writing the book, the IPL had taken shape but Indian cricket had not yet gone
to pieces. When he made the final revisions, he had to account for that
sequence of eight defeats in a row against England and Australia. To his
credit, he wove that disaster adroitly into his analysis. But his book
also makes clear that there is no longer room in Indian cricket for romance of
the Cardus-meets-Ghalib variety.
Coming between the starting and
the finishing of the book, the Indian disasters in England and Australia (and
since then, at home) have divided Brave
New Pitch into two major themes. One is an issue that has been a part of
cricket since the nineteenth century: fair compensation for players. Even more
powerfully than Packer and World Series Cricket, the IPL has brought this issue
to the forefront, by generating a conflict between the club that pays extremely
well and the country that makes moral demands upon the loyalty and identity of
the individual cricketer. There is no need to go into the details of the
conflict here, but it must be pointed out that fans and cricket journalists –
those that have not been bought off by the BCCI, at any rate – have not always
been kind to players who have refused to ignore the money on offer at the IPL.
Chopra, however, is unequivocal in his sympathy for the players, who are, he
points out, entitled to the same financial security that other professionals
and workers expect for themselves. In fact, one of the great strengths of the
book is that it looks at the current tensions within Indian and world cricket through
a clear, historical lens of labor relations. Chopra’s knowledge of the
economics of American professional sports comes in very handy here, providing
his analysis with an easy cosmopolitanism that is rare in the insular worlds of
sports history.
The other main theme of Brave New Pitch – the undeniable damage
done by the IPL to the quality and international competitiveness of Indian
cricket – is somewhat at odds with the author’s inclination to see the IPL as a
good thing for Indian cricketers. That, however, is not so much an
inconsistency in the analysis as a reflection of the twisted and unresolved situation
within the administration of the sport in India (and to some extent, the world).
Chopra is aware that the initial hopes – which he shared – that the IPL could
be accommodated into a reasonable calendar of international cricket, while
generating money, security, entertainment and a higher standard of play, have
not worked out. He insightfully explains why this has been the case: the naked
conflicts of interest between the ownership of IPL teams and the management of the BCCI (which are
often in the hands of the same people), and the growth of what he calls India's ‘gold-rush
economy,’ in which the primary impulse of entrepreneur-administrators is to
utilize new money-making opportunities to get very rich very quickly, with
minimal regulation, oversight or judicial intervention. He acknowledges that
the changed demographics of the Indian crowd have partially vacated the old
Romantic mansion of cricket, but points out that even the post-Romantic IPL-era
crowd has been shortchanged by the mafia of cricket bosses and corporate
bean-counters.
Like other thoughtful
commentators on Indian cricket, Chopra has very good ideas about ‘what needs to be
done’: changes in the structure of domestic First Class cricket, infrastructural
and professional support for the game at the local level, adjustments in the
format of Test and one-day cricket, and so on. One may or may not agree with
the particular suggestions he makes. What is more pertinent is the author’s
perceptible pessimism about whether sensible reforms, transparency and accountability
can be implemented in the current economic and bureaucratic environment. The
game has passed from the hands of players and dreamers – however tenuous their
grasp may have been in the past – and now resides entirely with those who are
determined to suck it dry until it is dead, and then move on.
No review is complete without
some nitpicking, and I do have a nit to pick: Chopra wastes far too much printer’s
ink on the issue of popularizing cricket beyond its historical base in the
Commonwealth countries. This has recently been a favorite pipedream of cricket
writers as well as a pet project of the ICC. Planning for the return of cricket
to America, beyond the enclaves of Commonwealth expats, is not a serious use of
anybody’s time. Nor, one might add, is it important that the ‘average American’
in Philadelphia and elsewhere play cricket. All sports are played in specific
historical contexts, and cricket has its own context and its geography. The
fantasy of expansion is unnecessary, especially when there are real problems to
address.
All things considered, however,
Chopra has written one of the most thought-provoking and knowledgeable cricket
books to be published in recent years. He writes with a keen sense of history:
not just the history of the game, but that of the world in which the game is
played. That alone places him head and shoulders above most other contemporary cricket
writers: above, for instance, Gideon Haigh, who writes with an encyclopedic
knowledge of the sport but little sensitivity to the political and social realities
that motivate those who follow the game. In having an ‘ear’ for these
realities, Chopra is not so far removed from Bhattacharya, in spite of the
prosaic tone of his writing.
February 5, 2013
