AUGUST19, 2019 INDIATODAY 57IN INDIA, TRUE PATRIOTISM AND TRUE
SPORTING WEALTH WILL COME OF AGE ONLY
WHEN SPORTSPERSONS STOP PANDERING TO
STRONGMEN AND POLITICAL LEADERSINDIA ON
THE FIELD
BY RUCHIR JOSHIT
OGETHER, INDIAN CRICKET
AND ITS SUPPORTERS tell us
a lot about the journey our society
has taken over the last hundred odd
years. As Ramachandra Guha’s and
Prashant Kidambi’s books on cricket
history tell us, in the late 19th century,
cricket was a scattered activity in different urban and mofussil
pockets of pre-Partition India. The first Indian clubs were formed
in Bombay, Karachi, Madras and Calcutta and they played among
themselves on inferior, bumpy maidans while the sahebs played in
a parallel world, on the other side of the fence on their (somewhat)
plush green grounds. Around the same time that various Indian
political groups began to challenge the Empire’s unquestioned he-
gemony, Indian teams began to have the occasional game against
the goras. At first the Indian teams usually lost, but gradually the
outcomes began to be less predictable. These matches would have
loud crowds of local janata supporting the native teams. A victory
could mean riotous celebrations and the defeat of a desi team, due
to what was perceived as biased umpiring, could lead to just plain
rioting. It was clear that the game was able to excite passions, even
among people who had no access to playing kits, cricketing skills or
proper grounds. Or, perhaps, the game worked like a magnifying
glass, focusing scattered passions into one flaming pinpoint.
The idea of a national team formed at roughly the same time as
the independence movement. The important difference was thatwhile Gandhi and the Congress moved out of
their middle-class enclosures to connect with
the poorest sections of urban and rural India,
organised cricket in India kept looking to the
Maharajas and Nawabs for leadership. How-
ever, unsurprisingly, issues from the country’s
politics kept seeping into the sport. Could Hin-
dus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis and Christians play
in the same team? What would a team weighted
towards upper castes and classes do when the
talent of a player from (what one would now
call) a Dalit background made it impossible to
exclude him? Would the team travel together?
Would they eat together? Would they come
together only on the playing field?
By the end of World War II, there was a
large pool of seriously gifted players in the sub-
continent, a pool from which a properly selected
eleven could challenge any team in the world. A
WAG once said that the chief reason the English
made sure that India was partitioned was that
“a team from a united India would have spelt
the end of all meaningful competition in world
cricket”. Wistful exaggerations aside, cricketing
was among the many intricate networks that
Partition sundered, especially in the north and