Into the paradise of flannelled fools

The wickets are pitch'd now, and measured the ground; Then they form a large ring, and stand gazing around Since Ajax fought Hector, in sight of all Troy, No contest was seen with such fear and such joy. —From the Cricket Song by Rev Reynell Cotton, for the Hambledon club, circa 18th century With apologies to Rev Cotton, I must begin this piece with a caveat borrowed from Ashish Nandy's excellent treatise, The Tao of Cricket, wherein he writes that cricket is an Indian game invented by the English''.This is not contrived jingoism. The passion for cricket in this country is manic, and that is neither new nor exaggerated. Let me illustrate with an anecdote from Ramchandra Guha's superb book A Corner of A Foreign Field. It concerns Ram Manohar Lohia, the socialist leader whose ``pet hates were Jawaharlal Nehru, the English language and the game of cricket generally in that order''. Lohia held forth to journalists about how cricket stood for empire, and how if we threw out Nehru, the last Englishman to rule India, we could go back to kabaddi. The scribes departed to file their stories. But after they had gone Lohia walked across to the nearest paanwallah, asked for paan, and while chewing it continued: 'Kya Hanif out ho gaya kya?' Why should a game played between 22 flannelled fools, as the cynical G B Shaw saw it, so obsess the mind? After 25 years of writing on the game, I confess to being clueless. Cricket is unique — its logic may be simple, but its grammar is intricate. Moreover, it has an esoteric dimension that is in step with the nitty gritty, making it more than just a sport. In the immortal words of the West Indian writer C L R James, What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?'' No other sport has inspired songs, poetry, philosophy in such volume. In England and Australia, cricket writers have become as legendary as players: Neville Cardus, Alan Ross, John Arlott, Jim Swanton, Ray Robinson to name a few. India has been grossly under-represented in print perhaps because a low literacy level, a poor sense of history and 50 of mixed permitted few such indulgences. Over the last two years, however, there has been a spate of cricket books, and none is a plain vanilla hagiography. But Guha is not convinced that cricket books have a future in India because the real cricket fan in India does not read books — he watches TV''. A pity. Guha's tour de force demands a bigger audience — it stitches the history of India along with that of cricket in the country, and is based on sophisticated research, not sophistry, easy on the ears and extraordinary in its scope. Complementing his book is Boria Majumdar's Twenty Two Yards to Freedom which, in his own words, assesses the role of cricket in national life where it is argued that cricket was a means to cross class barriers''. Majumdar started the book as a Rhodes scholar doing a doctorate on the Social History of Indian Cricket. While Twenty Two Yards may lack the felicity of Guha's prose, it speaks of extensive academic research — he had access to all the BCCI documents — as well as a reporter's inquiring mind and opportunism. For instance, he found Ranjitsinhji's letters in bizarre circumstances. Mariecke Clarke, granddaughter of Ranji's love Mary Holmes, was so impressed by Majumdar at an Oxford seminar, that she handed him the bunch! Rajan Bala's The Covers Are Off purports to be a social history of Indian cricket too, though in fact it is one man's cricketing journey. Bala is perhaps the country's most seasoned cricket writer today, and without doubt the best raconteur. This book is a treat because it is replete with stories that have rarely been documented, even if the hardnosed academics will seek greater veracity. Mario Rodrigues' Batting for The Empire is laudable for its subject, research as well as style. Ranji is such a holy cow that a revisionist view was going to be controversial. But Rodrigues' fact-finding is impeccable, his prose lucid. Rahul Bhattacharya's Pundits From Pakistan on last year's epochal tour across the border has earned rave reviews. Bhattacharya is the new kid on the block, but with a head for history and a heart that still nurses romance for the game. He has a veteran's 'feel' for cricket, a youngster's keen for detail and a beguiling turn of phrase.