Book: A corner of a foreign field
Author: Ramachandra Guha
Price: (Picador, ?20)
Ramachandra Guha, a widely respected Indian historian based in Bangalore, was in the midst of researching a magnum opus on the history of post-colonial India when the idea came to him of writing a history of modern India through the prism of cricket. Picador are still awaiting fulfilment of the original contract but, in the meantime, were happy to indulge Guha's little detour.
Much of the book is devoted to the previously untold story of why Indians started taking to cricket in the mid-Victorian period. The Raj's colonial masters were at best indifferent and at worst contemptuous of natives playing cricket. Indians, they believed, simply lacked the character to play the game.
"Cricket is essentially Anglo-Saxon," wrote James Pycroft in 1851. "Foreigners have rarely imitated us. English settlers everywhere play at cricket; but of no single club have we heard that dieted either with frogs, saur-kraut or macaroni." Pycroft would have been startled to learn that one day, benighted Hindustan would emerge as cricket's undisputed powerhouse, supplying roughly two-thirds of its global revenues.
What was it about cricket that caught the imagination of Queen Victoria's Indian subjects? The answer, suggests Guha, is that it gave Indians an opportunity to better their masters at an endeavour which apparently marked them out as superior-temperament, team spirit, fair play and courage. Cricket was a playing field on which might was not automatically right.
But as cricket started to develop in Bombay in the 1860s and 1870s, the Indian pioneers discovered that their colonisers did not always live up to the virtues which they preached. The first Indian club, set up by the Parsee Zoroastrian community in Bombay, probably the most pro-British section of Indians, met with repeated obstruction from their imperial role models.
The small strip of turf on which the Parsee club played in Bombay's main park was repeatedly torn up by military polo players who refused to consider another venue. Parsee lawyers spent years trying to evict the polo club, deploying subtle arguments about the importance of consistent pitches and evenness of bounce. But fair play proved as elusive in the imperial law courts as it was in the officers' mess. (Ironically, polo comes from Persia, the original home of the Parsees.)
The dispute eventually petered out, but at its height the controversy attracted attention from other Indian communities as a test case of British justice. It is surely unsurprising that the legal battle-with its emphasis on holding the British to their standards-coincided with the first stirrings of India's independence movement.
The Congress party, which was to deliver independence to India in 1947, was founded during the height of the Parsee cricket controversy in the mid-1880s. The first leaders of Congress also sought to hold the British to their standards by demanding the same political treatment as they provided to their own people back home.
But the development of Indian cricket is also a story about communalisation. Once the British had begun regularly to play against Parsee cricket teams, they realised the merits of promoting clubs based on communal identity. Much as Lord Curzon in 1905 divided Bengal into a Muslim east and a Hindu west, successive governors of Bombay made generous grants of prime seafront land to communal cricket clubs.
The Hindus eventually emulated the Parsees, followed by the Muslims. By the early 1900s, the cricket Quadrangular tournament was the most feverishly awaited annual event in Bombay. To the dismay of the increasingly influential Congress party, the entire city came out to cheer for their respective communal teams. Most years the climax was between the Hindus and the Muslims. All attempts, by Congress and others, to reconstitute the Quadrangular along non-communal lines proved futile in the face of overwhelming popular sentiment. Pakistan and India got into the habit of smashing each other for six, decades before the subcontinent was divided.
Guha is too subtle a historian to portray the British in a monochromatic light. It was JG Greig, a British cricketer, who inadvertently sparked lower-caste interest in cricket when he discovered and then promoted the prodigious Palwankar Baloo in the 1890s. Baloo, a wiry untouchable whom Greig requisitioned to provide bowling practice in the nets, was arguably India's greatest ever cricketer. He spun out many first-class batsmen on tours of England, and provided Indian crowds with their first cricketing superhero, says Guha.
But for all his superior talent, the upper-caste Hindu team first denied Baloo access to the pavilion, then, once that was conceded, denied him his proper due for winning matches and finally fought a rearguard action against an untouchable assuming the captaincy of the Hindu side which had clearly been earned on merit.
Baloo was to become the inspiration and biggest hero of BR Ambedkar, leader of India's untouchables in the 1930s and 1940s, who rallied the lower orders against a Congress party that was seen as upper-caste and self-serving. Today, unlike the Nawab of Pataudi and Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, India's princely cricketing legends, Baloo is all but forgotten. And yet it was Baloo who was chiefly responsible for first beating the colonials at their own game.
Indian cricket is today still dominated by the upper and middle castes, although it has long since spread from the state of Maharashtra, of which Bombay is the capital, to most corners of the country. Indeed, in defiance of global trends, cricket has trounced football in those pockets of the country where it had earlier been more popular-notably in the states of West Bengal and Kerala.
As for beating the English at cricket, it still engenders a feeling of particular satisfaction, although nothing like the frenzied passion that greets a victory over Pakistan. Beating the former imperial power has become a more routine event since 1971-when Indira Gandhi turned out to greet the first touring side to win a test match in England.
Indian cricket may now be in the midst of reverse-colonising its original home. The England team today is captained by a man whose father is Indian and who was himself born in Madras. Nasser Hussain is quite clearly from Essex. But on last winter's tour of India, when Hussain was asked whether India's seething crowds intimidated the England team, he said that, on the contrary, India's crowds were exhilarating-in England, your audience often consisted of one man and his dog. British officers re-acquainted Parsees with polo. Might Indians of a future era reintroduce cricket to the English?
