In May, the dominant and divisive Prime Minister Narendra Modi was convincingly re-elected to the second biggest job in the world’s largest democracy. The biggest job is, of course, the captain of the cricket team, a post held by Virat Kohli, whose team is currently competing in the World Cup in England, and has a good chance of triumphing on 14th July at Lord’s.
Though Modi might hold the political power, the 30-year-old Kohli gets all the glory. And, if anything, he exudes even more authority. Ramachandra Guha, the finest historian of the Indian republic and the author of a history of the game in his native country, wrote recently that Kohli has a mesmeric effect on the power-brokers who run the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI): “They worshipped him even more than the Indian cabinet worships Narendra Modi.”
Kohli is the very model of a modern, newly-assertive and economically successful India. His wife is the Bollywood star Anushka Sharma; before their marriage in 2017, he was linked to several different actresses. His image is everywhere. Yet for a man so ubiquitous—even at election time, his many product endorsements meant he stared down from far more billboards than Modi—it is hard to penetrate his carapace. Not many have got past the swagger, typified by one of his leisure pursuits: driving around Mumbai at night: “I love speed. I love cars. That is why I choose to drive when the roads are absolutely empty and then I can relax.”
Rather like Modi, Kohli appears to inspire loyalty and animosity in equal measure in India. Though even his keenest detractors would concede that his brilliance has earned him the right to a certain arrogance, he has yet to become the uniformly venerated figure cut by his predecessor Mahendra Singh Dhoni.
Kohli’s prowess as a player is beyond doubt. The all-time great West Indian batsman Viv Richards recognises in him “a serious passion I used to have.” New Zealand’s Martin Crowe called him “the next chosen one,” adding that he combined the qualities of India’s recent stars: “He exudes the intensity of Rahul [Dravid], the audacity of Virender [Sehwag], and the extraordinary range of Sachin [Tendulkar]. ”
But Kohli is unique because the game has changed so much. He is the first batsman to be a genuine master of three forms of cricket: Test, one-day and T20. In 2018, he became the first cricketer to be awarded the top three International Cricket Council (ICC) awards—Cricketer of the Year, Test Cricketer of the Year and ODI Cricketer of the Year—in a single year. He is the only batsman to average over 50 in Test cricket, one-dayers and T20 simultaneously.
He is especially good when the game is in the balance. Kohli averages an extraordinary 69 in one-day cricket when his team is batting second and chasing a total. Feats like these have led AB De Villiers, the former South African captain, to describe him as “a consummate surgeon at the crease.” Kohli also appears unaffected by taking on the captaincy. After the rather sedate and defensive Dhoni, Kohli is regarded as a captain as he is as a man—too aggressive. Yet it is working. His win ratio in Test cricket is, so far, the best of any Indian captain and his personal record with the bat is stunning. In 74 innings as captain he has scored nearly 4,500 runs at an average of over 64.
India is a vast nation of one billion people, one million politicians and many religions and languages that is united only by two things: the democratic process and cricket. The game is far bigger than any other sport on the subcontinent, and the Indian Premier League (IPL) is vastly lucrative. (Kohli captains the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the IPL.)
Indeed, the story of Indian society is just as easily told through the chronicle of its captains as it is through its still-dynastic politics. Rahul Gandhi, the opposition leader who was routed in May, is the great-grandson of the nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; the rumour is that his offer to resign immediately as leader of the Congress party after his defeat was turned down by his mother, Sonia Gandhi, herself a power-broker, former party leader, and widow of a prime minister.
Glamour and glory
Indian cricket began as an imperial enterprise and the senior Nawab of Pataudi, one of the few men to play Test cricket for two nations (England and India), was the last of the old regime. Pataudi played his last Test on 20th August 1946, almost a year before Nehru stood in New Delhi to welcome midnight’s children into the league of independent nations. But as a man who now spans the two fields of Indian glamour—cricket and film—Kohli’s real precursor is actually the Nawab’s son, universally known as Tiger. Via Winchester and Oxford, the younger Pataudi brought together three great stories of Indian culture. In 1969 he was the captain of India when he married Sharmila Tagore, a film actress who was a distant relative of India’s great literary bard, Rabindranath Tagore.Kohli, the son of a Delhi lawyer, doesn’t have the literary heritage but he presides over India in ways Tiger Pataudi could not have imagined. “No one in the entire history of the game in India,” says Guha, “has quite had Kohli’s combination of cricketing greatness, personal charisma, and this extraordinary drive and ambition to win for himself and his team.” But the praise is double-edged. Kohli is said, not least by Guha who had a short spell on the BCCI Committee, to rule Indian cricket like a personal fiefdom. In 2017, at the instigation of Kohli, India’s greatest ever leg-spin bowler Anil Kumble was replaced as head coach of the national team with the more pliable Ravi Shastri. Guha claims that Kohli did not want someone equally accomplished in his vicinity.
Both Kohli’s great talent and his determination to do things his own way can at times seem otherworldly. But, in fact, it might be tragically explicable. The pivotal moment in Kohli’s life came in 2006 when he was just 18. He was only a month into his first-class career with Delhi when his father died from a stroke. Kohli, in a rare moment of openness, has reflected: “I’ve seen a lot in life. Losing my father at a young age, the family business not doing too well, staying in a rented place. There were tough times for the family… It’s all embedded in my memory.” Kohli’s father had been a great support to him: “he was the one who drove me to practice every day. I miss his presence sometimes.”
The early loss changed Kohli: “I had one thing in my mind—that I have to play for my country and live that dream for my dad.” If that seems too perfectly Bollywood, consider that the young Kohli decided to play against Karnataka the day after his father died. He scored 90 and on being dismissed went straight to the cremation. Kohli’s mother Saroj has said that: “Virat changed a bit after that day. Overnight he became a much more mature person. He took every match seriously… It’s as if his life hinged totally on cricket after that day.” A chubby child lost weight and developed a work ethic that is brutal to the point of obsession. “I am a freak” he says, “for keeping things clean.”
Kohli also has a habit of getting into scrapes. In 2011 he made an obscene hand gesture to supporters at the Sydney cricket ground, no doubt in response to some choice provocation. In 2015 he used social media to attack Indian cricket fans who had criticised his wife. He took the fight, metaphorically, to a journalist and then, having got the wrong man, had to back down. During the launch of his mobile phone app in 2018, Kohli replied to an Indian cricket fan who had said that he preferred English and Australian players to Indians by telling him: “I don’t think you should live in India, go and live somewhere else.”
This remark is exactly contrary to the spirit of cricket in India, which has tended to be a unifying force in a nation divided along so many lines. There have been Muslim captains (the Pataudis and Mohammad Azharuddin), Sikh captains (Bishan Bedi) and plenty of Hindus (the rest). With the re-election of a government led by Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party is rooted in Hindu nationalism, the advocates of a secular India are fearful of division along religious lines.
It is not clear that Kohli will be any kind of counter-weight to this possibility. After 40 Indian soldiers were killed in Kashmir in March by a jihadi suicide bomber, Kohli led his team out against Australia wearing green military caps to -signal his support for the troops. Officially the ICC doesn’t allow political gestures of this kind, but the captain seems to have got away with it. This is hardly the cricket diplomacy that Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister and former cricket captain, has called for.
Kohli has availed himself of the opportunities that come with being the captain of the Indian cricket team. He and his wife, known collectively as “Virushka,” enjoy the financial fruits of fame. He is a co-owner of the Indian Super League football club FC Goa, of the International Premier Tennis League franchise UAE Royals and, more oddly, of the Bengaluru Yodhas franchise in the Pro-Wrestling League.
In conjunction with Anjana Reddy’s Universal Sportsbiz, Kohli has a youth fashion and men’s casual clothing brand. He is a shareholder in the London-based Sport Convo, a social networking site. He has a chain of gyms and fitness centres and a business that promotes children’s health. In addition, Kohli has deals to endorse 24 products and his brand value has been estimated at $171m, which puts him ahead of international sportsmen like Usain Bolt and Lionel Messi.
Vice and virtue
But the captain of India could be a lot more than just a brand. While there is no obligation for him to do good, Kohli fronts the usual philanthropic foundations; the one that bears his name helps underprivileged children and raises funds in conjunction with Save the Children. The highest-profile fundraising event is the regular “celebrity clasico,” a soccer match between the All Heart Football Club, captained by the man himself, and the All Stars Football Club, owned by Abhishek Bachchan, son of India’s greatest film icon Amitabh Bachchan. It’s something, but it hardly adds up to much, in a nation whose need is so great.Even if Kohli were to confine himself to the world of cricket, which would be reasonable, there are pressing questions that need to be aired. Why is a nation of a billion people not even better at the game than it is? India played its first Test match in 1932 but didn’t win a game until 1952. India could not win a Test series in England until 1971. India have finally become the top-ranked Test nation but, for a nation that is vastly bigger than any of its cricket-playing rivals, why did it take so long and why does it happen so infrequently? The BCCI has great cash reserves and an enormous fund of willing participants across a vast land. But below the feast of the IPL there is famine below. Facilities in Indian schools are terrible and the club system not extensive.
There are many other reasons for their relative failure: economic inequality, the corruption in the way the game is run and, more controversially, the existence of a superstar syndrome. The reason Kohli might want to raise concerns about the first two are, at least in part, to head off accusations that, to put it bluntly, he is himself a major problem.
Material inequality is the great fault-line of Indian society. This is a country which houses great wealth, while 1.14m children died last year of preventable causes. The multitudes of the nation are reflected in its cricket captains and so, up to a point, are its problems. On the one side, there was the haughty and Brahminical Sourav Ganguly (captain between 2000 and 2005) and, on the other, Dhoni, a former travelling ticket examiner at Kharagpur railway station who became perhaps the greatest of all India’s captains. During Dhoni’s tenure between 2008 and 2015, India won almost every ODI tournament of note, including the Asia Cup in 2010, the World Cup in 2011 and the Champions Trophy in 2013.
Dhoni’s seemed like the story of social mobility to inspire the dispossessed to pick up their bats and mark out their crease. Yet India has never yet found a way of enlisting all its citizens in the national effort. In a country that prizes education, a third of Indians are unable to read properly. Agriculture, on which the bulk of Indians are engaged, awaits a productivity revolution. The nation’s economic life is one in which millions are stuck in unremitting toil and penury.
Translated into the more trivial world of cricket, the huge population that has little time for practice and no resources for training has scant chance of showing its talent. And nor do those imperial beginnings of Indian cricket help: from the off, it has been the preserve of a middle-class elite. The majority of indigent Indians do not have the pitches, the kit or the club infrastructure. The vista of Indians playing cricket in the streets is misleading. So little of that raw talent will ever be spotted, let alone honed.
The mess is not helped by the other great blight on Indian cricket—and politics: corruption. The unedifying story of how loudly money talks in the Indian Premier League is well told in James Astill’s The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India. There is a former captain who, sadly, embodies exactly this vice. Mohammad Azharuddin was banned for life by the ICC and the BCCI for match-fixing. Just to complete the circle, Azharuddin is now a Congress politician.
A captain could speak with great authority against poverty and the corruption, but even a reformer would find it harder to speak up against celebrity culture. Guha has written that dominance by a leading individual—and here he is thinking of the Gandhi family’s dominance of the Congress party, as well as Modi and Virat Kohli—is a characteristic flaw of Indian institutions. In the case of cricket, the relationship between the captain and the BCCI was akin to that between servant and master. “Kohli is a great player, a great leader,” says Guha, “but in the absence of institutional checks and balances, his team will never achieve the greatness he and his fans desire.”
Yet it would be foolish to bet against him. And at least if we judge him by his performance on the field, we can still hope that there is a lot more to Kohli than tattoos and fast cars. The great worry in cricket—especially among the guardians of the game’s heritage—is that Test cricket, the longer and more subtle form, is in peril. The shorter attention spans of the younger generations are attracted to a more rapid form, T20, which is done and dusted in four hours, and attracts all the revenue. If the world’s greatest players take the same attitude then Test cricket is finished. Kohli, gratifyingly for those of us who cherish the Test form, is a bridge back to the old virtues. He is intent on taking his place in the ranks of the greats of Indian cricket and the crucible of greatness remains, in his estimation, the Test arena.
In 2017 Kohli received the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian award but that cannot be the summit of his honour. The example of neighbouring Pakistan shows how high the captain of the Test side can aim. Now that Imran Khan is leader of Pakistan it would be no surprise if another reformed playboy took the route of cricketing celebrity to ascend to high office. Just at the moment it is perhaps hard to imagine Kohli wanting to emulate Pakistan’s greatest-ever cricketer, except in his determination to win the same accolade within Indian cricket. He is in office of a sort in any case.
Philip Collins is a columnist for the Times. His latest book is “When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that Shape the world—and Why We Need Them” (Fourth Estate)
