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Past Forward!

Introductory note:
Guys and girls, Rediff presents a new columnist -- Dr Ramachandra Guha, to give him a name.
We've been discussing this column with Dr Guha for over a month now. The reason for our persistence is the same as the reason for our wanting his presence on our site in the first place.
There is so much cricket happening these days, that cricket writing has become as immediate, instant. A match report today, another one the day after tomorrow -- that's how it's been, and given our schedule, that is how it will continue to be.
In the process, however, we are missing out on a lot. The classic 'past forward' type of writing, which looked at the present in terms of the past, is rapidly dying out. And in this death, we all lose -- a sense of history, of perspective.
It is this perspective that we hope Dr Guha will bring back to cricket writing.
A social historian by profession and inclination, Dr Guha has taught at Yale University, the Indian Institute of Science, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he was Indo-American Community Chair Visiting Professor in 1997 and 1998.
In his own words, he writes on history to make a living, and on cricket to really live. His books on cricket include Wickets in the East (hailed, at the time, as the best book written about cricket by an Indian) and Spin and Other Turns, which Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack called "a book of high quality, written with a warmth and perception admirable in one whose early studies and adherences were of Marxism". Indian cricketers, remarked Wisden, had now ‘found a writer to emulate the stylishness of their best players.’
Guha’s column, which will be fortnightly to start with, will free-wheel its way through the game, its literature, its history, its politics and its styles.
Without further ado, it is over, now, to Ramachandra Guha...

Cricket-haters, cricket-baiters

Few people know that after the second World War, when the success of the Indian Independence movement became evident, another freedom struggle manifested itself.

This sought to free the mathrubhoomi of the polluting foreign game of cricket, to make sure that when the white man left he took his pastimes back with him. It is a measure of how ambitious this movement was that it first announced itself in Mumbai, a city that was then, as it is now, the place in India most closely identified with cricket and cricketers.

The opening salvo of the second freedom movement was fired in the columns of the crusading weekly, Blitz. It took the form of an essay called ‘Will Cricket quit India with the British?’. The essay was published in the issue of July 15, 1946, and it was authored by the well-known Congressman Dr Balkrishna Keskar.

Now, Dr Keskar had obtained his PhD at the University of Heidelberg, where he learnt, with the Germans, to admire 'manly' sports such as football and wrestling. Cricket, he wrote, was a game ‘purely English in culture and spirit,’ which could ‘only thrive in the atmosphere of English culture, English language and English rule.’

He dismissed cricket in India as a ‘game patronized mostly by the Maharaja, the rich and the snobs,’ -- that is, all those who sought to curry favour with the rulers. Keskar was confident that the game would never be able to survive the shock of (the) disappearance of British rule from our country’, and would rapidly yield in popularity to working class sports such as football and athletics.

Blitz has now become the voice of the ruling class, but in those distant days it was the vehicle of radical anti-establishmentarianism, the advanced guard of the revolution. Keskar’s challenge was picked up in the pages of the only other Bombay journal with any pretence to having its finger on the pulse of the people.

‘Nationalize India through sports!’ was the title of a stirring polemic published by the Bombay Chronicle on November 6, 1946. The writer, Janaki Das, had been the country’s representative to the World Cycling Championships in Zurich. There he met sympathetic anti-colonialists who urged him to lead the campaign to cleanse India of cricket. The Irish representative to the Zurich congress reminded Das that the game of bat and ball was ‘infested with all the elements of Imperialism.’ It was, he said, ‘invented by the British to carry on pro-British propaganda in the British–occupied slave countries like India, Australia and South Africa, (whose) subjects are taught to look to London for inspiration.’

The French representative added that cricket was ‘entirely unknown to the freedom-loving countries, like the democratic America, the mighty Russia, the vast continent of Europe, the whole of Western and Eastern Asia, Japan and China, and even Africa (except South Africa).’

Reporting these conversations in the Bombay Chronicle, the Indian cyclist urged that this 'black spot stamped by British Imperalisam on the face of India be wiped out’, to be replaced by games ‘which build health and character and cost little’, such as athletics, swimming, cycling, and the ancient Indian form of team wrestling, Kabaddi.

Unlike the first freedom movement, however, the second one has been spectacularly unsuccessful. After fifty years of political independence, cricket is more popular than ever before, patronized as much by the Maharaja as by the milkman, by the snob as well as by the socialist. It certainly was no hindrance that the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a keen follower of the game. Indeed, it was Dr Balkrishna Keskar’s melancholy duty, as Minister of Information and Broadcasting in Nehru’s cabinet, to carry out his boss’s command and have All India Radio broadcast live ball-by-ball commentaries of Test matches played in the country.

Radio broadcasts (in all the languages of the currency note) have helped enormously in expanding the game’s reach, in deepening its roots in a land to which it was brought as an alien import. More recently, the process has been carried forward by the spread of satellite television. Television has effectively bridged the divide between city and country, and between the sexes, with both peasant men and upper-class women numbered among the fanatical followers of India’s Test side.

For all this, some of our countrymen remain resolute in their opposition to cricket. These moles under the wicket fall into three distinct categories. There are the economists, who worry about the impact on productivity of wholesale absenteeism from the office, and the kitchen, whenever India plays a match. With Sachin Tendullkar on the box a hundred days in a year, cricket-watching is having an ever greater, and always negative, impact on our GNP. One pro-bomb analyst at the Delhi School of Economics has in fact computed that the impact of Western sanctions will be neutralized by the simple act of abolishing cricket.

In most universities, the department of economics is sited next to the department of sociology. While economists openly complain that cricket is the ‘opium of the people’, sociologists show their contempt through neglect. Consider a recent two-volume collection on the culture and society of India’s first city. Sixteen solemn sociologists contributed to this study, which was beguilingly called Bombay: A Metaphor for Modern India. None of the scholars thought it worth their while to analyse the city’s greatest obsession, or mention the city’s most famous residents. Neither the game of cricket, nor the names of Tendulkar, Gavaskar, Merchant, Manjrekar, do not figure in this book’s index.

But perhaps the most dogged opponent of cricket is the cultural nationalist, the Anglophobe swadeshi-ist who will be forever suspicious of anything that was not invented in the Indo-Gangetic plain. Dhoti, yes, patloon no, says this fellow. Roti yes, dabal roti no. Sanskrit yes, English no, tandoori chicken yes, Kentucky Chicken no.

And above all, kabaddi yes, cricket no.

I recall an angry letter written to the Indian Express at the time of the 1992 World Cup. ‘How long’, demanded Sr M M Vyas of Jaisalmer, ‘how long shall we Indians go on spending money lavishly, wasting precious time for the maintenance of this monument of slavery called cricket?'

Which brings me, finally, to the greatest of Indian Anglophobes, the man whose dislike of Britain and all things British ran deeper and longer than anybody else’s. He was the late socialist leader Dr Ram Manohar Lohia.

Now, Lohia’s pet hates were Jawaharlal Nehru, the English language, and the game of cricket, generally in that order. These aversions, possibly genetic in origin, were made more concrete while Dr Lohia studied at Berlin in the 1930s. Returning home with a PhD in political science, the young leftist became the leader of the Congress Socialist Party, and a key player in the Quit India movement of 1942. After Independence he sat in the Opposition, chasing Nehru, English, and cricket in and out of the Lok Sabha.

There is a Lohia story I now want to make public. It was told to me by an old associate of the doctor, who was present. The incident occurred almost forty years ago, in hot and steamy Mumbai, and till this column, was one of the most rigidly kept secrets of the Lohia-ite movement.

I breach this confidence with some diffidence, for writers are known to have been beaten up for less. It is truth, and truth alone, that commands me to share the secret with the wider world.

The story goes like this. It was the last week of December, 1960, and India were playing Pakistan at the Brabourne Stadium. On the second morning of the match, while some forty thousand people crowded into Brabourne, a smaller but not less intense crowd gathered in an Irani restaurant outside. This eatery had been chosen by Dr Lohia for a press conference.

To a group of assembled journalists, the good doctor thundered on about how the game of cricket symbolized our continuing colonisalism, and how the last Englishman to rule India was complicit in this. Throw out Nehru, he said, and we can all happily start playing kabaddi.

The scribes departed, to file their stories. My informant is the only person still living who saw what happened next. Apparently, after the journalists had all gone, Dr Lohia walked across to the nearest paanwallah, asked for a jodi of his favourite ek sau bis kanauji, and then continued: ‘Kya Hanif out ho gaya kya?’ The answer came back, 'No, Hanif Mohammed is still batting.'

Proves my point -- that inside every cricket-baiter there is a cricket-lover struggling to get out.

Ramachandra Guha