Cricket’s lost innocence

Reflections

Cricket must regain the innocence of childhood tournaments, and break free of the embrace of brands and bookies.

Cricket today is a blend of nostalgia and the future, innocence and worldliness, which demands a different kind of storytelling. On the one hand, it is only cricket and the English language that have achieved the transition from colony to commonwealth. On the other, cricket inevitably conjures up thoughts of childhood days, where on a little nukkad (street corner), armed with tennis ball and bat, groups of friends enacted the great battles of a lifetime. Nukkad cricket created a bunch of local heroes, little legends who inevitably faded away in later life. This is an innocence captured in R K Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935), in which a gang of urchins form the Madras Cricket Club, evocative of the legendary association of the same acronym.

Photo: Daniel Bacchuber

For people throughout Southasia, cricket was childhood fantasy. Swami and Friends might sound remote, even naive, today. But it is that nostalgia, that magic of nukkad cricket, that today sustains the World Cup. For all its paraphernalia, its commentators, its bookies, its branded creations, stripped down to the essentials it is still a nukkad battle between two sets of warriors – the dreams of childhood enacted on a different scale. The little warrior carrying his bat to battle is now a plump spectator, commentator and expert connoisseur of a world in which sport has become a model of life. Sitting back, the realisation sinks in that the world and sport has changed in a way he might not want to understand. The innocent flavours of childhood have become a bittersweet lozenge, a habit of a lifetime.

At one level, what sustains cricket is the Southasian diaspora. For those who make up these communities, cricket is no longer a colonial game, but rather a fragment of their childhood carried along wherever they go. The other day, a friend told me there are 600 cricket clubs around Berkeley, in California, where Indians, Pakistanis, New Zealanders and West Indians regularly enact one of the greatest rituals they know. Cricket has become the identity kit of thousands of workers and professionals abroad, a marker they live out and are proud of. Earlier, one would hear stories of diasporic families inviting musicians or religious leaders to sustain that touch of culture we call Southasian. Today, these groups think nothing of inviting a Venkatesh Prasad or a Javagal Srinath to spend a week playing with them. For them, the World Cup is a way of keeping in touch, living out battles that sustain identity.

Lifestyle aphasia

If the diaspora is one element of the cult of cricket, the second can be thought of as the ‘minnow effect’. This is the inclusion of a whole array of new cricketing countries in the international sport – Holland, Ireland, Canada – thus adding to the cosmopolitanism and, generally, surprise of the game. Watching the recent World Cup, the rise of Bangladesh is quickly reminiscent of the rise of Sri Lanka twenty years ago. For several decades, the only widely known cricket that Sri Lanka produced came from players based in England. Today, Sri Lankan players are legends; the Sri Lankan minnows are now killer sharks. Just three decades ago, Tamil Nadu would send the Jolly Rovers, a local team, to play in Sri Lanka, with the exercise being seen as low-level ‘club cricket’. Who remembers the Jolly Rovers today, as a Muttiah Muralitharan spins his way to history?

There have been local changes, too. Today, between the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the World Cup, one is seeing a split between nationalism and market – perhaps these are just the two strands of globalism? At one level, nationalism provides the spice, the catalysts for combat, preventing cricket from becoming too amiable a game. Nationalism and professionalism, meanwhile, provide the edge to a game that good manners and a class system had turned into a set of exclusive clubs. Nationalism also creates nostalgia, a ‘what if’ feeling about historical events such as Partition. As a child, I still remember that, after a game of cricket, we would assemble and quarrel over the selection of a hypothetical combined Indian and Pakistani team, which we knew would be world-beaters. Our selection committees quarrelled over choices as if they were life and death issues.

Nationalism also created a sense of pride through cricket. A whiff of sporting spirit has always prevented nationalism from turning jingoist. The fact that the Dutch team is sponsored by the dairy giant Amul is itself a hallmark of a new globalism. Likewise, Pakistani legend Javed Miandad has coached the Chinese cricket team. Also, cricketing legends such as Gary Kirsten, Garfield Sobers, Javed Miandad and Mustaq Mohammed have served as coaches for teams from other countries. Globalisation has created a space for this circulation of expertise and wisdom, which also gives cricket a hybrid touch of nostalgia and generosity.

Memory is also a crucial part of cricket. Memory is not merely recollection, a recitation of an epic game with all its poetic appeal. Memory demands a comparative perspective, a sense of judgement. It breaks the structure of jingoism or provincial fanaticism around cricketing skills and performances. When commentators were talking of Shane Warne as the greatest spinner of all time, a comment from Garfield Sobers restored some perspective. Sobers briefly said that Warne was good, but that Subhash Gupte was the best spinner he had encountered. It was as if a morsel of memory had bubbled up to do justice to an almost forgotten legend. (Gupte, incidentally, settled down later in the West Indies.) Memory also gives cricketers forced into exile by politics a new lease of life – paying tribute, for instance, to Pollock and Barry Richards, South Africans whose best playing years were lost because of Apartheid boycotts.

Beyond the framework of memory, though, what haunts the World Cup today is money. Between brand and bookie, the World Cup has changed irrevocably. It is not just that the IPL is the market end of the spectrum and the World Cup the nation end. The market has today made millionaires out of cricketers. Cricket as a spectator sport has become a consumer semaphore. From a sport, it now embodies lifestyle; a game that once had heroes now produces brands.

Brand and lifestyle read cricket differently. Although advertising in cricket goes back to the days of C K Nayudu, in earlier times the cricketer was stiff as a scarecrow in most advertisements – grace on the field yielded to rigor mortis before the camera. As brand ambassadors, Sachin Tendulkar and M S Dhoni, the Indian captain, are today as successful as top film stars. In fact, between them the two represent the old and the new middle class – Ranchi and Mumbai, respectively, in the marketing imagination. Sachin represents an older generation of professionals like Rahul Dravid, Saurav Ganguly and Anil Kumble, while Dhoni embodies the new generation’s sense of speed and success. He possesses a James Dean-like cool, evoking the grace, mobility and speed of a new generation of small-town boys who have taken quickly to cricket and the lifestyle it involves.

Meanwhile, it is hard to ignore the massive new presence of women as spectators and, increasingly, as commentators. Some add verve to the game while others, such as Sharda Ugra of India Today, are probably amongst its most meticulous chroniclers. For younger women, the game is interesting in itself; but for many older women, one had to know about cricket simply because that is all the men talked about. When life revolves around the World Cup, everything else is relegated to the background. To not speak cricket in this context is to choose a kind of aphasia, a loss of speech, about a major ritual of everyday life. As one woman told me, ‘When your husband, son and son-in-law speak only cricket, something of the game seeps into you.’

Hemingway-esque

Cricket demands a continuous narrative as commentary, but it is this commentary that is nowadays often disappointing. In earlier eras, the radio commentators were the eyes and ears of the populace. Today, with television, commentaries have become literal, even mechanical. The use of gimmicks, the introduction of electronic machines as referees, and the efflorescence of malapropisms add little charm. The narrative is too literal, a weak echo of what one can see, or too hysterical or nostalgic.

Cricket as commentary needs to create a fresh narrative. What made cricket a game to be discussed were its writers. The likes of Neville Cardus, S K Gurunathan, Jack Fingleton, Norman Yardley and C L R James were not just storytellers; their writings were like judgements sustaining the normative power of the game. Between advertisement and hysteria, cricket has lost its linguistic competence, leaving a huge gap between the excitement of the game and the canned narratives to which one is subjected. Maybe one needs more economical, Hemingway-esque prose to capture the excitement on the field.

All sport enacts the body as metaphor. But while wrestling or boxing exhibit an immediacy of physicality, cricket has a mediated sense of the body. The body is always at a remove – or almost always. When Ganguly removed his shirt at the Natwest finals in 2002, viewers were witness to an aggressiveness and machismo rarely seen in cricket. Cricket does demand physical skill, yet the body is always secondary. Speed, agility and stamina are certainly required, but cricket, for all its ruthlessness, is a ritual form of battle that hides animality in a way no other sport does. Its warrior’s code is a sublimated one, and its narratives always create a screen where culture dominates nature.

But the battles are changing. When one reads the cricket reports today, there is a sense that corporate interests guide the story. The feeling of the fairy tale, the epic, that cricket once had now seems largely extinct. Between brand, commentary, advertising and reportage, one misses the original innocence of the game. The anecdote is not quite anecdote when the same game is played on television a thousand times over. There is something lost when the imagination cannot reclaim the power of the story, the immediacy of battle.

Today, cricket is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, a corporate sport. But one hopes that the link between the World Cup and the drama of nukkad sport remains. It is that fantasy, that magical hope of fame, that innocence where every child can dream of being a Tendulkar or a Muralitharan, which keeps the game alive.

--Shiv Visvanathan teaches in Ahmedabad and spends his time between cricket and film.

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