The 'Hind Swaraj' of Indian cricket

Ashis Nandy introduces his book as a statement on the politics of cultural choices and the politics of visions in South Asia, using the metaphor of cricket. But as long as he stays close to cricket and its folk heroes, he is both entertaining and instructive. The moment he goes in search of those large generalities, his tone begins to falter, says T.G. VAIDYANATHAN.

AN English fast bowler during Lord Tennyson's 1937 tour of India ran fiercely down to bowl to an Indian batsman. But fate decreed otherwise and he had to run past the cringing batsman straight to the toilet in the pavilion. This is one of several Nandy stories in his recent Oxford paperback The Tao of Cricket (p.150, Rs. 195) - published originally by the Viking division of Penguin (India) in 1989 - but none of them is of cringing batsmen.

Certainly, Colonel His Highness Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, GCSI, GBE, KCIE was not one of them. He was, instead, the first in the line of great Indian batsmen who himself made English bowlers literally cringe. Not all cricketing maharajas of those days did. Certainly not the Maharaja of Porbandar, the Indian captain during the 1932 Indian tour of England. Where Ranjitsinhji made a substantial percentage of the 24,696 runs he scored in First Class Cricket in England with his trademark leg-glance, Porbandar made just two runs during the entire tour "from a leg-glance at Cardiff".

Sadly, the story does not end here and Nandy devotes several fascinating pages to showing how, on his return to India after the great English years, the Jam Saheb lived in a state of "permanent psychological diaspora", an "emigrant at heart". Ranji, we learn, spent vast sums of money entertaining English cricketing friends visiting India but was singularly unmindful about the welfare of Indian cricket. He died bitter and lonely at the end, entombed in his ancestral home - the vast and sumptuous Vibha Vilas Palace at Jamnagar. His sole companion in his old age was a blind old parrot called Popsey (rumoured to be in her fifties) acquired while Ranji was still in England from a neighbouring Cambridge pub. Some of Nandy's most rivetting pages are devoted to the "batting prince" as I once described him in a Deccan Herald profile.

In marked contrast is D. B. Deodhar - the Bhismacharya of Indian cricket - to whose life and times Nandy devotes some splendid pages. Born in the 19th Century (like Ranji), Deodhar's career harks back to cricket's golden era. However, not born to the purple (unlike Ranji), Deodhar's successes on the cricket field testify to middle class brahmin perseverance and chitpavan pugnacity. The boy who learnt to play cricket in Pune with pebbles on the river bank (Ranji honed his skills against professionals at Fenner's in Cambridge) had the distinction of making the second century against Arthur Gilligan and his touring Englishmen in 1926. Ranji is not among Deodhar's cricketing heroes and, not surprisingly, we learn that Deodhar turned down job offers made to him by a number of princes in order to protect his autonomy and freedom. Deodhar's admiration goes out to the unlettered Baloo (an "Untouchable" Pune cobbler) who knew just enough English ("How's that!") to claim 114 English wickets in the first All India Tour of England in 1911. (I am indebted to my friend, Ram Guha, for this and several fascinating revelations about India's greatest Dalit cricketer who, we learn, even stood and bravely lost to B.R. Ambedkar in the 1937 Legislative Assembly elections). We learn from Nandy that Baloo was given a public farewell by the citizens of Pune when he decided to emigrate to Bombay. Among those present on the occasion were luminaries like Ranade and Tilak. No doubt that other Pune wonder, Babu Tangewala - the tongawallah who had presented Bradman with a trophy, who had garlanded every century-maker from 1915 to 1960 - was there too, with his customary garland.

All this is true of the political Deodhar and Nandy is broadly right in celebrating this neglected hero of Indian cricket. But Deodhar's philosophy of cricket, alas, was not fundamentally different from Ranji's. He approved of "bodyline", holding that "cricket is a battle" and put C.K. above Bradman for sheer boldness and adventurousness. His modernism is rock-hard in that it is, as Nandy himself points out, "brewed in tradition and is hence a headier concoction". Although it is precisely this brand of uncritical modernism that Nandy has consistently rejected in all his writings, he seems inexplicably soft towards the Pune Professor of Sanskrit. For in what ways is Deodhar distinguishable from Jardine, the architect of "bodyline"? Born within 100 miles of each other (Jardine in Malabar Hills and Deodhar in a village near Pune) and nearly the same age (Deodhar is just eight years older than Jardine), the psychological similarities between the unbending Scot and the puritanic brahmin are quite simply alarming. Both men were wedded to the classics and both inspired fanatical devotion from their wards. Both were separated early from their parents and grew up the hard way in a kind of exile. Is it too much, then, to see them as archetypal products of "the kshatriya era of Indian cricket?" I say "Indian" advisedly, for the time has come to treat Jardine (who loved Indians and Indian cricket just as much as Deodhar and who, in fact, was once considered for the captaincy of India) and his stormy career as a part of Indian cricket history. His final disgrace and "exile" in England are the reverse side of Ranji's "exile" in India. The circle is complete. Now how did Nandy miss out on the great C.K. ("Mumtazim Bahadur Wafadar-i-Dowlat Diler Jung Lt. Col. C.K. Nayudu" to give his official name)? - the only cricketer to be honoured with a statue (just outside the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Indore) and even a road in Nagpur has been named after him. C.K. was born only three years after Deodhar in 1895 and his cricketing philosophy - like Deodhar's - was no different from Jardine's. "Wait until I meet you" was the cryptic, almost intimidating text of the cable he sent to Jardine while still at sea before the 1933 tour of India. C.K. set a "bodyline" field for Nissar who bowled with five leg-slips to England openers, Walters and Mitchell, in the Second Test in Calcutta which was drawn. And, yet, C.K.'s last days (as documented lovingly and faithfully by his youngest unmarried daughter, Chandra Nayudu, in her book C. K. Nayudu: A Daughter Remembers (Rupa, 1995)) were no less lonely than Ranji's at Jamnagar. C.K., in his last days, was really an anachronism remembered and cherished by no one except one or two old faithfuls. None of the four teams participating in the Holkar Memorial Tournament in 1966 was named after him. There are just three brief references to C.K. in Nandy's book and he remains one of two "wistful camels" (in Nandy's telling description) - the other being Deodhar - that foolishly attempted to force its way into the eye of the English needle. Not for nothing did the late S. K. Gurunathan of The Hindu describe C.K. in his obituary as "the W.G. Grace of Indian cricket" and the inimitable Mushtaq Ali (C.K.'s own protege) call him "the Shahenshah of Indian cricket". Even Deodhar - three years C.K.'s senior - refers to him in his Foreword to Vasant Raiji's book on Nayudu as "the incomparable Nayudu". But all these eulogies betray a dangerous colonial mindset.

As long as Nandy stays close to cricket and its folk heroes, he is both entertaining and instructive. But the moment he leaves the crease, as it were, and goes in search of those large generalities ("The Tao of Cricket is a statement on the politics of cultural choices and the politics of visions in South Asia, using the metaphor of cricket" is how Nandy's new introduction to the Oxford University Press paperback edition ominously begins) his tone begins to falter.

Thus, for instance, he declares in the very first sentence of the book, that "Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English". By the end of the opening chapter (the book has just three large chapters) cricket has ceased to be a mere game. It is now an inscrutable metaphysical entity, inviting hermeneutic subtlety and creative interpretation. "Cricket does not yield any ultimate truth; like everyday Hinduism, it yields only diverse constructions of truth". But Nandy does not stop with Hinduism to elucidate cricket's diversity. He ropes in comparisons to chess (p.3), popular Indian films (pp.41-49) and virtually all the games except, curiously, tennis but his most intriguing comparisons are of cricket to Victorian crime fiction, notably the Sherlock Holmes stories (pp.31-39) and to astrology (pp.99-103). Declaring that cricket in India is on the brink of the "Latin American phase" (a football match in 1970 led to a declaration of war between Honduras and El Salvador), Nandy sounds a note of warning about the cult of machismo in cricket.

Certainly, his point is well taken here and he rightly applauds the example of Vijay Amritraj for saying that if he had to win the title the McEnroe way, he would rather not win at all. He also cites Gundappa Vishwanath's fine gesture in recalling England batsman, Bob Taylor, in the Jubilee Test in Bombay in 1980. But instead of leaving it at that he works in a whole rigmarole of theory involving "hyper-competitiveness" and "other- directedness" to make his point. The unwary reader is apt to feel rather bewildered by all this. Or, worse still, bored.

But, fortunately, Nandy does not always pursue these intellectual will-o-the-wisps and devotes considerable space to his central argument, which is that Indians should play cricket their way and not adopt the international way of Messrs. Lillee, P. Thompson and Co. which is why his key middle chapter is titled "The Wistful Camel and the Eye of the Needle" (Vide "Matthew" Chapter 19.24). The wise - as opposed to the wistful - Indian camel will never, never attempt to enter the eye of the English needle.

That way lies "civilisational defeat". Nandy's book bids fair to be the "Hind Swaraj" of Indian cricket.

The Tao Of Cricket, Ashis Nandy, Oxford, p.150, Rs. 195.

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