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Literary Review
A feel for the game and language
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Barring a few minor blemishes, it is a pleasure going through these essays of one of the most able chroniclers of cricket in this country, says SUBROTO SIRKAR.
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THE title suggests this may be a history of Indian cricket. It is not: though these essays by one of the most able chroniclers of the game in this country do indeed cover a considerable span, while also featuring an interesting collection of characters who have adorned our cricket.
Let me first confess a personal weakness for the author. The first book I ever reviewed, around 30 years ago, for a long-defunct Kolkata daily, was the original edition of Dr. Mukherjee's Playing for India. Over the years, I've read most of what he's written on cricket. It was a pleasure to go over some of it again, and I feel anyone — with a feel for both sport and language — who picks up this volume would find it enjoyable.
The book begins with a blunder so embarrassing that the publishers and editor, after no doubt blaming each other, can only pretend it did not happen. The second sentence of the editor's introduction is a slightly modified version of the first: either should have appeared in print, certainly not both. But I hasten to add this carelessness is not evident elsewhere in the book. At places, though, the otherwise sensible introduction reads like a publisher's blurb: "The book presents the distilled reflections on our national obsession of our finest cricket writer."
There is something else that annoyed me. Throughout the book, the hallowed term Test cricket appears as "test", which decimates its importance. Here I suspect it is the Longman style-book that is responsible, for in Dr. Mukherjee's last book, published in 1996, there was a similar disregard for what the author himself felt to be "the highest form of evaluation known to cricketers all over the world".
The book has an attractive but intriguing cover, and many would feel it suffers from the total lack of illustrations. And personally, I consider books like this one incomplete without an index.
There is a good selection of the author's essays, though I missed the presence of that splendid piece, Princes of the Popping Crease, about the batsmanship of Lala Amarnath and Mushtaq Ali, from Dr. Mukherjee's first book. A question mark, though, about the editing. In the piece on Indian wicket keepers, somewhere along the line one was startled to see the name Padmakar Govind Joshi. Looking up the paragraph in the original version, one found P.G. Joshi. Additional information is welcome but this intrusion was unnecessary, especially considering the late "Nana" Joshi's first name was Padmanabh, as Dr. Mukherjee would know only too well. The editor could equally have inserted a footnote, where the West Indies paceman Lester King is mentioned, saying: "A slip of the pen? It was Frank King, not Lester."
Again, in the piece on pioneering Parsi cricketers, a printing mistake in the original article, as it appeared in Between Indian Wickets, is repeated. In Framjee Patel's list of players for the proposed All-India tour of England in1904, batsman B. Jayaram's name came out as Jayaraju. However, editor Guha lets that one pass. Incidentally, talking of mis-spelt names, when Dr. Mukherjee's by-line had appeared in the English magazine, the monthly Playfair, it was as "Sugit". Mention of this curiosity would have enlivened the author's CV!
While I was going through this Cricket Century book, an e-mail arrived from an old and dear friend, who is totally a non-cricket person. She describes Dr. Mukherjee as a "lovely man". Never having met him, I can only add that, at times, he is also a lovely cricket-writer.
An Indian Cricket Century: Selected Writings of Sujit Mukherjee, edited with an Introduction by Ramachandra Guha, Orient Longman, p.xii + 194, Rs. 240.
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