At the end of a tense, victorious Test match series, full of battles on and off the field, the sophisticated Indian cricket viewer is likely to switch off for a while — sated by all the sensations — and to idly peruse the IPL. At some point in his idle perusal, the gentleman (as he usually is) will become incensed at the venality and cheap thrills on display, recall the great Test series just concluded, wonder how long true cricketing values can hold out against the powers-that-be, and take up a lengthy lament over what is wrong with cricket in India. He will be correct in all his criticisms, and yet will miss the central one — the root of the evil — which is his own mythologising obsession with the game, which infects everything he says about it.
I am not being fatuous. We speak laughingly of cricket in India being a religion, but it is not funny because it is true. Moreover, it is not the mass popularity of cricket that provides the foundation for this special status. Many things are popular without in the least being authoritative; and the essence of a religion is not its mass appeal but its claim to authority. So it is, rather, the mythology woven about cricket in India that has made it the religion it is today — not just a game, but a fount of world views, of national identity, and authoritative statements of reality. And this myth-making has been performed not by the average cricket fan, and not by the administrators, but by the sophisticates — the scribes and the high priests of the religion of cricket.
“Untrained in political theory,” explains Ashis Nandy, “and unversed in the discipline of cultural studies, I had thought that the story of cricket in India told in
But Nandy’s conceit, which, having entered print, should have been rigorously put in its place, instead percolated and expanded through a whole generation of writers. Indeed, Nandy comes across as an accidental figure in this drama —the man who, out of curiosity, pushed open a door, which a whole cohort was already waiting to rush through. Ever since, our writers have not even paused to inquire whether cricket bears any mystical or essential connection to matters of nation and society. That is taken for granted, and capitalised on, to the extent that the very subject of cricket serves, and continues to serve, as a kind of anointing oil for would-be public intellectuals. From Ramachandra Guha to Shashi Tharoor to Mukul Kesavan, to a younger generation of writers like Chandrahas Choudhury and Rahul Bhattacharya, cricket writing has grown seamlessly conjoined with grave cultural studies — all the while transforming the game itself into an unquestionable cultural god.
Why this happened, I can only speculate. No doubt cricket provides a sense of home to Indian-English intellectuals, by nursing a colonial nostalgia, and being a useful link to the West. Very likely the subject has helped them assert a threatened sense of masculinity. But regardless of these mysterious causes, it is from such hands that the damage was done, and the Frankenstein’s monster fashioned. And Nandy did appear like that hapless scientist when, in 2015, he cautioned that “winning the World Cup might just make India’s macho and hyper masculine nationalism more intense” — and was at once attacked by the worshippers of the cult he helped establish.
However, he was right to raise the alarm, because when cricket (or any sport) becomes God, it is no longer fallible, and makes fools of us all. Silly aggression will be recognised for what it is in every other sphere of life, but coming from our cricketers it will be treated like doctrine. Banal cultural malaises and bad habits frequently encountered in any sportsmen, as in any of us, will, by passing through the shrine of cricket, be turned into authoritative statements of what ‘new India’ is, before which we must all simply bow. And episodes of sledging that ought to remind us — down to a T — of amateur games in neighbourhood parks and driveways, and be treated as such, become matters of national honour.
There is only one remedy for this, which is to finally begin telling the truth about cricket. That it is nothing but a game, played by young people who are neither particularly mature nor claim to be, but who are merely learning life-lessons through the means of a sport. That it does not define Indian identity or nationhood any more than carrom does. That in idolising cricketers, we infantilise ourselves. And, most importantly, that our public intellectuals have poured far too much capital into this one subject and, for everyone’s sake, they must stop and change course.
Aditya Sudarshan is the author of A Nice Quiet Holiday and Show Me A Hero