But cricket is not the only game that Indians play, although it might seem so sometimes on television. Café 20 had a telling footnote. Less than a week after India’s win in South Africa, news channels reported that four of India’s hockey players, along with the assistant coach of the national team, were going on a hunger strike.7 The protesters, all from Karnataka, would sit in a Gandhian protest outside the office of the chief minister of Karnataka to demand equal treatment with cricketers. The immediate trigger had been the state government’s decision to reward cricket player Robin Uthappa and then national bowling coach Venkatesh Prasad with Rs 5 lakh each for their role in the T20 win. The protesting hockey players also attacked the Centre and the state governments of Jharkhand, which presented cricket captain Dhoni with a new luxury car, Haryana and Maharashtra for showering similar gifts on their cricketers while ignoring the hockey players. Justifying the strike, then national hockey coach Joaquim Carvalho pointed to the severe imbalance in the rewards for hockey players when they won the Asia Cup shortly before the T20 win. Speaking in a live interview on Times Now, his sense of hurt and pathos came through clearly:
We are not jealous of the cricket players. We are not against them getting awards. We are also proud of them. We are simply saying that hockey is the national game. Why do governments and politicians not recognize our achievements? We just want the recognition we deserve.8
Carvalho’s point was underscored even further by the cynical response of Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy: he declared that he would consider the hockey players for a reward only if they won the World Cup.9 Once politicians would have been careful not to seem callous towards Indian hockey. Now there was not even a token statement of support for the hockey players’ predicament. It was politically useful to be seen as supporting cricket, not hockey. It was unimaginable in the glory days of Indian hockey that a day would come when cricket would supplant the game to such an extent in the national imagination that hockey players would be driven to desperate measures.
In more ways than one, Aaj Tak’s Café 20 and the subsequent hunger strike by the hockey players symbolized the vast gulf between the status of cricket vis-à-vis other games in modern India. There is no doubt that cricket rules but the question is, why cricket? Until the early 1980s, cricket was not the most pre-eminent Indian game. Cricket was popular but hockey was the ‘national game’ and soccer was equally popular in large parts of the country. Yet from the 1980s onwards cricket assumed centre-stage. Cricket’s emergence as the new Indian ‘national’ game does not necessarily stem from some peculiar Indian affiliation for the game but is inextricably linked to the expansion of Indian television and a confluence of factors that came together: the creation of a large middle class, the economic reforms, the birth of the satellite television industry and a whole gamut of forces that fall under the broad rubric of globalization. This chapter will map the growth of Indian television to draw out these linkages and demonstrate the central role of television in making cricket integral to modern notions of Indian identity. This emergence also marks the sunset for the nation’s Olympic sports, a condition likely to prevail in the Indian sporting landscape in the foreseeable future.
Cricket dominates television because its administrators adapted the best to the forces of television and globalization as they took shape in India. Hockey and soccer were left behind because their administrators refused to change and by the time they did, they had missed the bus. It would be foolhardy to attribute essentialist causal effects to television. Television does not explain everything but it is equally impossible to understand post-liberalization India without reference to satellite television. By 2007, India was home to as many as 300 indigenous satellite television networks10 and television’s embrace of cricket was the fuel that drove driven the rise of India as the financial centre of the global game. In a complete reversal of the earlier power order in the game, 80 per cent of the International Cricket Council’s earnings are now estimated to come from India11 and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is now the richest cricket body in the world.12 India has always had the numbers but this new-found money power is a recent phenomenon deriving from the muscle of India’s burgeoning private television industry. Between 1992 and 2006, the total number of Indian television households tripled to reach an estimated 112 million.13 It made India the world’s third largest television market, just behind China and the United States.14 More than 60 per cent of these television sets are estimated to be connected to satellite dishes.15 While numbers like these have attracted global media corporations, with both India and China gradually turning into new focal points of the global communication industry,16 this industry has fundamentally changed the nature of cricket, nationally and globally. The power source of India’s increased global clout in the organization of cricket is Indian television.
It is a measure of cricket’s embrace of television, in direct opposition to other sports, that it has virtually defined the legal structure of India’s satellite revolution. Historically, the story of Indian satellite television is the story of a private industry leapfrogging across stringent government regulations. In a country where the state monopolized television until the mid-1990s, the rise of the private satellite television networks is nothing short of a revolution. Till the time of writing, successive Indian governments had managed to pass only two legislations pertaining to the challenge of this new industry. As this chapter will show, since the early 1990s, the politics around the private television industry has been such that successive governments were forced to back off from virtually every controlling legislation that was mooted. The only two laws that managed enough support from Parliament came about because of cricket. Both these laws provide the legal superstructure of Indian television and in that sense, cricket has defined India’s satellite television industry as much as television has defined it. The fact that they were passed by parliamentarians demonstrates the power of cricket in the Indian imagination and the wider significance of the game in Indian public culture.
THE ‘6-SECOND’ MAHARAJA AND THE JWALAMUKHI ‘MILLION’: FORGOTTEN HISTORIES OF INDIAN SPORT
There is no evidence to show that cricket was any bigger in India than other sports like hockey and soccer before the 1980s. During the colonial period, hockey, soccer and cricket—all three became important playing fields for the politics of identity and nationalist self-assertion. Some of the greatest nationalist triumphs came not in cricket but in the other two games. Let us first consider soccer. The 1911 victory of the Calcutta-based Mohun Bagan Club over the British East York Regiment is seen by a number of historians as not just a sporting but also a nationalist milestone that spurred on the Swadeshi (indigenous) movement.17 It was celebrated in vernacular popular culture as a fitting reply to the British discourse on Bengalis being effeminate and hence, in the ideology of the period, an inferior race. The victory on the soccer field had a resonance beyond the playing field precisely because it was seen as the Bengali answer to the charge of effeminacy that had become a leitmotif of the imperial discourse. This is why contemporary vernacular commentaries on the victory focused more on its social meaning than on the game itself. To cite one example, Amrita Bazar Patrika pointed out that mental and physical strength was ‘an integral quality of Bengalees’ and urged Europeans not to consider them ‘non-martial’ any more.18 Similarly, The Mussalman commented: ‘The victory of Mohun Bagan…has demonstrated that Indians are second to none in all manly games’.19 No one caught the nationalist meaning of the 1911 victory for Bengali identity and self-assertion better than the Nayak which pointed out that the victory would fill ‘every Indian with joy and pride to know that rice-eating, malaria-ridden bare-footed Bengalis have got the better of beef-eating, Herculean, booted John Bull in that peculiarly English sport’.20
A measure of the centrality of football in the Bengali consciousness is Swami Vivekanand’s oft-quoted remark, ‘playing football rather than reciting the Gita will take one near to God’
.21 By the 1930s, the noted literary figure Sajani Kanta Das had noted that three things personified Bengali colonial identity: Mohun Bagan, Subhash Chandra Bose and New Theatres.22 Almost until independence, soccer had a legitimate claim to be among the most popular spectator sports in India. As sports historian Mihir Bose has noted:
While the Indians were fighting the British for their independence, one of the most popular games in the country was football. Logically after independence, football should have become India’s number one sport. It is cheaper, it certainly permeated more layers of Indian society—even down to the semi rural areas—than cricket and as in other parts of the world, could have been a metaphor for nationalism.23
This book is not the place to document the story of the decline of Indian soccer after independence. That has been well documented in studies elsewhere.24 It must be pointed out though that in sharp contrast to India’s abysmal position of 151 in the FIFA rankings at the time of writing, independent India began with a bang on the soccer field by winning the gold at the first Asiad in 1951. Its barefoot footballers beat the booted Iranians in the final. Similarly, in the 1956 Olympics, India became the first Asian nation to enter the semi-finals, eventually finishing fourth. Its last great international soccer victory came in the 1962 Jakarta Asiad when India won gold, followed by a bronze at the Bangkok Asiad of 1970. It has been pointed out that ever since, ‘the unresolved dichotomy between the interest of the nation and club as well as the long-term failure of the AIFF/Sports ministry to appreciate the importance of professionalism and commercialism in Indian football’25 have led to its terminal decline. The point, though, is that soccer always had a strong mass base in India, certainly not less so than cricket, before television arrived and changed everything.
Similarly, the astonishing success rate of Indian hockey in the late colonial and early post-colonial period, when it won six successive gold medals at the Olympics, between 1928 and 1956, turned that game into an icon for Indian nationalism. So much so that when the IOC toyed with the idea of dropping hockey as an event in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, India even offered to host the hockey event separately in New Delhi.26 The previous chapters have documented the rise and fall of Indian hockey in detail. The success of the Indian hockey teams in beating Western teams demonstrated to the nationalists that Indians could compete on equal terms with the West. The success of the Indian hockey teams was such that after independence the ministry of sport, not surprisingly, chose hockey as the official ‘national game’ of India.
It is significant that the Board of Control for Cricket in India was only founded as late as 1928, a full four years after the formation of Indian Hockey Federation. By this time, the hockey players had already won India its first Olympic gold. In fact, Anthony De Mello, one of the founders of the BCCI, has pointed out that it was the pride of the Olympic gold that first ignited the desire to create an Indian ‘national’ cricket team:
Heightened by our hockey success at Amsterdam, our ambitions for Indian sport knew no bounds just then. We visualized our cricketers playing at the Oval, at Lord’s…and straightway was born in those of us connected with the game in India the determination, that sooner or later, it should happen.27
It was hockey that had caught the national imagination and it led the way for cricket. Due to lack of popular support, ‘cricket in India was far from being a flourishing national sport in the middle twenties.’28 With the exception of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, there were few facilities for cricket across the country. Compared to other sports, cricket was still dominated by the British, by the royalty or by the elites.29
This is not to say that cricket was not popular. Ramachandra Guha and Mihir Bose, among others, have demonstrated the role cricket played in galvanizing nationalist sentiment from the 1880s onwards.30 Using the cricketing records of the army, it is even possible to speculate that playing, and defeating white soldiers, on an even playing field in cricket might have played a role in firming up the confidence of Indian sepoys for the Great Revolt of 1857.31 In the early 20th century, the Bombay Pentangular tournament, for instance, was a huge commercial and popular success until it was shut down in the 1940s.32 Yet, it was never the pre-eminent Indian sport. Cricket in the late 1920s was more of a ‘healthy cheerful adult’ than a fully grown adult.33
Even a pioneer of Indian cricket like Anthony De Mello saw the future of hockey as much brighter until well after independence. Writing in 1959, he saw an equally bright future for soccer as well, observing that, in contrast to cricket, they were both mass sports:
Soccer in India, like hockey, is a poor man’s game. It is a game which most boys around the country play at one time or another—at school or in the maidan…Thus there is a nationwide understanding of, and liking for, soccer, stronger than that for cricket, which has till now tended to be more a game for the rich man…34
Until well into the 1960s, all contemporary observers agreed that cricket certainly always had the ‘glamour’, due to its aristocratic roots, but its popular appeal in India was never more than that of soccer and hockey.35
A good illustration of this comes from the popular advertising of the era, which offers a prism to understand the popular culture of the time. From Air India to the Indian Railways, most public sector units until the 1960s used sporting metaphors to advertise themselves in print advertisements. Unlike the near-total saturation of cricket in sport-related advertising after the 1990s, the iconography of these advertisements of the 1960s largely focused on soccer, hockey or athletics. For instance, one Eastern Railways advertisement extolling its role in building ‘ties of kinship’ and ‘fraternal association’ across regional divides, drew parallels with how the playground is a ‘nursery of inter-state fraternity’. Significantly, the designers of this particular advertisement chose to put the image of a footballer in the foreground, with a vast multitude forming the pictorial background.36 Similarly, another Railways ad on its role in promoting sport, noted:
The Railways and sports bring together thousands of people from various regions and states and forge links of friendship and brotherhood between people…Both (Railways and sport) aim to build a robust nation.37
Focusing on the Railways and its promotion of sport to weld the nation, the iconography of this particular advertisement gave as much space to soccer, hockey, tennis, athletics and boxing as it did to cricket.38 Even the famous Air India maharajah that has symbolized the airline since its nationalization, featured in advertisements in the 1960s that showed him as an Olympic athlete, running the mile in ‘six seconds’.39 If that same ad were to be produced today it would be fair to guess that its copywriters would have no choice but to convert the six-second maharajah into a six-hitting Tendulkar. The fact that advertisers could use the imagery of non-cricket sports to sell popular products is a significant marker of how different sports were perceived in the popular imagination. If popular advertising is any indication, then cricket was never first among equals until television changed the very nature of Indian sport and nationalism.
Hidden amid the IOC archives at Lausanne is the intriguing story of an attempt to create an Indian equivalent of Olympia, in the town of Jwalamukhi. An Olympic torch is carried from Olympia to each venue of the Olympics every four years, and Indian sports administrators emulated this practice for the XIX National Games of 1960 from the Jogmaya temple in the holy town of Jwalamukhi near Hoshiarpur in Punjab. The Greek ceremony got an Indian twist with high priests chanting Sanskrit shlokas and lighting the flame from the temple’s sacrificial fire. This was a deliberate strategy by the organizers to build local interest. Such was the popular interest in the event that the IOA’s chronicler noted:
As the torch emerged from the temple, there was a tremendous ovation from the crowd of 10,000 that had collected outside the temple.40
About 1,500 torch-bearers carried the flame for the 350 km from Jwalamukhi to Delhi over ten days and it is significant that as many as a ‘million people’ turned up to see them en r
oute. The Jogmaya connection seems to have given the Indian equivalent of the Olympic flame a kind of religious sanctity that fuelled the fervour. At Jullunder, for instance, the Town Hall, where the torch was kept for the night, became a ‘virtual mandir’ and thousands filed past the flame and ‘made their offering.’ At Ludhiana, on 18 February, as many as 50,000 lined up on both sides of the Grand Trunk Road as the torch-bearers made their way into the city. Such was the frenzy that policemen and soldiers ‘found it difficult to control the rush of people who wanted to pay their homage to the flame.’41 When the torch reached Patiala, the effusive chronicler noted:
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