by James Astill
‘But, please, professor. What of this remains in Indian cricket today?’
He paused. Then Nandy shook his head. ‘I don’t see much of cricket in this IPL business. It is simply a degraded form of the game. What is the point of it? Is it an effort to catch up with other sports? Why? So many sports are so similar. Why can they not allow us to have one game to be different?’ He paused, and gazed into space. He looked bereft.
The Tao of Cricket was published in 1989. By then the most popular form of Indian cricket was already unrecognisable from the slow-moving and protracted game on which Nandy’s theory was based. This was one-day cricket, less an equivocal contest than a zero-sum run-chase, usually played over games of 50 overs per side. It was the original brattish challenger to Test cricket, a shorter, faster game, more demanding of explosive hitting. Though, like cricket itself, it was developed in England, during the 1960s, one-day cricket seemed like the sort of tamasha cricket that Indian fans had been waiting for all along.
Amazingly, in light of what was to come, India’s cricket bosses were slow to embrace the new format. Still obsessed with the prestige of cricket, they considered it rather déclassé and hardly bothered with it. In the first two one-day World Cups, in 1975 and 1979, both of which were held in England, India had won a single match, against the no-hopers of East Africa. Shortly before the third, which would also be held in England, in 1983, India’s chairman of selectors, Raj Singh Dungarpur, dismissed the format as ‘irrelevant’ to India. They entered the 1983 tournament as 66-1 outsiders.
The odds grew longer when, in an early round, the infant cricketing nation of Zimbabwe reduced India to 17 for five and the brink of elimination. However, India’s captain, the bustling all-rounder Kapil Dev, played an astonishing innings – 175 not out – and turned the game round. Unexpected victories against Australia and England followed, and India were suddenly in the final against West Indies at Lord’s. But still hardly anyone gave ‘Kapil’s Devils’ a prayer of actually winning the tournament. West Indies had won both previous World Cups and were considered more or less invincible at the format. Even the Devils themselves held out little hope.
When I asked one of them, Kirti Azad, whether, on the morning of the final, he had considered victory a possibility, he responded with a noisy guffaw. ‘We never, ever thought we could win. We never dreamt it. We were at Lord’s, the Mecca of cricket, playing the West Indies, a team in which everyone was a match-winner. Haynes, Greenidge, Richards, Marshall, Garner, Roberts, Holding – what a team! And we only had two world-class players, Kapil Dev and Sunil Gavaskar, who was the world’s best Test batsman, but not a one-day batsman. We thought we had no chance.’
India batted first and scored 183, a modest total. In their reply the West Indies were coasting at 57 for one. But then their best batsman, Viv Richards, got out to a brilliant running catch by Kapil, and the remaining West Indian batsmen collapsed. They were all out for 140, and India, to the amazement of everyone watching, had won the World Cup. As the last West Indian wicket fell, an ecstatic crowd of British Indians surged across the boundary rope, and the players fled for the sanctuary of the pavilion. Azad, a tall north Indian off-spinning all-rounder, got caught and stripped for souvenirs by the mob. ‘They even took my trousers,’ he chuckled.
Back in India millions, listening live to radio commentary of the game, celebrated in delirium and disbelief. India Today marked the victory with a cover story entitled ‘Miracle at Lord’s’. Mrs Gandhi, recently returned to power after a spell in opposition, again grasped the opportunity for some free publicity – indeed even more hungrily than she had after the victory at the Oval in 1971. She sent a telegram to the players that read ‘My slogan is “India can do it”. Thank you for living up to it.’ These words were emblazoned on state-owned petrol stations across India.
India’s World Cup triumph changed Indian cricket dramatically. It turned out that most Indian cricket fans did not want the drawn-out subtleties of Test cricket at all. They wanted a seven-hour hitting contest, an extended climax of action and screaming, with an unequivocal result at the end. And they wanted this all the more because, extending the miracle, Kapil’s Devils kept winning. Within two years of their World Cup triumph, they had bagged three more one-day trophies. These victories made the association between cricket and national pride even more explicit. A little over a decade before, Indian cricket fans had supported their team with little expectation of victory. These days millions tuned in to cricket expecting India to win.
Only 18 months after India’s World Cup win, a home Test series against England showed the effects of these changes. It was a dramatic series, played against the background of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, in October 1984, at the hands of a Sikh bodyguard. Yet the crowds were small by Indian standards: not every ticket for the Tests was sold. The series also suggested how one-day cricket had changed the way India’s cricketers were approaching the game. After India won the first Test, most observers expected them to close the series down, by playing for dull draws. But, now addicted to dashing stroke-play, they instead threw away the next two matches and lost the series 2-1.
India’s cricket cognoscenti bewailed these developments. Writing in 1988, their doyen, Sujit Mukherjee, warned that, ‘It is possible that a new kind of cricket crowd which watches only limited-overs cricket is rapidly growing in India. A large majority of our spectators watch cricket without understanding details of the game ... and their sole interest is being present at an Indian victory.’ Nightmarishly, he speculated that India’s Test match crowds might one day switch allegiance to the new format. ‘There is no denying that this can happen,’ he wrote. But the evidence was in fact already coming in. A country once famous for its patience and sloth had lost its heart to the newfangled tamasha cricket.
The Indian cricket board was now happy to provide it. Up to 1983, India had played 48 one-day internationals in nine years. In the decade that followed, they played 134. This was in line with a global increase, yet the cultural shift in Indian cricket was especially pronounced. Almost every one-day game was a sell-out; support for Test cricket was meanwhile drying up like monsoon rains on a Delhi pavement. The Ranji Trophy was even harder hit. As lately as 1977 a Ranji game in Baroda had raised a serious riot. By the late 1980s not even a big regional grudge-match could raise a decent crowd. Many state associations stopped bothering even to charge for Ranji tickets.
But cricket’s overall popularity was soaring, bringing new money into the game. This was apparent at every level. In 1982 a small north Indian manufacturer of cricket bats and gloves, Sanspareils Greenlands, launched its own kit brand, SG. Its timing was propitious. India’s World Cup victory unleashed huge demand for the company’s hand-stitched pads and Kashmiri willow bats. ‘Our sales went berserk. That victory had a massive impact,’ the company’s boss, Triloknath Anand, would recall. ‘Sports shop owners, cricketers were coming to our factory and saying “Jitna maal hai bhej doh”’ (send us everything you have). SG is now the world’s biggest manufacturer of cricket kit.
The BCCI’s fortunes also improved. On the night of India’s World Cup victory, the board was too broke to afford India’s heroes a decent dinner. The team celebrated in a burger bar in Piccadilly. Unimpressed, they demanded a fat win bonus, which the board was also unable to stump up. ‘We said, “Come on, yeah, we won the World Cup! We don’t want tips!”’ recalled Azad. To raise money for a bonus of 100,000 rupees (then about £6,400) per player, the cricket board persuaded Lata Mangeshkar, a great Bollywood singer, to perform a benefit concert in Delhi. But its days of penury were numbered.
With demand for one-day cricket soaring, India’s cricket bosses found they could make as much from ticket sales for a one-day international as for a five-day Test. Games held in Sharjah, at a stadium built by a Pakistani-educated and cricket-devoted Arab tycoon, Abdulrahman Bukhatir, were especially profitable. They were played before festive crowds of Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan expatriate workers and, in a foretaste of
the IPL, attended by the Indo-Pakistani glitterati, including politicians, Bollywood stars and fugitive Bombay gangsters.
India’s success also made the Indian board more ambitious. Under the direction of a Congress politician, N.K.P. Salve, the BCCI launched a successful bid to host the 1987 World Cup jointly with Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The bid was bankrolled by another great son of Saurashtra, Dhirubhai Ambani, a self-made textiles billionaire. Yet its mastermind was the board’s newly appointed treasurer, a Bengali cricket administrator and Marwari businessman called Jagmohan Dalmiya. Suspicious, Machiavellian and committed to monetising Indian cricket’s growing popularity, Dalmiya would rule over the Indian game for most of the next two decades.
India failed to retain the Cup in 1987. Yet its staging of the tournament was a triumph. In Wisden’s view, ‘the fourth World Cup was more widely watched, more closely fought and more colourful than any of its predecessors held in England.’ Through cricket Indians were expressing a more hopeful national mood. Mrs Gandhi had been succeeded by her 40-year-old son, Rajiv. Youthful and forward-looking where his mother had grown paranoid and imperious, Rajiv talked of India’s youth and bright future. Reforms were introduced to encourage investments in information technology, laying the way for India’s computer services industry. There was talk of staunching India’s brain-drain – the thousands of doctors, engineers and researchers who left for richer pastures each year.
Under Rajiv India also began snipping away the scar tissue bequeathed by four decades of Nehruvian socialist rule, a thicket of enterprise-throttling laws and regulations that was known as the ‘licence-permit raj’. The extent of these strictures was astonishing. Indian companies could not increase, diversify or reduce production without obtaining the government’s express say-so. And obtaining that permission was hard, and sometimes impossible. It involved a process riven with mind-numbing bureaucracy and, inevitably, corruption. Partly as a result of Rajiv’s reforms, India’s prospects began to improve. The economy grew at an annual average rate of 5.7 per cent during the 1980s. India, at last, seemed to be moving forwards and its success in one-day cricket, a fast and glamorous new cricket format, seemed indicative of that.
The decade also witnessed the beginnings of another great change, of enormous significance to India and its favourite game. This was the rise of television. Introduced to India in 1959, when the state broadcaster Doordarshan (‘distant show’ in Hindi) was founded, television had been slow to take off. In 1982, when colour television arrived, India had only two million sets. Yet by 1992 it had 34 million. This represented a huge increase in the audience for televised cricket.
Henceforth, India’s top cricketers would not be able to walk unmolested through any Indian city. Television made them much more visible – none more so, at this time, than India’s Cup-winning captain, Kapil Dev.
If any man represented the 1980s, as Nayudu had the 1920s and Pataudi the 1960s, it was Kapil. He was India’s most brilliant one-day cricketer, their match-winner, their most exciting player. It was often said, mostly by Indians, that they had taken so enthusiastically to cricket because they are a sedentary people and it is an unathletic game – not the way Kapil played it. He bounded in to bowl – fast, as no Indian had for decades – flinging himself elastically into his delivery stride. He hit sixes like Nayudu. He was easily India’s best fielder. In an era of great all-rounders, of Imran Khan, Ian Botham and Richard Hadlee, Kapil was world-class and led India by aggressive example. Whatever timidity remained in Indian cricket, Kapil abolished it.
He also signalled another sort of change. Kapil’s family were by no means poor, as the Palwankars were. Yet by the exclusive standards of Indian cricket, they were parochial and unpolished. India’s captain hailed not from Bombay or Delhi but from Chandigarh, capital of Punjab and Haryana. He spoke English clumsily. In this way Kapil augured another watershed in Indian cricket, an end to its dominance by the metropolitan elite. A new breed of hungry, lower middle-class cricketer, introduced to the game by television, would soon begin emerging from India’s smaller cities and furthest corners. Kapil was their patron saint.
He was my neighbour in Delhi and I knew him slightly. With another World Cup approaching – to be held in India in 2011 – we arranged to meet one day, over lunch in a plush Delhi hotel, to chat about the past.
Almost three decades after his Cup-winning heroics, Kapil remained an impressive specimen. His hair was greying and his face a little jowlier, yet he was still lean and muscular. It was still possible to imagine him running in to bowl. As he ushered me to a table, in a Chinese restaurant with views overlooking Delhi, he radiated the same nervous energy that he had on the pitch. It made him slightly unrelaxing to talk to – especially, I soon found, on the subject of his modest origins.
‘Kapil, you were a different sort of Indian captain ...’ I began awkwardly, as he toyed with his mobile phone.
He frowned back. ‘How do you mean, “different”?’
‘Well, you came from Chandigarh, not Bombay or Delhi,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t that quite unusual?’
But Kapil was still frowning. He looked insulted, which was the last thing I had intended. ‘What I mean to say is,’ I added cravenly, ‘you must have been a particular inspiration to people living in small towns.’
Kapil relaxed slightly. ‘Yes, the media are always saying this,’ he said guardedly. ‘I don’t know why they’re so interested, but it’s true I came from a small town and no one else did. Cricket was all Bombay. For 20, 30 years, people said only big-town boys can play. But that wasn’t true. I showed a lot of people I had talent and with the grace of God I showed that boys from the small towns were good too. And now that’s where the talent is and the support. In small-town India people are really crazy about cricket. But you can’t compare now and then. In our time, not even 15 per cent of people had a television to see our faces, but now 90 per cent have televisions. Cricket has become so much more popular since our day.’
I had seen an illustration of this shortly before, in the hotel’s ballroom, where Kapil had joined a clutch of other former World Cup captains – Sir Vivian Richards, Imran Khan and Arjuna Ranatunga – to launch the forthcoming World Cup. They were filmed by a huge battery of television cameras, before several hundred Indian journalists. The tournament, though still more than two months away, was already causing huge excitement in India. Indians expected their team to win the cup for the first time since 1983. And that was, for perhaps the first time, a realistic expectation.
‘But still everyone knows us and everyone loves us,’ Kapil added, and then fell silent. He didn’t look especially happy to be adored. In the pause, I overheard Imran and Richards, who were sitting at the table with us, deep in conversation.
Or rather, I heard Imran, who was now a Pakistani politician and strong critic of American foreign policy. ‘You know, if they killed his wife and children, it is not hard to imagine why a man would become a suicide bomber,’ he told Richards, who was listening in inscrutable silence. ‘Or he would fight them and raise his children against them! If the people in the UK and US knew what was really going on they would rise up and protest. The Americans are destroying us. People are desperate. They say all our leaders are corrupt, only Imran Khan can save us!’
‘Is it hard for you to move around in public?’ I asked Kapil. He shook his head. ‘Very hard. People make it very difficult, even here in Delhi people always want to see me. But the Bengalis are extreme. In Kolkata so many people crowd around me. They come and touch my feet.’ Kapil winced. ‘I don’t like it. It gives me goosepimples.’
CHAPTER THREE
The Cricket Box
Tense and perspiring, I took my seat in an upper tier of the Chinnaswamy Stadium. Reaching it had been a fight. But it was a fine February day in Bangalore and as I looked out over one of India’s great cricket ovals, my spirits rose. Far below, green and perfect, the pitch was ready for the first big contest of the 2011 World Cup, India against England. In the azu
re sky above the stadium, long-winged raptors were wheeling in slow circles, surfing the thermals of a bright south Indian morning.
Play was not due for an hour but the stadium was already half-filled and in ferment. Bollywood songs blasted from a pair of giant speakers, half-drowning the background hubbub of drumming, laughter and chatter. The crowd was tuning up. Between songs, an official implored through the speakers, ‘Please, no insulting of umpires or players. Let’s have a friendly environment.’ This drew a brief ripple of applause, and then the hubbub resumed.
A stream of new arrivals flowed past, many wearing the sky-blue India team shirt. Some looked as drained as I felt. Others took one look at the pitch and punched the air in elation. A group of young men with Indian flags painted on their cheeks burst into a war-cry, ‘jeetega bhai, jeetega, India jeetega!’ (‘We’ll win, brother, India will win!’)
Making it into the Chinnaswamy was alone worth celebrating. The game was originally to have been played in Kolkata. But Eden Gardens, to the embarrassment of its overseer, Jagmohan Dalmiya, had turned out to be a building site. The fixture was therefore switched to the smaller Chinnaswamy, which halved the number of tickets available to 40,000. And 33,000 of these were promptly gobbled by members of the state cricket association, local cricket clubs and Bangalore’s great and good. Local politicians, policemen, judges, civil servants and army officers – everyone who was anyone in Bangalore needed a ticket for the game. The remaining few thousand were to be made available online, but the website crashed within minutes. So they went on sale at the stadium, which caused a riot.
The night before the sale, a crowd of thousands had gathered outside the stadium, and when it became clear that most would leave empty-handed, they began to protest. The police beat them up with bamboo staves. It was the usual ticketing shambles, and grist to the mill of India’s media. Every bungled detail was front-page news in the 330 million copies of newspapers that circulate in India every day, and headline news on India’s 120-odd television news channels. As match-day approached, the fixture had received far more coverage in India than the British media gives to cricket in a year. And, despite my best efforts, I still had no ticket.