by James Astill
I had watched a fair amount of cricket in India in recent years, but mostly from the comfort of the press box or a hospitality suite. I wanted to watch this game, like the next man, from the general stand. But, like the next man, I couldn’t get a ticket. In despair, the day before the game I called an influential friend. No problem, he said, and offered me a couple of VIP tickets for the pavilion. But when I said I’d prefer a cheap seat he sounded doubtful. No one elects to go downmarket in India these days. ‘But get yourself down to Bangalore and we’ll see,’ he said and, sure enough, by the morning of the game he had found me a standard ticket (stamped ‘strictly for exclusive use of the Karnataka Cricket Association’).
Proceeding to the stadium, I found a prosperous-looking crowd gathered outside it, smartly dressed in bright-coloured polo or India team shirts. Many of those queueing for the stadium were chatting in English. At 1,000 rupees for even a cheap seat, the match was not for the poor. Having made it inside, I found two computer programmers, Ronak and Nishit, seated either side of me. They were not friends, though both were in their twenties, came from Baroda and worked for an IT firm in Hyderabad. They were not unfriendly, as I prodded them with questions. But they were reserved, perhaps shy, and neither said a word to the other. Both were convinced that India would win. And, of course, Sachin Tendulkar was their favourite player.
‘Isn’t that a bit unimaginative?’ I asked Ronak, a slight figure in a blue polo shirt.
‘But he’s the god of cricket.’
‘Oh, come on. Surely there are more exciting players than Sachin?’
‘Don’t get me started,’ said Ronak. He did not look amused.
Tendulkar, or simply Sachin as Indians call him, means a lot to them. He means more than Nayudu, Pataudi, Bedi, Gavaskar and Kapil combined. Sachin started playing cricket for India as a curly-haired Bombay schoolboy, 5ft 2in tall, and 16 years old. That was in 1989. And more than two decades later he was still playing for India and had scored more international runs than any other cricketer ever has or probably ever will. But for Tendulkar’s hundreds of millions of Indian devotees, he meant even more than this stupendous record would suggest.
‘Cricket is like a religion in India and Sachin,’ Indians like to say, ‘is God.’ Well, not quite. There is probably no Tendulkar temple in India, despite many rumours to the contrary. But the qualities Tendulkar cultists ascribe to their hero are truly superhuman. In India, Sachin is a paragon, not merely the best ever cricketer, but one of the best of all Indians. He is praised for his modesty, his patriotism, his devotion to his family and general high-mindedness. He is spotless and irreproachable, and anyone who dares challenge that view had better watch out. Sachin’s fans will not have his perfections challenged. The minute Greg Chappell, India’s former coach, fell out with him, who he appeared to find rather selfish and inflexible, his India days were numbered.
The crucial background to this Sachin adoration is an amazing surge in cricket’s popularity over the course of his career. According to a survey conducted in 2007 by a Delhi-based think-tank, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, nearly 80 per cent of Indians under the age of 25 followed cricket either ‘to a great extent’ or ‘somewhat’. Given India’s youthful demography – over half the population are under 25 – that would suggest India has more than half a billion cricket fans. That represents an astonishing monopoly on India’s sporting affections.
The explosive growth of Indian television ownership is chiefly responsible. India’s 160 million – and rising – television households represent an eightfold increase over the course of Tendulkar’s two-decade-long career. The India–England match in Bangalore was about to be watched by one of the biggest television audiences ever assembled for a live cricket match. Estimates of the Indian viewership alone started at 200 million.
Cricket is now ubiquitous on Indian telelvision. It is shown constantly on 16 sports channels and relentlessly discussed on over 100 news channels. Then there are ad breaks, and more cricketers appear, appearing in commercials for insurance, cement or mopeds, goods and services for a fast-emerging economy. Nalin Mehta, an expert on Indian media, describes this assault as the ‘cricketisation’ of Indian television.
It has made Indian cricketers as famous as film stars, and similarly rich. In 2011 Tendulkar earned an estimated $16.5 million from product endorsements alone. Yet unlike Bollywood stars, India’s cricketers are additionally respected as national champions, on a footing with the Indian army. They are hybrid heroes – part soldier, part entertainer – and it is hard to describe the adulation this brings them.
I once happened to share a plane from Mumbai to Delhi with a sometime India cricketer, Mohammad Kaif, a hard-working middle-order batsman who was perhaps fortunate to play over 100 one-day internationals in the early to mid-2000s. Hardly any cricket fan outside Asia would have recognised him. Yet the effect he had on a crowded Kingfisher airliner cabin was incendiary.
When Kaif stepped aboard, his name was whispered up and down the aisle. Sitting behind me, a middle-aged man hissed the following commentary to his wife much of the way to Delhi: ‘Oh my god, Mohammad Kaif!/Kaify!/Mohammad Kaif is sitting down/Kaif is reading/What is Kaif reading?’
The cricketer responded to the fevered murmuring with a mask of implacable benevolence, designed to radiate thanks and goodwill with minimum energy loss. As he left the plane, the purser seized one of his hands in both of his own and stooped low before him. ‘Sir,’ he said in a voice that was at once tender and respectful, ‘We really miss you and we pray you are back in the team soon’. I suspect that wasn’t true.
Multiply Kaif’s appeal by 100 and you have some idea of the Tendulkar cult. He is India’s best, most consistent and most enduring, and most internationally respected cricketer. He is also the richest; but in Tendulkar’s case his commercial profile is more a counterpoint to his popularity than a cause of it. Tendulkar is not like David Beckham, a sportsman so reprocessed by celebrity it is hard to remember if he was ever any good. Sachin remains a slightly geekish cricketer, obsessed by the pursuit of batting excellence that, over the course of his long career, he has often delivered. ‘Tendulkar never fails,’ an Indian selector said of the 16-year-old prodigy he was then proposing for the national side. The wonder is that he so rarely has.
This explains the volume of Tendulkar’s celebrity to millions of Indians. It still does not explain the tone of it, which is deeply personal. In a time of great change in India, Tendulkar, a modest, superstitious Hindu family-man, an Indian everyman, stands for continuity. For Indians over the age of 35, he conjures memories of a more modest, traditional India. When Tendulkar made his India debut, Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister and India had fewer than 850 million people. Now Rajiv is long dead and India’s population is over 1.2 billion; yet Tendulkar goes on.
On that sunny day in the Chinnaswamy, we were blessed with an early look at him. India won the toss and chose to bat, bringing Sachin straight to the middle. As he walked out, looking as always slightly too small for his pads, the crowd welcomed him with a roar of 40,000 personal devotions.
‘Sachin! Sachin-bhai!’ the shouts rang out imploringly around the stadium as Sachin-themed banners and flags were unfurled. The television cameras picked them out and displayed them on a giant in-stadium screen. There was a row of middle-aged men, beaming and pointing to their paunches where their T-shirts bore the message, ‘Until I see God I will settle for Sachin’. There were children, smiling shyly, with ‘SACHIN’ painted on their cheeks. One banner draped from an upper tier read: ‘Commit all your sins when Sachin is batting. They will go unnoticed because even God is watching him bat.’ It was a long banner.
In all this Tendulkar exultation, I noticed a small party of middle-aged British tourists a few rows behind me, laughing forcefully with their neighbours. I couldn’t hear what was said but guessed they were bantering about England’s chances in the game. You might come to regret that, I thought.
Tendulkar m
et his first ball with a solid forward prod and the crowd gave a burst of relieved all-in-this-together applause. The giant screen showed a line of celebrities in the VVIP seats, including the state’s chief minister and Bangalore’s playboy billionaire, Vijay Mallya, a liquor-to-airline baron and owner of the Royal Challengers Bangalore IPL side. They were clapping too.
What followed was the classic Tendulkarama that Ronak and millions of others had been hoping for. The little master – a nickname Tendulkar inherited from Gavaskar – was at first subdued while his partner, Virender Sehwag, blazed away as he does. But after Sehwag got out, with India on 45 for one, Tendulkar got moving. A graceful cut, a punch straight back for six, a couple of back-foot drives, and he had fifty, brought up with another punched six. The English bowlers, toiling on a flat pitch, were easy prey. The crowd was going berserk. ‘Sachin-bhai!’ people were screaming and laughing. ‘Sachin-bhai, give me sixer!’
Tendulkar’s batting is not (though millions would disagree) the most distinctive India has produced or even, to my amateur eye, especially memorable. He does not have an obvious signature shot: a fluid cover-drive or murderous pull to bookmark him in the mind. But that is partly because of his greatest asset, his versatility. Tendulkar is not representative of India’s most beguiling tradition of batsmanship, the style of wristy artistry, of graceful cuts and drives, established by Ranjitsinhji. But he can play those shots. He is a product of the more coached and organised Bombay school of batting, as Gavaskar was. But he scores much faster and hits the ball harder than Gavaskar did.
He got his century with a flick off his hips for four, and the roar of the crowd was stadium-quaking. I turned to see Ronak with his mouth wide open in a drowned-out Munchian scream. ‘Sachiiiiiiin!’ he seemed to be shouting.
He leaned over and yelled jubilantly in my ear, ‘Now do you see why Sachin is God?’ Ronak’s travel companion, a skinny young man wearing a blue Afro wig, was jumping up and down on his shoulders. High above the stadium, I noticed two kites collide and briefly lock on to one another.
Suddenly there was a different drama. As Tendulkar had approached his century, the flow of latecomers into the stadium, still pouring up the stairwell, began speeding up. I had spotted a few uniformed policemen among them, having presumably abandoned their posts for a glimpse of the final coup de Sachin. But the upper tier of the stadium was already packed: there was nowhere for the new arrivals to go.
A crowd of unwanted people started building at the head of the stairwell and, with hundreds more pushing up to join it, those in front were pushed, then suddenly surged forwards, tumbling down towards the precipitous edge of the upper tier in a mêlée of limbs and bodies. While the stadium was still in uproar, yelling for Tendulkar, these terrified people were screaming in terror.
A burly young Sikh, wearing an Indian team shirt and a baseball cap on top of his patka, heaved himself out of the scrimmage and grabbed my arm to steady himself. He stared at me, wide-eyed with fear. ‘This country,’ he said in a Cockney accent, ‘is a fucking disgrace.’
Between innings, as I queued for a refreshing slice of cucumber sprinkled with chilli, the crowd burbled with delight. India had scored 338 – a huge total – of which Tendulkar had hit 120. Even the English supporters probably thought this was too much for their team, who had a poor reputation in one-day cricket. Indeed, no side had chased so many runs in Bangalore.
Yet England got off to a thumping start. They scored 63 in nine overs, before India made a fluky breakthrough. Kevin Pietersen, a thrilling long-limbed hitter, walloped a ball straight at the head of the Indian bowler Munaf Patel, who stuck out his hands to save his life. He then landed in a heap on the ground, followed by the ball, which landed almost in his lap.
But the other opener, the captain Andrew Strauss, was playing the innings of his one-day career. Pulling anything short for four and cutting fiercely, he raced to a run-a-ball century looking like the world’s best batsman, which he was not. Batting was easy on this pitch, it was now clear. The crowd gave Strauss’s hundred a brief, not ungenerous, burst of applause.
Yet as the evening sky darkened at a rush and the floodlights came on, the stadium hushed. Strauss and his partner, Ian Bell, looked untroubled by India’s bowlers and were scoring freely. England’s captain slapped a long-hop from the spinner Piyush Chawla for four – and that was his 150. England, with only two wickets down, now needed 67 to win at less than six an over. It looked to be all over.
The crowd started flooding from the stadium. I turned to say something to Nishik, but he had already gone. The VVIP pavilion was now almost empty. Ronak turned to me, as disgusted spectators flowed silently past to the stairs, with a look of embarrassment. ‘You should know, we are very bad losers,’ he said glumly.
‘Why is that?’
‘Because we make it more than a game.’
His friend in the blue wig sat hunched and disconsolate beside him. The floodlights shimmered off his plastic curls. The party was over.
India’s captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni summoned his main fast bowler, Zaheer Khan, for a last try. The crowd gave a burst of hopeful applause; no one looked confident.
‘We’re just trying to get something good out of this terrible day,’ said Ronak.
‘Has it really been that bad?’
‘Not for me,’ he said, looking wretched. ‘But I’m not a diehard.’
But then everything changed. Bell, looking to heave Zaheer for another six, looped a catch to mid-off. The crowd roared – and kept roaring as, next ball, Strauss fell lbw. A thunder of cheering rang out as the Indian fielders, like silent movie stars, started hopping up and down, clapping and encouraging the bowlers. No one was leaving now.
The new batsmen looked anxious, as anyone would. A deafening chant of ‘Ind-i-a! Ind-i-a!’ ‘Jee-te-ga! Jee-te-ga!’ filled the stadium. Two more wickets fell.
The noise was now so loud it was possible to imagine, in the weird silver light, that the air was visibly pulsating because of it. The chanting got quicker, louder and more emotional. ‘India! Indiaaa!’ ‘Jeetega! Jeetegaaa!’ The crowd was pleading for a wicket. A shower of shredded silver foil swirled down from the upper tiers across the pitch, sparkling like fireflies in the floodlights.
‘Indiaaa!’ ‘Jeetega!’
Another wicket fell. England were imploding. They were now way off the pace. They needed 29 off the last two overs, with their tailenders at the crease. They were being beaten by Zaheer, the pressure and the hostility of crowd.
The spectators around me were standing and, with one exception, yelling for India and victory. There was a furious urgency to their demands. When Tendulkar got his century the crowd had screamed with warmth and happiness; now its chanting was rhythmic and nasty. People were screaming – actually screaming – for India to win.
I looked from one snarling face to the next and wondered what I was seeing. It didn’t feel threatening. It wasn’t like being in a riot. It was like being in a dream riot, which had gone on so long it seemed almost real. Scanning the stand behind me, I briefly glimpsed the group of middle-aged English tourists. Standing rigid, staring at the pitch, they looked stunned.
But the England bowlers could bat. Graeme Swann, a cocky Nottinghamshire off-spinner, clouted a huge six over midwicket and three balls later his partner, Tim Bresnan, an unflappable Yorkshireman, did the same. A howl of anguish tore through the stadium, followed by louder and more urgent chanting, ‘India! India!!’ Next ball, Bresnan took another heave and was bowled. All around me families, friends and perfect strangers were jumping up and down and embracing each other.
This was the moment for which Ronak’s friend had worn his blue wig. Leaping on to his seat, he arched himself backwards, cupped his mouth with both hands, opened his lungs and crowed, ‘India!! Indiaaa!!’ and then waited for the response. ‘Jeetega!! Jeetega!!’
Bending backwards again, he repeated the same jugular-popping scream: ‘India!! Indiaaa!!’ And again the crowd did as he demand
ed, shouting back, ‘Jeetega! Jeetega!’
The only Indian not screaming was Ronak. He stood silently next to me, in the thick of this mania, even when his friend in the blue wig almost fell on top of him. This was, I felt sure, meant as a courtesy to me and I was grateful for it; though I hoped I wasn’t spoiling his fun.
England needed 14 off the last over, which Patel would bowl. Swann scrambled just three off the first two balls and the crowd screamed out, more confident now. Then the new batsman, Ajmal Shahzad (born in Yorkshire, just like Bresnan), hit another huge six back over Patel’s head. The crowd groaned; then roared, as Shahzad missed the next ball and the batsmen muddled through for a bye.
England needed four off two balls to win, then two off the last, which Swann drove hard. He middled it, but straight to mid-off for a single. The scores were level and the match, momentously, a tie – the rarest result in cricket. And all at once the crowd was silent. There was suddenly no shouting at all, a contrast as dramatic as the tumult that had preceded it. Chatting calmly, or silently nursing their raw throats, the spectators filed peacefully out of the stadium and went home to bed.
India’s television revolution started with a war. In 1990 Saddam Hussein’s army rolled into Kuwait, imperilling, among others, a million and a half Indian migrants working in the Gulf. This created huge demand in India for news of the war, which Doordarshan, with its antique news bulletins, dominated by monsoon reports and the daily life of the prime minister, could not meet. But a new and rollicking sort of cable television entrepreneur could. In late 1990 and early 1991, as Operation Desert Storm was brewing, hundreds of small satellite dishes were set up in India to bring live coverage of the war to Indian homes via CNN.