The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  It was complete nonsense. Pepsi was not the cool outsider portrayed in the ad: it was the dominant foreign player in India’s soft drinks market. But the campaign was subversive and very popular. ‘It was about how the game had changed,’ said Ms Chauhan. ‘It had got faster, coloured clothing had come in, it had got cooler. The undercurrent was “official is boring”, “official is the done thing”.’ It was also, as another popular subtext, about two of the world’s most iconic firms fighting for Indians’ favour. ‘Everybody loved that, having these big guys, these big colas slugging it out,’ recalled Ms Chauhan. ‘It was just like America, just like abroad.’

  Humiliated by Pepsi’s coup, Coke started signing up its own stable of Indian cricketers shortly after the World Cup. This was the time at which the celebrity and wealth of Indian cricketers began to rocket. Shortly before the tournament Tendulkar had signed a deal with Mark Mascarenhas’s management agency guaranteeing him $7.5 million in sponsorship deals over the next five years.

  Indian cricket was suddenly suffused with commercialism and aggressive nationalism and some saw a link between the two. ‘Perhaps,’ ventured Wisden, ‘we should not be too harsh on the individuals responsible for the riot in Calcutta. They were merely responding to the seductions created for them by the promoters of the Wills World Cup, an event that plainly, disastrously, put money making above all the fundamentals of organising a global sporting competition. As the glamorising of the Indian and Pakistani cricketers reached new and absurd heights, so too did the unshakeable belief of the masses in their invincibility.’

  There may be some truth in this. Yet the association between cricket and nationalism predated the opening of India’s economy to foreign fizzy drinks. The belligerent mood of Indian cricket crowds at this time also reflected what was happening in Indian politics. In the 1990s it was dominated by the rise of Hindu nationalism, a nasty and illogical ideology, which played to the worst Islamaphobic instincts of many Hindus.

  Its march was fuelled by an act of vandalism. In 1992, whipped up by cynical politicians, a Hindu mob demolished the medieval Babri mosque in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The vandals believed it had been built over the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. This led to the worst wave of Hindu–Muslim rioting in India since 1947 and, in turn, swelled the following of a small Hindu nationalist outfit, the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose leaders had played a lead role in the mosque’s destruction. In India’s 1984 general election the BJP won two seats. In the 1996 election – a few months after the World Cup – it won 161 and briefly formed India’s government.

  There were, of course, deeper reasons for Hindu nationalism’s sudden surge. They included India’s long years of economic failure. As a result, India had provided too little opportunity for its vast and fast-growing population, which in turn gave a dangerous primacy to political patronage, in the form of the government jobs, subsidies and free services with which politicians reward their supporters. The rise of Hindu nationalism was in part a symptom of this. It can be seen as a counterattack by high-caste Hindus, the BJP’s core supporters, against a wave of new low-caste political parties, which were at this time threatening to deprive them of government jobs and other state favours.

  The chauvinism displayed by Indian cricket crowds was, then, not merely a thuggish response to new wealth. It was also a product of India’s dismal economic performance – which had forced India to open its economy with such dramatic consequences, including for Indian cricket. As the single main portal for advertising goods and services to a billion current or future consumers, it was being showered with cash. And this drenching would only intensify.

  The 1996 World Cup marked the onset of a massive expansion in India’s cricket economy. In a time of accelerating economic growth, no industry grew faster than cricket. In 1999 the BCCI again sold five-year rights to Indian cricket, this time to Doordarshan, for almost $60 million. Seven year later, ESPN Star Sports bought the rights to two ODI World Cups, the first two T20 World Cups and three renditions of a lesser tournament, the Champions Trophy, for $1.1 billion.

  This was in line with a global trend. In 1992 Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV bought the rights to Premier League football and promptly rekindled its fortunes. ‘Sport absolutely overpowers film and everything else in the entertainment genre,’ the mogul declared, and spurred his executives to buy up as much of it as they could, not least in India, where Murdoch’s company part-owned two sports channels – Star Sports and ESPN. In a 1996 speech to shareholders, Murdoch predicted, ‘We will be doing in Asia what we intend to do elsewhere in the world, using sports as a battering ram and a lead offering in all our pay-television operations.’

  Across America, Asia and Europe, sport was now being deluged with television bucks. Sky paid £304 million for its first lot of five-year Premier League rights; by 2012 they cost over £3 billion. In the process, English football has been transformed. Premier League clubs bought up the best foreign players, vastly improving the standard of the league, which in turn made it much more popular.

  In India, this money-storm has been even more dramatic. Satellite television’s discovery of sport has coincided in India with the opening of one of the world’s biggest, fastest growing and least developed consumer markets. According to McKinsey, a management consultancy, the Indian middle-class is likely to grow from around 50 million in 2005 to 583 million in 2025. The size of the Indian consumer market will meanwhile quadruple. Capturing the affections of these future Indian shoppers is one of the biggest prizes in global advertising – and advertising on cricket is by far the best way to attempt this. In 2011 Indian advertisers spent $3 billion to buy airtime on televised cricket, representing 90 per cent of the total TV ad spend on sport in India, and a quarter of the total spent on television advertising. Cricket accounts for an estimated 60 per cent of Pepsi’s entire Indian advertising budget.

  Commercially and otherwise, cricket has indeed overpowered all other forms of Indian entertainment – including Indians’ erstwhile favourite, film. ‘Bollywood is very big, it has a very broad appeal in India,’ Uday Shankar, the boss of Star India, told me. ‘But it doesn’t have the reach of cricket.’ In fact Indians are not only turning on televisions to watch cricket – they are actually buying them for that purpose. ‘Cricket has played a huge role in the growth of cable television, driving its penetration all over India,’ explained Shankar. ‘Because cricket is what people want to watch.’

  Cricket’s predominance in Indian media can also be seen by comparison with its other main rival for Indian eyeballs, Hindi soap operas. They are another oddity of Indian TV. Every evening, between seven and 11 o’clock, dozens of Hindi entertainment channels each show at least half a dozen of these family sagas, running consecutively in half-hour slots. The Zee network has more than 30 different soaps on its schedule. In those four soap-sudded hours Hindi entertainment channels generate more than half their profits.

  The craze began in 2000, with the tearaway success of a soap shown on Star Plus, written and produced by a 22-year-old prodigy called Ekta Kapoor, a daughter of a veteran Bollywood star called Jitendra. It was called Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, or ‘Because a Mother-in-Law Was Once a Daughter-in-Law’, and followed the fictive fortunes of Tulsi Virani, a pious Gujarati woman married into an extended family of Gujarati industrialists.

  I called on Kapoor in the Mumbai offices of her production company, Balaji Telefilms. She was wearing jeans and a tight white T-shirt embossed with a glittery union flag, and flicked her long black hair from her eyes theatrically as she spoke. Kyunki, she said, was her attempt to produce a more Indian-style plot than had previously existed on Indian TV. It was based on familiar Indian archetypes, a good housewife and her jealous, scheming harridan of a mother-in-law. It was also important to Kapoor that the show should air every evening, an innovation at that time.

  ‘I said, “OK, in America they have weekly soaps, but India has a completely different mindset,”’ Kapoor told me.
‘We Indians love to have daily gossip about our neighbours. We believe in every day wanting to know what’s happening in our neighbours’ house. So what if those neighbours are a whole family that you see on TV every day? And what if we do this with the biggest issue there is in India, which is mother-in-law and daughter-in-law?’

  Within a few months of its debut, Kyunki was drawing over 20 per cent of India’s measurable television audience: roughly equivalent to the most popular cricket match. It would remain the top-rated show on Indian television for eight years. Kapoor was hailed as the ‘queen of Indian television’. Yet the growth in TV-ownership that Kyunki drove also contributed to its demise. As television spread through India’s smaller towns and countryside, the audience became increasingly diverse and less metropolitan in its tastes, and around 2005 Kapoor’s soaps started to fizzle. ‘People in small towns, they want simpler stories, they don’t want a lot of complication,’ she explained, looking rather tense. ‘Our stories were more for the biggest 27 cities, sophisticated, and we had a lot of extramarital affairs, which were clearly not acceptable.’

  No soap has since emulated Kyunki’s dominance of Indian viewers, nor does it seem likely that any could. ‘It would be humongously inhuman to have one person catering to such a variety of tastes,’ Kapoor said. ‘It’s such a vast range. There’s Bihar who wants something, Gujarat who wants something else, there’s some small town, Bhilai or somewhere like that, that wants something different altogether. So now you have very fractured programming.’

  But in all these places Indians want cricket. This demand has had two main effects. First, it has driven a big increase in supply. In the 1980s India played 155 one-day internationals and 42 Tests, potentially adding up to 365 days of cricket. From 2000 to 2009 they played 257 one-day internationals, 47 Tests, plus (appropriately) 20 Twenty20 internationals – a possible 512 days of cricket. Second, this boom has made the BCCI, through its control of Indian cricket, spectacularly rich. In 2011 it generated revenues of over $180 million, which is a lot of money for a volunteer organisation with a legal status similar to that of a private club. Over 80 per cent of cricket’s global revenues are now estimated to be generated in India.

  It is not easy to see where this money gets spent. In 2006 the BCCI claimed to be spending $347 million on upgrading India’s cricket grounds. It has spent much less on unfashionable things like cricket coaching in schools and clubs. According to a 2010 report by India’s tax authority, the BCCI was spending just 8 per cent of its revenue on developing cricket.

  This helps explain why India, despite its windfall, is still much less good at cricket than it should be. It has got better. The past two decades have been easily the most successful in the history of Indian cricket. Yet India still struggles to beat countries with a tiny fraction of its population and enthusiasm for cricket. Over this period it has played New Zealand in 19 Test matches, of which India has won four and lost three. That might sound respectable. But then consider that India has well over a billion people and effectively one sport. New Zealand has four million, and cricket is perhaps their third or fourth favourite game.

  But off the pitch Indian cricket has been transformed. Once a cash-strapped supplicant, the Indian cricket board now more or less controls the political world of cricket. This was a power shift that also became apparent in the run-up to the fateful 1996 World Cup, which England had expected to host. It thought this had been settled by a gentlemen’s agreement at the International Cricket Council – such agreements were the way the ICC had traditionally done business. But India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka challenged that assumption and on 2 February 1993, after an unprecedentedly long and fractious meeting at the ICC, England gave way ‘in the best and wider interests of the world game’. This was the day that power in cricket shifted irrevocably to the east.

  The governance of the game was already changing. Technically, as ‘foundation members’ of the ICC, England and Australia had vetoes, but it was not possible for these to be exercised against Asian opposition without risking complete break-up. Until this time, the ICC had been run under the aegis of the Marylebone Cricket Club. Yet the establishment of an independent secretariat was already imminent, and cricket’s former masters recognised that the ICC must soon have an Indian head. Still, they hoped it would be someone more to their taste than the abrasive and controversial Dalmiya.

  That was a forlorn hope. In 1997 Dalmiya became the ICC’s first Asian leader, with the grand title of president, rather than old-style chairman. Playing to the Indian crowd, Dalmiya himself portrayed this logical shake-up as a continuation of India’s momentous freedom struggle. ‘They were a corrupt kind of a set-up,’ he said of the unreformed ICC. ‘Basically it was England, Australia and New Zealand ... It was more a colony or more a small kind of a club, and we felt it was necessary to change all that.’ Yet Dalmiya was not content with a level playing field: India’s struggle continued. Fuelled by a disorientating combination of postcolonial grudge and ruthless financial self-interest, the BCCI launched, in effect, a campaign for cricketing suzerainty.

  It encountered little resistance. Because of the rocketing sums Indian broadcasters would pay for rights, a home series against India was suddenly the biggest windfall in cricket. This ensured that, by the turn of the century, the BCCI could count on enough votes at the ICC, especially from other Asian cricket boards, to get its way on almost any issue it cared about. Having huffed and puffed to remove from the ICC’s statute the Anglo–Australian veto that was actually never wielded, the BCCI, through its financial stranglehold on the game, had since engineered one of its own. The result is that India can now cherry-pick opponents for its international calendar. It can more or less decide where and when international cricket tournaments are played. It can also demand India-sized exceptions to any ICC agreement, on disciplining players or introducing technology to assist umpires, for example, that it dislikes. As the Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh has noted, ‘this is more than a power shift. It is a change in the nature of power.’

  Australia’s cricketers felt the effects of this change early. By the late 1990s, they had been the world’s best team for a decade, so India’s cricket bosses – responding to pressure from Indian broadcasters and advertisers – wanted them to play India more and more. ‘Suddenly we were going to India all the time,’ Adam Gilchrist, Australia’s star wicketkeeper-batsman, recalled. ‘And not just us, the Australian development side, youth side, they were all coming to India.’ During the 1990s, India played 26 one-day internationals against Australia; in the next decade it played 46.

  At first, most Australian cricketers were, to put it gently, unhappy with this development. Tony Greig’s enjoyment of the rock star status India afforded foreign cricketers was not widely shared among non-Asian players. ‘You could say there was a negative perception of India in the team,’ Gilchrist recalled. ‘It was hot. You got sick.’

  His team-mate Shane Warne was among the gripers. ‘I don’t like spicy food,’ he told me, while in India to play in the IPL. ‘Everything’s spicy here, you know, so I struggled a lot when we played in India. And, of course, the Indians played the spinners really well, so I’d get a bit frustrated and a bit grumpy. They’d smash you all over the park and then you’d come back, it’d be boiling hot, the food was spicy and there were just people yelling and singing all night or whatever they were doing. And you’d just ... Aaaah! There was just no peace and quiet.’

  Whether they liked it or not, the Australians started touring India every other year. This produced some wonderful games, including an Indian victory in Eden Gardens in 2001 which ranks among one of the finest in cricket. Having been dismissed for a paltry 171 in their first innings – 276 short of the Australians total – the Indians were forced to follow on. They then scored 657 for seven, including a glorious double-century by the wristy Hyderabadi V.V.S. Laxman. They proceeded to bowl the Australians out for 212 to record a famous victory. Henceforth Laxman would be known to the Austral
ian cricket press as ‘Very, Very Special’ – not, as he was, Vangipurappu Venkata Sai. This Indian victory was immediately followed by another in Chennai that was almost as dramatic. The Indian media, showing little regard for the Ashes, the venerable rivalry between England and Australia, labelled the battle for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy the greatest in cricket.

  The Aussies were also impressed. When they returned to India in 2004 under Gilchrist’s leadership, they took India much more seriously. They rethought their approach to the country, on and off the pitch. This began, Gilchrist explained, with a decision to stop fighting India’s peculiarities. Abandoning their usual aggressive game, the Australians reconciled themselves to lifeless wickets and the imperative of containing India’s best batsmen. They also made a point of getting out of their hotel rooms more, to soak up a little more of India, and spit less of it back out. They dealt more courteously with the crowds that mobbed them. They kept their cool, and won the series 2-1. For Gilchrist, this was ‘clearly the pinnacle’ of his career.

  In the course of this success, some of the Australian players discovered that India had rather more going for it than they had thought. ‘We came here and saw some of the things that were happening,’ Warne said. ‘The sponsor deals and TV deals.’ The fast bowler Brett Lee was one of the first to cash in. Having signed up as an India ‘brand ambassador’ for Timex watches, he went on to hoover up Indian advertising contracts, appeared in a Bollywood film and also released a self-penned duet with the Hindi singer Asha Bhosle that included the lines, ‘I’m different, I’m not from here/I am just another guy, with blonde hair though.’ He was, if not much of a song-writer, a wonderful fast bowler.

  By the mid-2000s India’s cricket bosses had become as powerful as most Indian politicians. And India’s cricketers were among the world’s richest sportsmen. Tendulkar, by one estimate, was earning nearly $30 a minute – four times what Amitabh Bachchan, India’s most enduring Bollywood megastar, took home. But the third party in India’s new cricket economy, television companies, was growing disaffected.