by James Astill
‘But aren’t you afraid they will find you again?’
He shook his head, and then silently to the ceiling. ‘Allah,’ the gesture meant, ‘will decide.’
CHAPTER SIX
Cricket, Caste and the Countryside
By 7am the sun was climbing over Dharavi, a big slum in Mumbai, and a symphony of clanging metal and whirring machinery resounding from its thousands of hut factories. The working day had begun. In cramped and murky spaces, poor slum-dwellers were labouring to produce shoes, clothes, toys and recycled materials, goods worth millions of dollars a year in exports alone. Dharavi, a square mile of low-rise wood, concrete and rusted iron, is one of the biggest slums in Asia. It is also, amid the poverty and filth, astonishingly industrious.
Chetan Jaiswal, a 26-year-old slumdog, had found better employment, working at a stockbrokers in the nearby district of Bandra. We had arranged to meet on a Monday morning, before he left the slum to spend his day ‘sitting in front of a computer screen, buying shares for people,’ and Chetan was anxious not to be late. He was waiting for me, motorbike helmet in hand, on a busy thoroughfare bordering the slum. Yet Chetan, who was reckoned to be the best cricketer in Dharavi, had time for a five-rupee cup of chai and a chat.
He had had a good weekend. The previous day Chetan had taken four for 14 for his company, Total Securities, playing on Azad Maidan. As we sat down on a roadside seat to drink our tea, he modestly accepted my congratulations. ‘I am very lucky,’ he said. ‘Because of cricket I can live, I can work, I can give money to my family. It means I have my bike, it means I can roam with my friends. Cricket is my life.’
Dharavi, which I had visited often during my time in India, was cricket-mad. The great majority of its million inhabitants, a multitude of poor migrants drawn to Mumbai from all over India, seemed to love the game. Yet there is no record of the slum having produced a single first-class cricketer, and it was easy to see why.
It has no sports facilities. To play games of tennis-ball cricket, Dhjaravi’s youngsters had only three nearby yards to choose from, including the Dharavi-Sion Sports Club, which I had visited the previous day. It was optimistically named. Half an hour’s walk from the slum, the club was merely half an acre of bare, gritty ground.
This made Chetan’s achievements all the more impressive. The son of a poor migrant from Uttar Pradesh, he had learned cricket playing in cramped alleys inside Dharavi. It had been obvious from early on that he had a talent. ‘I was always better than the others,’ he said with the same imposing self-confidence – the testosterone-whiff of a sportsman – that Arvind Pujara had radiated. So Chetan’s father, who worked as a porter in Mumbai’s port, sent him as a 15th-birthday present to the nearby Matunga Gymkhana. That gave Chetan his first experience of real cricket, played with a hard leather ball, and he found the adjustment hard. ‘I was terrified of the ball,’ he confessed. ‘I still am.’
Yet he visited the Gymkhana for only a few weeks – it cost 350 rupees a month, which was more than his father could afford. But through hard work Chetan had proceeded to Mumbai University to study physics, where he got another opportunity to play pukka cricket. And despite his fear of the hard ball, he hit centuries in two of his first college games. This sparked the interest of Total Securities.
The company provided Chetan with cricket kit and smuggled him into its side to play on the maidans. And when he completed his studies it offered him a job and wages of 17,000 rupees a month. That was almost twice what Chetan says he would otherwise have earned working in a call-centre. Thereby he had been able to help support his parents and three younger siblings. ‘We needed another breadwinner in our family,’ he said. ‘And by God’s grace, through cricket I was able to provide.’
On a national scale, Chetan’s sporting achievements were modest. But viewed against the extreme poverty of his opportunities, they were impressive. He was reckoned to be the only semi-professional cricketer in Mumbai’s biggest slum. His success was also remarkable in another way.
Chetan and his family are Chamars, members of a Hindu leatherworking community traditionally considered ‘untouchable’ – that is, defiling to high-caste Hindus. According to an early British ethnographer, George W. Briggs, who studied the community in the early 20th century, ‘the Chamar occupies an utterly degraded position in the village life, and he is regarded with loathing and disgust by the higher castes. His quarters abound in all kinds of abominable filth. His foul mode of living is proverbial. Except when it is absolutely necessary, a clean-living Hindu will not visit his part of the village.’
Chamars shared this reviled status with roughly a sixth of India’s population – around 200 million people today. In British times, untouchables were referred to as ‘depressed classes’. Today they are known by a Marathi translation of that phrase, as Dalits. And they are still depressed. Over six decades after caste discrimination was formally abolished in India, Dalits are among its poorest and most illiterate people. Not coincidentally, since 1947 only one Dalit is known to have played cricket for India.
This is a powerful indication of the elitist turn Indian cricket took after 1947. Yet it also has a peculiar resonance, because of what went before. In the first two decades of the 20th century, Indian cricket had several prominent Dalit stars, most of whom were from a single Chamar family – the remarkable Palwankars.
The eldest Palwankar, Baloo, was born in 1875 in the south Indian town of Dharwad. But the family moved soon afterwards to Poona in Maharashtra, where Baloo’s father found work with the army. After some cursory schooling, Baloo and his younger brother Shivram were hired as groundstaff by the local Parsi Gymkhana. There they learned to play cricket, messing about with whatever kit their Parsi employers left lying around. And soon their duties included bowling at the members in the club nets.
In 1892, or thereabouts, Baloo was hired in the same capacity by the local European Gymkhana. This brought him into contact with one of the foremost cricketers of the Raj, Captain John Glennie ‘Jungly’ Greig (his nickname was earned not by hunting tigers, but by the sound of his full name said quickly). Baloo and Jungly, a Kiplingesque combination, began practising together every morning, the untouchable groundsman wheeling in to deliver his left-arm spinners to the British officer.
This was lucky for Greig, too, because Baloo was a natural. Early appreciations of his bowling note the smooth flow of his action, his ability to turn the ball both ways, and his magnificent control. ‘One of the best native bowlers,’ the great Parsi bowler Dr M.E. Pavri wrote of Baloo in 1901. ‘Has both breaks and a curl in the air and has a lot of spin on the ball. The most deadly bowler on a sticky wicket.’
Word of the talented Dalit quickly spread around Poona. Soon the city’s Hindu Gymkhana was considering Baloo for a grudge match against the local Europeans. Its Brahmin players, members of the Hindu priestly caste, were not keen on the idea of taking the field with a Chamar. But Jungly told the local press they would be mad to leave Baloo out. And sense, if not decency, prevailed. Baloo was picked for the Hindus and helped them to a famous victory. But though his high-caste team-mates would take the field with the untouchable spinner, they would not take tea with him. While they repaired to the pavilion for refreshment, Baloo was directed to a stool on the boundary, where he was served tea in a disposable clay cup by an untouchable servant.
It is a paradoxical image: the poor Dalit bowler in spotless cricket whites, yet shunned by his own team-mates. This illustrates something of the contradictory attitude towards the caste system that prevailed under the British.
They were at once fascinated and appalled by it. Since the early 19th century, British liberals had identified caste discrimination as a great evil and barrier to India’s progress. For James Mill, whose 1818 History of British India was a powerful influence on generations of colonial officers, it produced nothing but ‘indolence, avarice, lack of cleanliness, venality and ignorance’. But unlike other abhorrent Hindu customs, such as child marriage or sati (the
practice of wives throwing themselves on to their husband’s funeral pyre), the British made no serious attempt to end the caste system.
Much as they deplored it, they saw the system as a crucial source of stability, without which ‘order would vanish and chaos would supervene’. They therefore enshrined in their laws a highly theoretical and rigid definition of the caste system, which they learned from certain medieval Brahmin texts. These ordered Hindu society into four groups, or vedas, as follows: priestly Brahmins; Kshatriyas, a class of warriors and rulers; Vaishyas, the farming and merchant castes; and, beneath these groups the Shudra labouring castes. Untouchables formed a subhuman fifth category, technically outside the caste system altogether.
Caste discrimination was not outlawed until India’s independent constitution was adopted in 1949. Yet it was already by then much reduced. Though still widely practised in the countryside, observance of untouchability was hardly evident in India’s cities – caste distinctions being hard to enforce where people live crowded together and work outside their traditional occupations. British rule also created unprecedented opportunities for low-caste Hindus. By 1856 a third of the army of Bombay was from the untouchable Mahar community. At the battle of Kohima in 1944, when British and Commonwealth troops turned back the advance of the Japanese, the newly formed Chamar Regiment was in the thick of the action.
By early 1897 Baloo had moved to Bombay, initially to work for the army. And his cricket career soon flourished there. When the Hindus made their victorious debut in the Bombay Triangular in 1906, Baloo was their star turn. He took eight wickets against the Europeans, an achievement celebrated by Bombay’s budding liberal intelligentsia, for whom nationalism and eradicating casteism were twin causes. For the Indian Social Reformer, Baloo’s match-winning turn was ‘a landmark in the nation’s emancipation from the old disuniting and denationalising ways’. It was well said. The relative ease with which the gifted untouchable found cricketing opportunity in Bombay, at the highest level of the Indian game, shows the extent to which urban India was modernising.
The following year Baloo took 13 wickets against the Europeans, and scored a fifty. The untouchable spin-bowler was now unstoppable. On the inaugural All-India tour of England, in 1911, he almost single-handedly upheld the honour of Indian cricket. Though the Indians won only two of their 14 first-class matches, Baloo’s bowling was magnificent. He took 75 first-class wickets at an average of 20.12 runs per wicket. By the standards of a bowler-friendly time, that was not quite as world-beating as it may now appear. At least 20 English county bowlers had better records that summer. But it confirmed Baloo’s status as one of India’s finest bowlers. His younger brother Shivram, the second of four cricketing Palwankar brothers, was also on the tour. He came second in the Indian batting averages and scored a match-winning century against Somerset.
On his return from England, Baloo was given a welcome reception by the ‘Depressed classes of Mumbai’. At this event a congratulatory speech was delivered by a talented Mahar student, one Bhimrao Ambedkar. Another son of a soldier, Ambedkar was a future scholar, politician and architect of India’s constitution. This was his first recorded public appearance.
Baloo was now joined in the Hindus side by one or more of his brothers, Shivram, Ganpat and Vithal. Together they helped deliver four further tournament victories for the Hindus up to 1920. In 1913 the Hindus fielded a side that included all four Palwankar brothers. Contemporary Indian historians, including Ramachandra Guha, who has done wonderful service in rescuing the brothers from obscurity, have tended to focus on the discriminatory slights they sometimes suffered. Yet, at a time when untouchability was still legal and casually practised in much of India, the degree to which they were accepted by Bombay’s cricketing elite seems more remarkable.
In 1921 Gandhi launched a national campaign against untouchability. For Gandhi, too, this was a necessary precondition to India achieving swaraj, or self-rule. ‘Swaraj,’ he declared, ‘is a meaningless term if we desire to keep a fifth of India under perpetual subjection, and deliberately deny to them the fruits of national culture.’
The Palwankars were not merely enjoying India’s national culture, they were making it. Baloo hung up his bowling boots that same year. But in 1922 the Hindu Gymkhana awarded Vithal Palwankar its captaincy – an honour some felt Baloo had been wrongly denied. Tall and graceful at the crease, Vithal ranked close to C.K. Nayudu as a batsman: they ended their careers with almost the same first-class batting average, a little over 35. But Vithal was a more successful captain. He led the Hindus to three tournament victories in four years. He was also their captain on that memorable day in 1926 when Nayudu destroyed the MCC’s bowling on the Bombay Gymkhana ground.
By the time Vithal retired in 1932, the Palwankars had been mainstays of the Hindus side for three decades. Meanwhile the fight against untouchability was one of the hottest issues of the freedom struggle. No wonder the historian Guha has compared the significance of the brothers’ achievements to those of black American sports stars such as Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali, heroes of the civil rights movement. Yet, despite the remarkable political resonance of their triumphs, the Palwankars are hardly remembered in India today, and then only by a small tribe of cricket aficionados.
That is not because the heat has gone out of caste politics. Quite to the contrary – Indian politics has been transformed over the past two decades by the rise of parties dedicated to serving Dalits and other low-caste Hindus. India’s giant state of Uttar Pradesh has been ruled by the biggest of them, the Bahujan Samaj Party, on four occasions, and is now littered with statues of Dalit politicians. But I know of no memorial, anywhere in India, to Baloo the untouchable cricketer.
This is, most obviously, another sign of modern India’s obsession with politics. Yet there is another reason why Baloo is not celebrated by Dalit activists – it is that Baloo became a politician himself and ended up on the wrong side of history.
By the late 1930s the campaign against untouchability had broken into two main factions. The more popular was led by Gandhi, who considered untouchability an abomination, but otherwise approved of the caste system. ‘I consider the four divisions alone to be fundamental, natural and essential,’ he once said. The other faction was led by Ambedkar, who took a more absolutist view of the problem. He saw caste discrimination as inseparable from Hinduism and considered upper-caste Hindus incapable of delivering the equality that Gandhi preached. ‘Inequality is the soul of Hinduism,’ he declared.
Ambedkar therefore rejected Gandhi’s leadership and even Hinduism. In 1936 he declared that he ‘would not die a Hindu’. The following year Ambedkar led a low-caste opposition to Congress – the Scheduled Caste Federation – in India’s first provincial elections.
He himself stood for a seat in the Bombay assembly. Congress put up his old hero Baloo to stand against him. The former cricketer had remained a prominent champion of his benighted caste. Devoted to Gandhi, Baloo similarly saw the improvement of the untouchables’ lot as an ongoing project within Hinduism. He also saw great progress in this regard. In the cities Baloo believed caste discrimination was no longer much of a problem. The election, in the event, was a close-run contest, but Baloo lost this one. Ambedkar won by 13,245 votes to his 11,225.
Ambedkar, of whom there are statues everywhere in UP, went on to greater things. India’s constitution is a triumph of liberal values and one of the country’s enduring strengths. But in 1956 he died, shortly after converting to Buddhism along with half a million of his Mahar followers, a disappointed man. None of the three political parties Ambedkar established gathered much support beyond his caste. Most Dalits supported Congress, as they would do for the next three decades. Dalits, along with Muslims and Brahmins, were one of the three assured vote-banks that kept Congress in power.
But during the 1980s Dalits abandoned Congress for the Bahujan Samaj Party and other low-caste outfits. The single policy demand of these parties was for an increase in handouts
to low-caste Hindus, chiefly by expanding a longstanding system of positive discrimination. On the basis of this, at least half of India’s public-sector jobs and places in schools and colleges are now reserved for low-caste Hindus and members of other disadvantaged groups. In Tamil Nadu a staggering 69 per cent of government jobs are thus sewn up. This caste-based patronage, besides having a damaging effect on the institutions affected, has caused huge resentment and enshrined caste identity in Indian politics.
There is little evidence it has improved the lot of Dalits, who remain one of India’s poorest groups. Yet in other ways caste is becoming less important in Indian society, as is again most obvious in the cities. Well-educated Dalits, like Chetan the Dharavi cricketer, are no different from any other middle-class Indian. They share the same tastes in film, music and cricket, perform the same religious devotions and probably hold much the same political views. They are unlikely to suffer caste discrimination, especially in the workplace, which is becoming increasingly meritocratic as the private sector expands. When, in 2008, the BSP and other low-caste parties demanded that India’s leading IT companies – including Wipro, TCS and Infosys – hire a certain quota of low-caste Hindus, the companies didn’t know how to respond. A boss of Infosys told me this was because they had no idea what castes their existing workers belonged to.
In middle-class India, caste is mainly important in the marriage market: as it was for those Brahmin cricketers on Azad Maidan, playing for the honour of their ancestral villages and to keep their small community together. Yet inter-caste marriages are becoming more common. The matchmaking website Jeevansathi.com reports that around 60 per cent of its online matches are across caste lines. The advertisements (or ‘matrimonials’) that young Indians post on such sites suggest they are increasingly more bothered about a future mate’s occupation and level of income than caste. The acronym ‘CNB’, which stands for ‘caste no bar’, is displayed increasingly. Chetan reckoned he was typical of this trend. He expected to have a love marriage – even though, by happy circumstance, his girlfriend was also a Chamar. (Dalits, it is worth noting, are no less fastidious about such distinctions than any other Hindu.)