by James Astill
Cricket was a new hobby for Shahrukh. No one had played the game in his village in West Bengal. I asked him what he liked about the game and, though still watchful, he replied with all his heart. ‘I play cricket with my passion and my emotion. It is my chance to be famous,’ he said.
I asked what his ambitions were, expecting him to say something about cricket, and he looked embarrassed. ‘Any human can dream ...’ he said, reluctantly, shooting a glance at his workmates. ‘I know I am fated to be small and poor but I can always imagine earning a lot of money.’
I asked how much he had in mind. ‘Maybe 6,000 rupees a month,’ he said.
This, then, is also where Indian cricket resides, far from the elite, the corrupt politicians, tycoons and turkey-cocking film stars who have laid claim to it. Here, in the slums and villages, what was once an English game thrills and unites millions – including those, like Asghar, accelerating away from poverty, and many more, like Shahrukh, who have not yet made the break. Cricket is their relief, their excitement, the main ingredient of national culture that they have embraced. It belongs to them too.
With that Asghar and I thanked the boys and turned to clamber back out into the alleyways of Dharavi, into the television noise and light. And, as we went, I noticed that Shahrukh had written his name, ‘SHAHRUKH’ in curly-blue capital letters all over his jeans.
Acknowledgements
During four years living and working in India I travelled thousands of miles to dozens of Indian cities and interviewed many hundreds of people. Yet I resolved to write The Great Tamasha on my doorstep in Delhi, watching a group of children playing games of cricket.
It seemed appropriate: cricket is India’s and my shared passion. It was also more than usually in the news at the time because of the IPL, which was launched shortly after our arrival in Delhi and caused a great political uproar not long before we were due to leave. No news item was consistently bigger in India during these boom years between 2007 and 2010, both for the light the tournament shone on India’s growth and progress, as well as its cricketainment ‘wow’. At a time of gathering global interest in India, foreign correspondents also found themselves writing about Preity Zinta’s glamour quotient and DLF maximums – even those, such as my counterparts at the New York Times, unfamiliar with the language of runs and wickets. That The Economist was interested in Lalit Modi’s billion-dollar baby was less surprising. Unknown to most of its readers, the British weekly is a deeply cricket-loving organ: in the heart of many Economist editors and writers cricket love burns.
Yet having initially resolved to write the story of the IPL, I soon discovered that this would not do. To write so narrow a book on Indian cricket, one which paid no homage to Bombay’s maidans, or to the Indians who have played and spread the game over the decades, or which ignored the many coincidences between cricket and the great events of Indian politics would have been a travesty. As I hope to have shown, I know of no better way to make sense of India, in its vastness and complexity, than through its passion for cricket. And the more I discussed my research with friends and journalistic contacts in Delhi, the clearer this became.
Experts in diverse fields, of politics, business or social affairs, most nonetheless turned out to have strong (sometimes very strong) views on cricket, too. These sources and friends are too many to list here. But of the many brains I have picked for this book, on cricket and otherwise, I owe particular thanks to: Ajay Agnihotri, Imtiaz Ali, Manoj Badale, Abbas Ali Baig, Bishan Singh Bedi, Surjit Bhalla, Pramod Bhasin, Harsha Bhogle, Bharat Bhushan, Adam Gilchrist, Shekhar Gupta, Cyrus Guzder, Peter Griffiths, Dipankar Gupta, Arun Jaitley, Tony Jesudasan, Aamir Khan, Ashok Malik, Amrit Mathur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Himanshu Modi, Lalit Modi, Raju Narisetti, T.N. Ninan, the late Tiger Pataudi, Aditi Phadnis, Sachin Pilot, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Arvind Pujara, Sundar Raman, Mahesh Rangarajan, Sunali Rohra, Rajdeep Sardesai, Ronnie Screwvala, Ashutosh Sharma, Uday Shankar, Lokesh Sharma, Parul Sharma, Y.S. Shatrusalyasinhji, Suhel Seth, Rajeev Shukla, Digvijay Singh, Manjit Singh, Manvendra Singh, Badri Narayan Tiwari and Yogendra Yadav.
I am especially grateful to those who fed and housed me on my travels for this book including: Vivek Narain, Sonia Jehan and Raju Korde in Mumbai, Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin in Lahore, Declan Walsh in Islamabad, Sarah Webster in Delhi, Anwar Ali in Shahabpur and Utpal Pathak in Patna. I am especially grateful to John Haywood who, without a second’s hesitation, gave me a room in his house in Nizamuddin to work from, and to John Driver for the same kindness in Tilton-on-the-Hill.
I am deeply indebted to a group of experts on Indian cricket for all manner of generous help. Gulu Ezekiel, Gideon Haigh, Ramchandra Guha, Ashis Nandy and Vasant Raiji gave me their wonderful books as well as their thoughts. Sandeep Dwivedi and Sharda Ugra, two brilliant cricket journalists, were encouraging and wise counsellors and always ready to help with their contacts. Varun Sood provided superb logistical and intellectual support in Mumbai, especially navigating Bollywood and the television industry. Madhusudhan Rama, a brilliant cricket statistician, ran rigorous and imaginative checks on the caste, religious and regional profiles of Indian cricketers over the decades. He and his colleagues at Cricinfo, one of the great creations of the internet age, are a beacon of hope for serious cricket fans. L.V. Krishnan at TAM was kindness itself in providing me with data on Indian television audiences. I am also extremely grateful to Leo Mirani, for skilfully negotiating the Times of India archives in Mumbai on my behalf.
I am also especially thankful to those who kindly read and commented on the manuscript: Gideon, Sandeep, Sharda, Sambit Bal, M.J. Akbar, Debjeet Kundu, Stephen Brown, Mark Bearn and Barney Ronay. Their criticisms rid it of many errors and infelicities, for which I am deeply grateful. Natasha Fairweather, my paragon of an agent at A.P. Watt, was an unfailing and patient support. I am profoundly grateful to Charlotte Atyeo and Matthew Engel, my outstanding and understanding editors at Bloomsbury. And I am particularly thankful to Indrani Bhattacharya, who runs The Economist’s Delhi office and is a dear and generous friend, meticulous researcher and valued advisor.
I must thank, too, my colleagues at The Economist in London, especially Simon Long. A superb Asia editor and generous predecessor in Delhi, he encouraged me to roam and think freely about the subcontinent, after his own example. I am also grateful to John Micklethwait for sending me to Delhi, which gave me the opportunity to write this book, and then for giving me two bouts of book-leave to finish it.
But my greatest thanks are inevitably to those closest to me, who have put up with my absences while working on the book and have in many ways compensated for them. I owe enormous thanks to my parents-in-law, Rupert and Mary-Blanche Ridge, and to my siblings, Katherine, Matthew and Mark. I owe a big apology to my children, Francis, Tommy and Gabriel, and look forward to spending more time playing cricket with them than writing about it. Above all I am grateful to Mian Ridge, my wife, for her glorious company in India and elsewhere, and for her encouragement and tolerance of me, most of the time. But this book is dedicated to my parents, Michael and Jean Astill, who have a head-start in that regard.
Bibliography
Most of this book was researched from living sources, in scores of interviews with the great and small personages of Indian cricket. But many published records were also essential. In researching the historical sections of this book, I consulted primary or near-contemporary records where possible. On the pre-1947 origins of Indian cricket, the early Parsi cricket chronicles and several colonial memoirs were invaluable sources. The archives of the Times of India in Mumbai were extremely useful. But I was also indebted to several more recent histories.
Ramachandra Guha’s brilliant A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport was a peerless guide to the 19th-century Parsi struggle for a playing space in Bombay, as it was for the biography of Palwankar Baloo. Simon Wilde’s Ranji: A Genius Rich and Strange was a formative rendering of Ranjitsinhji. Boria Majumdar’s Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom
provides the best account of the role of cricket in liberalising India’s airwaves. Richard Cashman’s Patrons, Players and the Crowd was often inspirational on the social composition and economy of Indian cricket’s first independent decades. Mihir Bose’s pioneering A History of Indian Cricket provided a wonderful introduction to the broad sweep of India’s cricketing story.
For the later chapters on the IPL, especially the league’s formation, I made great use of the archives of Cricinfo. They are likely to be the most reliable source for future aficionados.
Among all the books I consulted, the following were especially helpful:
A.G. Bagot, Sport and Travel in India and Central America (London: Macmillan and Co., 1897)
Derek Birley, A Social History of English Cricket (London: Aurum Press, 1999)
Rahul Bhattacharya, Pundits from Pakistan: On Tour with India 2003–04 (Delhi: Picador, 2005)
Mihir Bose, A History of Indian Cricket (London: Andre Deutsch, 1990)
Mihir Bose, A Maidan View: The Magic of Indian Cricket (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986)
Mihir Bose, The Magic of Indian Cricket: Cricket and Society in India (London: Routledge, Sport in the Global Society, 2006)
Mihir Bose, Bollywood: A History (Stroud: Tempus Publishing Ltd, 2006)
Geo W. Briggs, The Chamars (Calcutta: Association Press, 1920)
Richard Cashman, Patrons, Players and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1980)
E. L. Docker, History of Indian Cricket (Delhi: Macmillan, 1976)
Framjee Dosabhoy, The Parsees: Their History, Manners, Customs and Religions (1858) (Delhi: Asian Educational Services, India, 2003)
Tony Greig, Test Match Cricket: A Personal View (Hamlyn, 1977)
Ramchandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport (London: Picador, 2001)
Ramchandra Guha (ed.), The Picador Book of Cricket (London: Picador, 2002)
Ramchandra Guha, Spin and Other Turns (London: Penguin, 1994)
Ramchandra Guha, Wickets in the East (Oxford: OUP, 1992)
Ramchandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London: Pan Macmillan, 2008)
Gideon Haigh, Sphere of Influence: Writings on Cricket and its Discontents (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2010)
C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Hutchinson, 1963)
Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007)
Pradeep Magazine, Not Quite Cricket: The Explosive Story of How Bookmakers Influence the Game Today (Delhi: Penguin India, 2000)
Boria Majumdar, Lost Histories of Indian Cricket: Battles off the Pitch (London: Routledge, 2005)
Boria Majumdar, Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket (Delhi: Viking, Penguin, 2004)
Boria Majumdar, Indian Cricket Through the Ages: A Reader (Oxford: OUP, 2005)
Nalin Mehta, Indian on Television: How Satellite News Channels Have Changed the Way We Think and Act (Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008)
Sujit Mukherjee, Playing for India (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1988)
Sujit Mukherjee, Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer (Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1996)
Ashis Nandy, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (Oxford: OUP, 2007)
J.M. Framji Patel, Stray Thoughts on Indian Cricket (Bombay: The Times of India Press, 1905)
Manekji Kavasji Patel, History of Parsee Cricket (Bombay: J.N. Petit Parsi Orphanage Captain Printing Press, 1892)
M.E. Pavri, Parsi Cricket (Bombay: J.B. Marzban and Company, 1901)
James Pycroft, The Cricket Field (1851) (Milton Keynes: Lightning Source UK Ltd., 2012)
Vasant Raiji, India’s Hambledon Men (Bombay: Tyeby Press, 1986)
Vasant Raiji, C.K. Nayudu: the Shahenshah of Indian Cricket (Mumbai: Marine Sports, 1989)
N.K.P. Salve, The Story of the Reliance Cup (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1987)
Captain James Trevor, The Lighter Side of Cricket (London: Methuen and Co., 1901)
Stephen Wagg (ed.), Cricket and National Identity in the Postcolonial Age: Following On (London: Routledge, 2008)
Simon Wilde, Ranji: A Genius Rich and Strange (London: the Kingswood Press, 1990)
Simon Wilde, Caught: The Full Story of Cricket’s Match-fixing Scandal (London: Aurum Press, 2001)
List of Illustrations
1. Bhupinder Singh, Maharaja of Patiala (turbaned, front row) and A.E.R. Gilligan (on his right), captain of the M.C.C, with their teams around them in Lahore in November 1926. Two weeks later, in Bombay, the M.C.C. side would face the Hindus of India: tougher Indian opponents than they had believed possible.
2. Cricketing prince: K.S. Ranjitsinhji.
3. Cricketing prince: Bhupinder Singh.
4. India’s first batting star, C.K. Nayudu, the great ‘untouchable’ spin-bowler.
5. India’s first batting star, Palwankar Baloo, the great ‘untouchable’ spin-bowler.
6. Wearing solar topees, after the colonial fashion, Syed Wazir Ali (left) and Phiroze Palia walk out to bat against the M.C.C. in Benares in January 1934.
7. Scoreboard operators in Calcutta in 1933.
8. The Maharajkumar of Vizianagram – “Vizzy” – with the All India team mascot in 1936.
9. The Maharajkumar of Vizianagram – “Vizzy” – having unaccountably missed a straight one in Gravesend.
10. India’s captain: Jawaharalal Nehru walking out to bat for the Prime Minister’s XI against the President’s XI
11. The queen is introduced to the Indian side at Lord’s in 1952. She is shaking hands with Sadu Shinde.
12. Tiger Pataudi (in raincoat) arriving in England with his India side in May 1967.
13. The crowd riots at Eden Gardens, Calcutta, in January 1967, interrupting the second day of a Test match between India and West Indies.
14. Cricket on Oval Maidan in Mumbai, a surviving fragment of the 19th century Esplanade – where it all began.
15. Kapil Dev, India’s captain, lifts the World Cup at Lord’s in 1983. India’s shock victory unleashed enormous demand for the one-day game in India.
16. Alongside his friend and batting partner Vinod Kambli.
17. As a teenage India star.
18. Over two decades later, as India’s most-revered celebrity.
19. Wrestling at Nawab Ganj, eastern Uttar Pradesh, in 2010. Tournaments like this one, held to commemorate Gandhi’s birthday, draw big crowds in northern India. But they are becoming rarer, as cricket fever sweeps the countryside.
20. Men and boys gather in a Karachi street to watch a one-day game between Pakistan and India, held in Dhaka in March 2012. Pakistan would win this one.
21. Scenes from the National Stadium in Karachi during the first game of the 2004 India tour of Pakistan. Making a nonsense of pre-match fears, the Karachi crowd gave the Indian team a wonderfully warm welcome.
22. And was rewarded with one of the finest one-day games ever played. The Pakistani attack was led by Shoaib Akhtar, who bowled ferociously that day.
23. Heavyweights from Indian business, politics and film were all drawn to the IPL. Here Mukesh Amnbani (wearing a check shirt), India’s richest man and owner of the Mumbai Indians, talks to BCCI president Sharad Pawar (wearing a white shirt), Lalit Modi (wearing glasses) and Niranjan Shah.
24. Vijay Mallya (here chatting with Modi), added the Royal Challengers Bangalore team to his airlines and liquor empire.
25. Preity Zinta, Bollywood star and co-owner of the Kings XI Punjab team, watches with Ness Wadia, her sometime boyfriend and business partner, as Irfan Pathan is greeted by the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala.
26. IPL cheerleaders represent a big cultural change to a conservative country. They are disapproved of by Hindu nationalist politicians and lusted after by millions of spectators.
27. Cricket in Dharavi, a giant slum in Mumbai. These are the sorts of conditions in which most
Indian cricket is played.
1. Bhupinder Singh, Maharaja of Patiala (turbaned, front row) and A.E.R. Gilligan (on his right), captain of the M.C.C, with their teams around them in Lahore in November 1926. Two weeks later, in Bombay, the M.C.C. side would face the Hindus of India: tougher Indian opponents than they had believed possible.
2. Cricketing prince: K.S. Ranjitsinhji.
3. Cricketing prince: Bhupinder Singh.
4. India’s first batting star, C.K. Nayudu, the great ‘untouchable’ spin-bowler.
5. India’s first batting star, Palwankar Baloo, the great ‘untouchable’ spin-bowler.
6. Wearing solar topees, after the colonial fashion, Syed Wazir Ali (left) and Phiroze Palia walk out to bat against the M.C.C. in Benares in January 1934.
7. Scoreboard operators in Calcutta in 1933.
8. The Maharajkumar of Vizianagram – “Vizzy” – with the All India team mascot in 1936.
9. The Maharajkumar of Vizianagram – “Vizzy” – having unaccountably missed a straight one in Gravesend.
10. India’s captain: Jawaharalal Nehru walking out to bat for the Prime Minister’s XI against the President’s XI
11. The queen is introduced to the Indian side at Lord’s in 1952. She is shaking hands with Sadu Shinde.
12. Tiger Pataudi (in raincoat) arriving in England with his India side in May 1967.
13. The crowd riots at Eden Gardens, Calcutta, in January 1967, interrupting the second day of a Test match between India and West Indies.