Historian Ramchandra Guhas latest book The Commonwealth of Cricket chronicles his tryst with cricket as player, spectator and administrator and how it was a way of life in an age of innocence that is coming to an end
Ramachandra Guha. AFP File
The administrators of the Indian Premier League are to cricket what the proponents of the theory of love jihad are to inter-faith marriages – heartless interlopers who insist on poisoning the idea of romance to achieve their dubious goals. The former have commodified cricket as never before, even going to the extent of fixing matches, as is alleged. The latter have turned love into a conspiracy against the society. The continuing rise of these two groups threatens to bring the era of innocence to a definite end. Not surprisingly, they are conjoined through familial ties – Home Minister Amit Shah's son is the Indian cricket board (BCCI) secretary; its treasurer is Union Minister Anurag Thakur's brother.
The fading away of innocence underlies historian Ramachandra Guha's The Commonwealth of Cricket, his latest book, which exuberantly sketches out the origin of his enchantment with cricket, his relative lack of exploits in school and college games, his passion for watching matches, his adulation of players, from club to Ranji to national levels, and why they and their performance became his memory. His exuberance segues into pessimism as he narrates his experience of trying to reform BCCI, after he was drafted into a Supreme Court-mandated four-member Committee to do so.
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Guha describes himself as "Accidental Administrator", a variation on the title of journalist Sanjaya Baru's The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh. The accidental prime minister lasted all of 10 years, largely because he subordinated his authority to that of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and compromised on issues dear to him. Not so Guha. Realising he could not overcome the veritable Czars of Cricket to reform BCCI, he simply quit.
Guha's was a wise decision. For one, the Supreme Court lost its enthusiasm to reform BCCI, rather inexplicably. After all, the same court did not hesitate to supervise the complex task of preparing the National Register of Citizens in Assam. For the other, Guha did not receive the support of two Committee members, Vinod Rai and Vikram Limaye. This is the same Rai who, as Comptroller and Auditor General, became a national hero for his report on the 2G scam, which a Delhi court subsequently found baseless.
Guha's appointment to the Committee had the Right-wing trolls snarling. They jubilated at his departure. They seek to devour both love and cricket. Lovers and cricketers have only passion as their armour. It is, therefore, not surprising that Guha's reformist zeal had only the support of Diana Edulji, the former Indian women's team captain, who was the Committee's fourth member.
Guha, the spectator, has watched dozens of Test matches from packed stands, and played inter-college finals before thousands of spectators. As for Edulji, I remember her turning out, in November 1976, for an India XI against West Indies, watched by an estimated 25,000-30,000 people in Patna. One afternoon, the spectators took to roaring even as a player would walk up to her bowling mark. It was not an exhibition of chauvinism. They were, it so happened, listening to their transistor radios, cheering Bishan Singh Bedi as he slogged the Kiwis, in Kanpur, to a half century, his highest Test score. Perhaps Guha and Edulji were on the same page because they had, in their own ways, experienced the romance of the "most subtle and sophisticated game known to humankind" – and aspired to reclaim it for those young.
Indeed, what do they know of cricket who only IPL know? Guha's book vividly captures how cricket was romanced and remembered in the age of innocence. Cricket mirrored a way of life. It is nearly impossible that a Test player today would interrupt his career to complete his engineering course, as EAS Prasanna did. You cannot have an S Venakataraghavan who, even as he waited for his turn to bat, sketched a boiler of an industrial unit to instruct the repairman on how to plug a leak. Guha's college contemporary Arun Lal got a first class in economics, yet went on to play for India; another team-mate, Piyush Pandey, is an advertising guru.
Perhaps their textured life was because of their elite background. Cricket has gained from its democratisation, a point Guha makes. Yet, sadly, this has also produced unidimensional men, skilled at little else other than cricket. This explains why many slip into depression once they realise they are not good enough to earn a living from cricket.
IPL aficionados will diss Guha for his romanticism. But they are unlikely to remember 2020 IPL in 2040 in the manner Guha recalls Tests watched in his childhood. Twenty20 cricket, with its sameness and repetition, is not conducive to build memory around it. Our collective memory at the end of the era of innocence will be a swamp of traumas. Guha learnt cricket in the picturesque Dehradun, which now strives to acquire the sameness of an urban sprawl, with malls replacing its charming bungalows, its forest denotified to expand its airport, its Rispana river fetid with human excesses, bearing little resemblance with Qurratulain Hyder's description of its pristine, gurgling waters in Ships of Sorrow. This age can only spawn IPL and love jihad. This age can only throttle romance.
The writer is a senior journalist
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