The Great Tamasha Read online

  For my parents

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One: Mastering the Game

  Chapter Two: In the Land of the Blind

  Chapter Three: The Cricket Box

  Chapter Four: The Pawar and the Glory

  Chapter Five: Boundaries of Belief

  Chapter Six: Cricket, Caste and the Countryside

  Chapter Seven: Cricket à la Modi

  Chapter Eight: With the Daredevils

  Chapter Nine: Twenty20 Vision

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  Outside the New Delhi bureau of The Economist, where I lived and worked for four years, was a small public garden in which a privileged section of north-Indian society was often on display. A narrow brick pathway tracked the perimeter, around which the local householders paraded in slow circuits early in the morning, before the sun boiled up the sky, or in the lesser heat of dusk.

  The women wore loose Punjabi pyjamas or bright, unflattering tracksuits. Their husbands, wealthy businessmen and senior civil servants, took their turns in small groups and sleeveless shirts and slacks. Almost all wore gleaming white trainers and many brandished swagger sticks, brigadier-style, to ward away the colony dogs. Sometimes they were serenaded by a screeching of peacocks from the neighbouring zoo. Every hour or so, a tiger wretchedly groaned.

  The garden enclosed by the walkway was used by the servants of these wealthy Delhi wallahs. Drivers, guards, housemaids and handymen – launderers of tracksuits, scrubbers of trainers – they loitered off the path in dowdier clothes, smoking, teasing the dogs, snoozing beneath dusty trees or tending the vegetable plots that some had dug slyly beside them. And on a bumpy patch of lawn, especially from October to April when the temperature in Delhi mercifully drops, their children gathered to play cricket.

  Though poor, they were lovingly turned out, often brushed and combed for the school day. Yet they were recognisably of north-Indian servant stock. Skinny boys with the delicate, milk-chocolate features of north-eastern Assam, Darjeeling and Manipur charged in to bowl at dark-skinned Biharis and Bengalis. A pair of skilful Muslim boys, wearing lacy white skull-caps, smashed a worn-out tennis ball to the garden’s furthest corner, where a tiny Christian girl, with plastic rosary beads joggling around her neck, might be sent to retrieve it.

  Snatches of Tamil (or so I was told) marked out the children of the local cooks – Tamil food, low-fat and vegetarian, having become prized in high-cholesterol north India. But mostly the children spoke Hindi, interspersed with the shouted words of English – ‘Bowl it!’ ‘Sixer!’ ‘Catch it!’ ‘Out!’ – that form the lexicon of India’s favourite game.

  This was a scene that, during those four years, I grew attached to. I am a ‘cricket tragic’, in the smug but acute self-description of John Howard, Australia’s former prime minister, and can enjoy watching almost any exhibition of the game. And the more I watched these games, as I paced the pathway, clearing my head of whatever politics or business I was reporting on at the time, the more I enjoyed them.

  I started to recognise and look out for the best batsmen and bowlers, and, over the years, I saw them grow taller and improve. The distance one teenager, with the Asiatic features of the north-east, hit the ball was amazing. And his skills seemed all the more impressive after I, just once, asked to have a go myself and found the splice of the bat he was using was broken almost in two. Swinging that bat without it coming apart in mid-stroke required a difficult grip that my school cricket coach had not taught. I could hardly hit the ball. How the children rifled it high over the trees, endangering passing cars and sometimes their parents’ slowly turning employers, I couldn’t imagine.

  There is scarcely a more poignant image of India than this: of poor children gathering in a crowded Asian city to play cricket. It is suggestive, first of all, of cricket’s spectacular success in India. From northern Kashmir to Kolkata in the east and down to the Tamil south, come monsoon or dry, every day millions of Indians watch and play cricket. When India’s national side plays a big game, perhaps 400 million people gather around television sets, to shout, pray and groan; India’s biggest cities appear to empty – the government, at great cost to the economy, sometimes calls a national holiday.

  India has made an English summer game its own, and in the process changed it. Indian cricket is more popular, more manically followed and, at its infrequent best, more delicately skilful than the game played by any non-Asian country. No English cricket crowd is like the churning, hallooing throngs that fill Indian stadiums. Cricket is India’s national theatre – its great tamasha, a Hindi word for ‘entertainment’, which Indians use promiscuously, in half a dozen languages, to mean a show, a performance or a scene.

  No other British legacy in India, save perhaps the English language, has proved more popular or enduring than cricket. Nothing unites Indians, in all their legions and diversity, more than their love for it. No other form of entertainment – not even Bollywood or politics – is so ubiquitous in India’s media, and no Indian celebrity more revered than India’s best cricketers. ‘God has a new House’ – that is how the Times of India recently splashed on the news that Sachin Tendulkar, the most adored Indian player, had been gifted a seat in parliament.

  And this cricket hysteria – as distinct from the simple game of bat and ball – is itself popular. Indians, segregated by class and divided by Hindu caste and religion, find in all-in-this-together cricket love a reassuring idea of national unity. A clue to this is the stories they love to tell of the real die-hard cricket crazies, half-demented by devotion to the game. Sudhir Gautum is India’s best-known cricketing mendicant. A poor Bihari, he travels the length of the subcontinent to see India play, with his body painted in the colours of the Indian flag and ‘Tendulkar’ written in white paint across his famished belly. In the world of sport, perhaps only Brazilian football plays such an exalted role in national life as cricket does in India.

  Yet the story of Indian cricket is not only about cohesion and success. It is also deeply pathetic. The poor children who play cricket on India’s streets and parks have almost no chance of emulating their heroes and playing for India. They are unlikely even to play an organised game of cricket, with a good bat and leather ball. That is because real cricket, as opposed to street games, is dominated by members of a small and privileged middle-class, albeit to a rapidly diminishing degree. In part, that reflects Indian cricket’s 19th-century origins. It was, from the start, an elite game, picked up by those ambitious to emulate or impress their British masters. Yet India’s failure – over the ensuing 150 years – to spread more cricketing opportunity to its cricket-hungry people is nonetheless lamentable. It is the main reason why India is much less good at cricket than it should be – only fairly recently has India, despite its enormous cricket obsession, become consistently competitive with the teams of much smaller cricketing populations. In a country with a poor record of harnessing the talents of its vast population, this is a significant failure.

  Elite and popular, unifying and exclusionary, polite and uproarious, Indian cricket is as contradictory in nature as India itself. For a cricket-loving foreign correspondent, this offers rich pickings. Watching, playing and, more often these days, talking about cricket are among my greatest pleasures, and India has provided unrivalled opportunity to indulge them. There must be Indian politicians, businessmen and taxi-drivers who do not like to discuss Tendulkar’s batting or India’s prospects against the Australians, but I have rarely met them. Cricket, the shared inheritance of the British Commonwealth, is how I have got closest to India.

  It has also given me a more than useful vantage on to it because, in cricket, a lot of India is reve
aled. It is not always pretty. Indian cricket is perhaps, on balance, a force for unity. Yet caste, religious and regional differences have been played out on many Indian cricket fields; with plenty of ugly nationalism evident in the stands. These are the big conflicts of modern India, great wrestlings over community and identity, and throughout its history Indian cricket has reflected, and sometimes been shaped by, them.

  That is the rough end of Indian cricket politics; the everyday version, the game’s administration, is also pretty unforgiving. Controlling cricket has always been a big prize in India, vied for between princes, businessmen and politicians. But in the past decade or so, that contest, waged in boardrooms and even the Indian parliament, has become a lot more vicious. This reflects the enormous wealth that has flooded into the game – due to the wildfire spread of Indian television and the accelerating economic growth underlying it. When Tendulkar began his long international career in 1989, India had roughly 30 million television households. By the 2011 World Cup, in which Tendulkar played, it had 160 million. This media revolution is transforming India on a scale that is still hard to comprehend, spreading popular culture and a trickle of prosperity to the furthest parts of the country. And cricket, as the most valuable, popular and ubiquitous product in Indian media, is at the heart of this. In a time of great change, Indian cricket is the zeitgeist.

  The Great Tamasha is the story of this phenomenon, the conquest of India by cricket. The first three chapters are broadly historical. They trace the history of the Indian game, from its genesis on the maidans of Victorian Bombay to the recent explosive growth in the TV-cricket economy. Here we will meet some of the great figures of Indian history – including graceful Ranjitsinhji, who won a kingdom with his bat, the one-eyed Nawab of Pataudi, India’s greatest captain, and the leonine Kapil Dev, a genuine Indian world-beater, inspiration to small-town Indians and, incidentally, regular perambulator around the garden outside my office. The three chapters that follow are more explicitly concerned with politics. The first examines Indian cricket administration – which I take to be a rather discouraging case study in how power operates in India. The two that follow explain, first, the vexed role of Muslims and Pakistan in Indian cricket; and, second, that of Hindu caste. These are the dominant themes; the subjects are Indians themselves, politicians, entrepreneurs, cricketers well known and unknown, and many ordinary fans. They are the protagonists in India’s great sports-cultural drama, and their stories, inspiring or pitiful, are also part of it.

  The last three chapters are, directly and otherwise, about the great cricketing event of my time in Delhi – the launch of the Indian Premier League. A domestic Indian competition, founded in 2008 and contested by privately owned, city-based teams, the IPL is the biggest trauma to strike cricket in decades. It uses a new fast-paced, short form of cricket, Twenty20, employs the world’s best players on wages previously unimagined in cricket, plus a lot of shouted American-style razzmatazz. Amazingly, at the time it was introduced, many questioned whether India’s millions of cricket-hungry fans would go for this confection. They have gorged on it. After three six-week seasons, the IPL was estimated to be worth over $4 billion in annual revenues. Even by India’s recent standards, this was eye-watering growth.

  In a venal age, the tournament’s financial success was also part of its appeal. Middle-class Indians, the main beneficiaries of India’s growth spurt, were intoxicated by it. Inevitably the tournament also drew in a powerful horde of investors and chancers – film stars, politicians and billionaire tycoons. The IPL was for many an image of the new India. It was rich, fast and powerful. And it had Western cheerleaders too – white girls in hot pants, dancing with pompoms.

  But then the IPL imploded amid allegations of grand political interference and corruption. It really was, it turned out, an image of the new India – just not as its cheerleaders had sold it. The Great Tamasha describes these events, including through the eyes of the IPL’s divisive Svengali, Lalit Modi. It also examines the league’s recovery and return to soaring growth – calamitous as this may prove for cricket as we know it. The IPL is in a sense the book’s leitmotif. It is the apogee of India’s cricket mania – emblematic of a giant nation’s thrilling, yet fatefully turbulent, rise.

  A Note on Names and Numbers

  Over the past two decades or so, many of India’s biggest cities have been renamed, typically to restore an original place name at the expense of a British colonial garbling of it. Thus, Bombay became (or, some would say, reverted to being) Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, and Calcutta became Kolkata. Poona was rewritten as ‘Pune’ a little earlier, in 1976. Like most Indians, I take a flexible approach to this political name game. When referring to events in these cities in the distant or colonial past, I use their former British-given names; otherwise I use the modern replacement. But I have kept faith with ‘Bangalore’ – its intended successor, ‘Bengaluru’, or ‘the city of cooked beans’, having so far failed to catch on.

  With the essential exception of the word tamasha, I have tried to avoid using Indian words and terminology that are incomprehensible to anyone unused to Indian English. However, it has been impossible to avoid two elements of Indian numbering: a lakh means ‘100,000’ and a crore ‘ten million’.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mastering the Game

  The first of December 1926 was a normal, workaday Wednesday in Bombay, the busiest city in India. But thousands of men and boys awoke that morning with no plans to work.

  By 9am, as the pale morning sun was gathering heat, burning off the night-time haze that hangs over Bombay’s western seaboard, they could be seen streaming towards a grassy park near the island city’s southernmost tip. Known as the Maidan, it was the location of the Bombay Gymkhana, a whites-only sports club with the best pitch in the capital city of Indian cricket.

  A two-day game was in progress between the Marylebone Cricket Club, a proxy for England’s national side, and the Hindus of India. It was one of the biggest social and sporting events in the city for years. The MCC was playing its first game in Bombay on its first ever tour of India. It was also the first major tour of India by foreign cricketers for over two decades, a lag that reflected the intervening war years, but also the low esteem in which Indian cricket was held.

  According to that morning’s Times of India, on sale in Bombay’s streets as the men and boys streamed by, the first day’s play had been watched by ‘vast crowds which thronged the stands, tents, and every possible vantage point, both inside and outside the ground’. Over 20,000 people were said to have attended, including the cream of Bombay’s British society, filling the Gymkhana’s splendid neo-gothic pavilion and lining the seats in front of it. Everyone else was packed into temporary stands built around the boundary’s edge, covered by billowing Mughal-style awnings called shamianas.

  It was a well-informed crowd. The stands either side of the pavilion were reserved for the members of Bombay’s other main sports clubs, the PJ Hindu Gymkhana, under whose aegis the Hindus side was raised, the Parsi Gymkhana, the Islam Gymkhana, the Catholic Gymkhana and so on. The general public was restricted to some seats at the far end of the ground, backing on to the rest of the Maidan. The cheapest were available for one rupee – almost a mill-worker’s daily wage in Bombay at the time.

  It was, in short, a crowd befitting India’s most cosmopolitan, prosperous and cricket-loving city; and, on that first day of the game, it had had a treat. After winning the toss, the MCC had scored 363, including a roistering innings of 130 by the Somerset amateur Guy Earle, with eight sixes, one of which had smashed a window in the pavilion. The Englishmen were all out shortly before the close of play; and the Hindus ended the day uncomfortably on 16 for one.

  This was the sort of dominance the tourists had come to expect in India. They were not the best cricketers England could put out, the England captain A.W. Carr and stars such as Walter Hammond and Herbert Sutcliffe having declined to tour. But it was a strong party, led by a former England ca
ptain, A.E.R. Gilligan. It included another six current and future Test players, among them the fast-medium bowler Maurice Tate and an ancestor of mine, Ewart Astill, a flaxen-haired Leicestershire professional who bowled off-spin and medium-pace cutters. On a six-week sweep of Sind, Punjab and Rajputana – the first leg of a grinding run of 34 matches in four and a half months – the Englishmen were unbeaten. They had won only three of their 12 games; but, had more of the contests been played over three days, instead of two, they would have won many more. No Indian batsman had scored a century against them.

  Even so, Bombay’s cricket fans had been counting on the Hindus to put up a stiffer fight. They were also a strong side, picked from across India to compete in Bombay’s annual cricket tournament, the Quadrangular. A two-week autumn festival held at the Gymkhana Ground, the Quadrangular pitted the Hindus against three other teams defined by race or religion: the Europeans, the Muslims and the Parsis.

  It was India’s toughest cricket contest – also by far the most popular – and the Hindus had won it in three of the previous four years. They could therefore claim to represent not only their co-religionists, but all India. ‘India expects Bombay to do its duty – to check the victorious passage of the visitors,’ sounded the Indian National Herald, a nationalist rag, in the run-up to the MCC game. ‘We depend upon the Hindus to resist the invaders.’

  At 10.30 on a bright sunny morning, the Hindu batsmen walked out to begin the second day’s play. They started well. But then two more wickets fell, putting the Indians in a sticky position at 84 for three. The English bowlers sniffed blood. Yet warm applause for the next Hindu batsman, a tall and lean 31-year-old, walking briskly towards the wicket, signalled that the crowd still had hope. This batsman’s name was C.K. Nayudu.

  ‘CK’, as he was known, was the best and most popular cricketer in India. An officer in the army of Holkar, a small princely state of central India, he was lithe and fit, a superb fielder and handy medium-pace bowler. But he was mainly a hard-hitting batsman, who had been the Quadrangular’s leading run-scorer almost every year for the past decade. He was a wonderful striker of a cricket ball, famous across India for the massiveness of his hits. And having watched Earle’s pyrotechnics the day before, Nayudu arrived at the Gymkhana wicket with a point to prove.