Bleeding Blue for a Beautiful Game!

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The TV anchors in Blightly often borrow from Pele to claim O Jogo Bonito for Football, and such has been the case yet again in last couple of days, albeit in a condescending context- as in how the Blues of Man City have blotted “the beautiful game” and thus UEFA are right in barring them for 2 seasons. 

For some reason, hearing all that extolment on Football, and chastised reference to colour Blue, awakened the slumbering Cricket lover in me. Yes- you do get to see the best of a team sport with inter-spread individual brilliance in Football, but then  skills of wristwork and hand -eye coordination are arguably unmatched in Hockey, long stretches of concentration and stamina abound in Tennis, surface and natural conditions tilting affect results in Golf, Tennis & Racing , and winning the toss is paramount in Oxford vs Cambridge Boat race or in a game of darts. But, importantly not one of these sports offer  ALL of these in a good measure,  nor do they provide as good an excuse for being able to sit in the sun all day drinking beer, discussing those interesting nuggets of statistics and quibbling about the idiosyncrasies. But above all, I stand to argue, none of these games have had social impact on as many people across the world, as what was once a deeply classist  “gentlemen’s game”; and  that a team wearing blue has had a most positive impact on nearly a seventh of world population.

There is this passage, a small detour in a chapter titled “The Proof of the Pudding” in one of the best non-fiction books I have read:  Beyond A Boundary, by CLR James

"All art, science, philosophy, are modes of apprehending the world, history, and society. As one of these, cricket (in the West Indies)  could hold its own. A professor of political science publicly bewailed that a man of my known political interests should believe that cricket had ethical and social values. I had no wish to answer. I was just sorry for the guy."

While the context in this case was the struggle (against discrimination) of making a black man- Frank Worrell to captain the West Indian cricket team,  this paragraph could easily represent the sentiments of millions of Indians- particularly of my generation- who have seen “just a game” lead to a collective sigh or a synchronized chant of “Sachin! Sachin!” reverberate stadia many a times. Even the “god of cricket” himself claimed that the best innings of his career was his match winning, 41^st century at Chennai , immediately after the Mumbai terror attacks- because “we had succeeded in bringing a fraction of a smile on the faces of the people.”

While sport in general involves an armchair variant of patriotism, where the love for your country is measured in terms of achievements on track & field, and where spectators could be completely apolitical and ignorant of the country’s larger problems, Cricket in India does provide a measure of unification unseen in other arenas. It should be said that the unification element is short-lived and dissipates after matches until the next great victory presents itself. But cricket is the sole medium that unites the most Indians, regardless of caste, class, religion, region, or language.

Players wait in the middle for order to be restored at the end of the Test , India v Australia, 4th Test, Calcutta, December 16, 1969

Such is the power of this game in India, that while it could lead to a full fledged riot with tear gas shelling and 6 deaths in 1969- all in a way due to an umpiring error,  or a match being awarded on communal reasons; it has led to the first public shunning of  “untouchability” in pre-independence days of rigid casteism , and served as a key binding force in an increasingly fractured nationalism post-independence.

In independent India’s history, politics has mostly thrived on breeding and fanning divisions in a geographically, ethnically and religiously diverse country. Indian politics, has been driven by these divisions, often incorporating missions which focus on only one of the Indian identity areas at the expense of the other- a phenomenon M N Srinivas referred to as vote-bank. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that the benefits reaped by ALL political parties from Congress to BJP have eventually led to an India with chasms running deep in the psyche of the nation.

That other pillar of “Socio-cultural narrative of a nation”- Art too suffers from the same malice. Linguistic divisions between states meant that a pan-Indian literature hardly gathered steam in Independent India. In a country marred by seriously high level of illiteracy, and penchant of learning English  (for the purpose of jobs ) more than the vernacular, it meant that literature never occupied space in national discourse. The fact we hardly celebrate Kalidas or Valluvar,   in the same vein as Shakespeare or Milton are taught and revered in England,  Ilyin and Dostovesky in Russia  or Tom Paine in the US says a lot about role that medium has played in any kind of national or cultural unification in India.  

 Even the modern version of popular art- i.e. Cinema has failed to form a pan-Indian appeal. There are obviously exceptions to this rule, and things have begun to change a bit in last decade or two- but its more like a few patches of oasis in otherwise barren landscape of caricature-esque representation of people belonging to specific regions, language or sects- in Hindi as well as regional cinema.

The situation might have gone the same way in Sports- for apart from the colonial games of Cricket, Hockey, Football and Polo; India had no indigenous outdoor amusement that could appeal to the masses cutting across class and region, especially to more sophisticated and affluent urban spectators- who could have paid to watch and hence promote them. Kabaddi could have been a serious contenders – with pan India appeal, but yet somehow both failed to attract the cosmopolitan audience.

While Indian national teams in both Hockey (Olympic Golds) and Football (Olympic semi-finalists in 56) indeed did far better than their counterparts in Cricket, an interesting thing to note is in those years Cricket had a nearly regional (based in Bombay or central provinces) set of players. In both of the other teams, the representation was far more pan-Indian with players from Hyderabad, Madras, Bengal, United Provinces and Bombay.  By late 1960s, situation had somehow reversed with Hockey being dominated by players from UP and Punjab; Football by Bengalis and Cricket beginning to show the rise of players like Bedi, Pataudi, Abid Ali, Prasanna, Jaisimha, Chandra challenging the Bombay hegemony.  With Hockey and Football practically decimated due to changing rules of games as well as apathy shown by their respective associations, Cricket became and has ever since- remained a unifying entity for India- even in regions where those two sports hold their own.

Even with the national discourse tilting towards right-wing in last 6-7 years,  Cricket -thankfully till now- has remained untouched from fast rising prejudice wave. Even the isolated incidents of attempts to appropriate Cricket to Ancient India through fabulist interpretation of Mahabharata, as in the case of Internet or Plastic Surgery  haven’t seen any revival/ credence.  For all that is worth, it indeed provides a window of hope- when you see a Mohammed Shami  being cheered as feverishly as a Bumrah or Rohit Sharma. People, while watching the game, seem to forget their acrimonies with others- as was suggested in a news show during Delhi Election campaigns. Even if for a fleeting glimpse, as it lasts till the euphoria subsides the next day, Cricket continues to help unite people in India even today, irrespective of their political, social, linguistic and economical differences.

If nationalism by definition is the voluntary expression of a unified national identity, the fleeting nationalism that cricket achieves is far better than the imposed fractured nationalism of politics or of Indian cinema. 

India’s cricket team is now the single biggest symbol of the nation abroad and the rallying point for “patriotic” Indians wherever they are in the world. While the vast majority of diasporic Indians cannot vote in Indian elections, that does not mean that they have been silent on the country’s politics. That cricket has managed to woo over almost whole of India (Kashmir remains a sole sore spot) is a great attestation to the beauty of this game  And sitting in a country, whose own blue coloured dress led to an unnecessary storm in the teacup; when people in our country are appropriating labels of national and anti-nationals based on whether you wear Saffron or Green, when very few care to think about peace and purity of white, it seems that the national flag of India may as well be coloured blue-a most wonderful symbol of a really beautiful game!