This is my favourite book on cricket and is also cricket writing at its best. It is the history of Indian cricket – interwoven with our pre-independent Indian history. Did cricket influence the course of the Indian history or was it the other way around – go read this classic to figure that out.
There are a lot of authors who write well….great prose, vivid imagery, interesting story telling….you get this in some 25% of the books you read….but what happens when you have an author who is also in love with his subject…in this case…Guha and Cricket…you get a masterpiece. Most of our recent cricketing history…. late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds…is almost anecdotal and apocryphal…facts woven into fiction to make it interesting or fiction peppered with anecdotes to make it a fact. No one takes the trouble of researching the archives, analysing old newspaper articles (including letters to the editors), burrowing thru government repositories…Guha does a first-rate job of this and creates a classic tale of the growth of Indian cricket with the pre-independent India as a backdrop. Mahatma Gandhi and BR Ambedkar also make fleeting appearances in this magnum opus.
The history of Indian independence has a thick overlay of Caste and Religion…Guha compellingly presents a tale and writes that it was true of Indian cricket too. The gymkhanas that were started, whether it was the fabled Bombay Gym where some of us even now go to tipple and eat, to the Hindu, Muslim and Parsi Gymkhanas – their genesis, growth and their role in popularizing a popular European sport in India is lovingly captured. How the dreaded caste structure of Indian society influences as to why plays and who captains the team is brought out thru the stories of the Palwankar Brothers…Baloo. India’s first genuine spinner, his brother Shivram, Ganpat…who died young and the great Vittal…the precursor to the Sachins and Virat Kohlis. These 4-5 chapters also deserve a second reading. Once to absorb the facts and second time to enjoy the prose. The triangular (between the Europeans, Hindus and Muslims) …and their final progress to Pentangular (when the Parsees and the Rest team get added) takes up a couple of interesting chapters…very interesting writing on the clubs and their role in getting communities together and also pitting them against each other. The competitions were anchored to the Clubs and their religious affiliations till the early 1920s. It is then that the liberal minded thought it was against the an political ethos of an united India playing tournaments based on religious lines and this led to the evolution of the Ranji Trophy ( where teams were composed based on Geography). …
The book overflows with interesting stories constructed thru the archives of the old Mumbai newspapers of the 1900s. The genesis of the Ranji Trophy ( provinces playing against each other as against the communities as in the Pentangular), the shenanigans of the British Governors ( the much hated Lord Harris still has a famous school trophy in Mumbai till date – this is the same tournament where Tendulkar and Kambli made their records), the flamboyance of Deodhar and Nayudu, the eccentricities of the Maharajah of Vijayanagaram (Think Vizzy Trophy) and Patiala, Jardine of the famous Bodyline series…and his Indian connections, cricket lore of the famous Pataudis…it is all there…..helping us relive the history of the most famous sport of this country.
What makes the book very gripping is the span of history…from mid 1800s to the current…. painstakingly researched….and written in a manner that it puts life into events which are over 150 years old. The book has a fresh reprint and updated (till 2014). For those of you who haven’t read it in 2002…should read it to get a hang of why cricket is the way it is now in India. Sponsorships, defecting from teams, sponsors pulling in the punches, players crying sick and hurt for non-fitness reasons, administrators calling the shots…if you thought that these are all a recent phenomenon…read this treatise….it was there in cricket all the way from the 1900s.
It is history, sports, social transformation, Indian Independence struggle, blended into one in an effortless and seamless manner. If you have to read 3-4 books in a year, this should be one of them.
( Divakar Kaza is a retired Corporate Executive. He is originally an Hyderabadi and now settled in Bangalore).
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