On Cricket and Ramachandra Guha's sociological thesis

I have a problem. As they say in the part of the world my ancestors came from (the most recent ones at any rate..), Arambha shUram khalu keraLiyA - "it is truly a Keralite trait to begin something with gusto". Of course, that means that this blog will be resting in peace for eternity within a few days. We shall see whether that comes to pass. So for now the problem remains.

In the meantime, I have just finished reading Ramachandra Guha's phenomenal history of Indian cricket. I will confess I had never read anything by him before, so I was pleasantly surprised. It is an interesting exercise to look at cricketers through the prism of class barriers - especially in India. I recall a long time ago reading that the great Australian opener Geoff Marsh was a farmer. To my teenage mind, this was a bewildering concept. I had a tough time imagining Sunil Gavaskar going back home and wearing a ragged dhoti and yoking a bullock to his plough.

Guha eloquently reminds us that there were significant class barriers (there still are) in India, and that our efforts should be to eradicate them from all walks of life. One thing did puzzle me though. He describes at length the various arguments for and against the communally drawn Bombay Triangular/Quadrangular/Pentangular. And he (correctly) gives more play to the argument to abolish a communal tournament in communally sensitive times (the 1930s-40s). In a manner befitting a postcolonial, he presents the arguments of the British (ie. that cricket can only generate goodwill between members of different communities etc.) as the bias of an empire that seeks to continue to dominate the natives by dividing them. Then, surprisingly, towards the end of the book, he looks at the issue of India vs. Pakistan test cricket in the 90s in a completely different light! (You might recall that during this period, many on the right had campaigned for a complete stop to cricket contact between India and Pakistan because of Pakistani support for militants waging war against India). Now, in Guha's scheme of things cricket had become the great healer of the pain of partition! And he rubbishes suggestions that cricket should be subservient to the politics of the day as rantings of right wing lunatics (which, in a sense they were). So now we have a conundrum. When Gandhi urges us not to play cricket between communally drawn sides, we should listen to the great man. But in the 90s, we should play cricket with Pakistan despite a raging battle up in the mountains because cricket will bring us close together? Were the British correct after all?

I hold no brief for the lumpen elements of the far right, but shouldn't our principles be consistent? The Zimbabwe cricket crisis sounds eerily similar to this, and one wonders whether one should can all the rhetoric and accept that all views are by definition polemical. Maybe we could all take refuge (and save a lot of newsprint and bandwidth) in the Rooseveltian aphorism, "He may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch".

To nitpick Mr. Guha's excellent book (and I mean that without sarcasm or irony), what is with the comparison of the RSS to the SS? I mean let us be honest. Compare the BJP-RSS with the Republicans-Christian Coalition (or even to the Ku Klux Klan to stretch the analogy a bit) by all means...but with the SS? 6 million Jews? 3 million Poles? a million gypsies? Have we lost our bearings totally? Or is this view a concealed form of anti-Semitism? I find the latter explanation unlikely, since anti-semitism has never been an issue in India (except among certain extreme islamist and leftist types), and surely Mr. Guha is far too nice a guy to harbor such beliefs. So the most charitable explanation is that certain intellectuals (not Mr. Guha, for he is not the one who invented this analogy) have been less rigorous than they should have been in drawing parallels and comparisons. I have jewish friends, and my wife is Polish. I think the casual (perhaps irresponsible) comparison of the RSS to the SS is insulting and disrespectful to the victims of the Nazis.