I was on the ferry to Manly, in Sydney. I disembarked. I had a few hours to spare, before the start of a conference for teachers of preaching in nearby Dee Why. My eyes noticed a billboard on a cinema — near the ferry terminal, as I remember it (although Google maps provides no such evidence). Filling the ‘Now Playing’ space was Gladiator. “Why not?!” I went in and watched. At the end, I sat there with this sense of never wanting the movie to finish…
I did a lot of concurring as I read this book.
Guha was born in 1958. I was born a few months later, in 1959.
Guha had the bulk of his schooling in Dehradun, resting at the base of the Himalayas, while I was 30 kms up the road in Mussoorie, and I do mean ‘up’ because we were at an altitude of 7000′ in the foothills of those Himalayas. ‘(Dehradun) was set in a long, low valley, with the Siwalik Hills to its south and the Himalaya mountains to its north. Its western border was defined by the Yamuna river; its eastern border by the Ganga’ (1). This valley was our daily vista as children. We even lived in that valley for a season, at the Yamuna end, when my father was based at the Lehmann Hospital in Herbertpur. Guha even mentions playing a game against my alma mater, Woodstock School, with a Tom Alter (who went on to a Bollywood career) leaving an impression on him, with his perfect Hindi. Tom Alter once left an impression on me as well. I faced him in the nets once. Just once, thankfully. He was fast. I’ve never been so scared, and scarred, on a cricket field.
Guha grew up with ‘hot water bucket baths’ (21), as did I.
Guha moved to Delhi in the 1970s, as did I. He has since moved to Bangalore, from where Barby and I returned one year ago, after living there for seven years. So Dehradun, Delhi, Bangalore. It is all so familiar. While Guha concurs with Nobel Prize winning physicist CV Raman — ‘My greatest discovery was the weather of Bangalore’ (93) — I doubt whether the empirical evidence would cause the professor to draw this conclusion today. Surely, the weather in Mussoorie in October is an even greater discovery!
As it turned out, Guha wasn’t much good at playing cricket. Neither was I. He talks up his meagre efforts, mingling humour with longing, as do I. When we took our children to India, I sought out my cricket coach at Woodstock School, Brij Lal. I can take you to the exact space on the concrete where he proclaimed, in the company of my children, the only grandstand that matters, that my bowling was ‘unplayable’. But, alas, as with Guha, ‘my own cricketing talents and achievements were unremarkable’ (88) is far closer to the reality.
It may have turned out better if my parents, in their wisdom, had not removed me from Woodstock one semester before graduation — the semester in which the cricket season was played. They wanted me to have a year of high school in New Zealand, maximising the possibility of a successful application to medical school. That application failed, as did my cricket career. See, the cricket season in NZ tracked with the summer and so it spanned two academic years, the end of one (Oct-Nov) and the beginning of the next (Feb-March). I enrolled in Auckland Grammar School in the February, half way through the cricket season. I remember cycling home one afternoon in February, still wondering whether I could summon the courage to try and make a team, mid-season. I cycled past the cricket nets. A 13 year old was batting. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. “Yikes. I am not playing cricket at this school. They are far too good.” My own cricket career effectively ended at that moment, as a lost and lonely lad of 17, on a bike. Only later did I realise that I had been watching Martin D. Crowe, of whom Guha has time to write: ‘He batted as if piloting a sleek limousine, moving smoothly from first gear to top. (199)’
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| Cricket on a rooftop in Delhi, next to the barsati. |
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| Cricket on a Delhi maidan in the 1970s. |
Guha is full of love for Indian cricketers from the 1970s, all the same names that filled my make-believe games in the maidans and next to the rooftop barsatis of our homes in Delhi, when I would bat like Gavaskar and bowl like Bedi — as well as my indoor games of Owzthat when it became too hot. Vishwanath, Prasanna, Wadekar, Sardesai, Engineer, Chandrasekhar … goodness me, even Brijesh Patel and Eknath Solkar, names I have not heard for decades. Guha’s cricket awakening was a series between India and Australia in 1969. Mine was not until 1971, when India travelled to the West Indies and then, later that year, to England. ‘I heard every ball on the radio’ (37). I may not have been too far behind.
By this time in the book, my pulse was beginning to race.
I wonder, I just wonder if Guha was also among the spectators at the Ferozshah Kotla in Delhi, in December 1974, when a certain West Indies player, Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards, announced himself to the world. I was there. He’d failed on debut in the first test in Bangalore (I needed no Guhaian assistance to remember his scores of 4 and 3). As the narrative unfolds, it turns out that Guha didn’t have tickets to the Delhi game. Every day he would go to the Maidens Hotel in Delhi, where the Indian team was staying, to see if he could scrounge a ticket from a friend in the team. ‘I walked over the Ridge to see Kirmani at the Maidens Hotel’ (69). [Oh, did I fail to mention that our first home in Delhi shared a boundary with this 5 star hotel? One year, our parents’ Christmas present was a yearlong pass to the swimming pool at this hotel, as a way to escape the summer heat. We swam there every day, hopping over the back fence…] But back to Guha and his struggles through the front door, a few months later. ‘I walked back disconsolately to the college’ (69). The first day passed. I was there. “Were you there, Professor Guha?” This was the West Indies, for goodness sake, the ‘most charismatic side in world cricket … their names making music in any order and in any language’ (65, 68). I was there, ‘a college boy eavesdropping on greatness’ (68) — but, “Were you also such a college boy, Ramachandra?” He was. He secured a ticket to the big day. ‘(Clive) Lloyd came in, all seventy-five inches of him, the slouch and the spectacles masking the most malevolent of intentions’ (71) … but, on that day, Lloyd was just the opening act:
… It was not the best of views, looking out over wide mid-off, but at least I had a seat. As the sun bore down Richards began to go bananas. Bedi was hit for six, then Prasanna for two more … Then Piyush (his friend next to him) issued a prediction. The next one he said, will go over the Wills Filter hoarding that rose high to the left of the sightscreen. Richards came crashing down the wicket, and aimed for long-off. The ball climbed ever higher, cleared the Wills sign comfortably, and finally came to rest in the Ambedkar football stadium. It had travelled, in effect, from New Delhi to Old Delhi. In the city of kingdoms a new king had announced himself (72-73).
192 not out. Whenever that numeric appears in the course of daily life, I am transported back to that foggy December morning at the Kotla. If ever it is a hymn number on Sunday morning, my worship becomes syncretistic. Yes, I was there, with Ramachandra Guha.
Given that he writes about a ‘lifelong love affair’, Guha is a besotted, even intoxicated, fan of the game, as was I. However, over the years, the Spirit has put his finger on the idolatrous in it for me and so, while I’ve stepped back from it a bit, the affection lingers … and a book like Guha’s could easily accelerate the backsliding! Two beautiful chapters find Guha in storytelling mode. One is ‘Handshakes with Heroes’ (122-148), in which he relates his personal encounters with Indian cricketers. ‘It was in the summer of 1970 that I shook hands for the first time with a Test cricketer’ (24). The other is ‘A Hindu’s Pantheon’ (179-217) in which he moves around the cricketing world, country by country, introducing the reader to his favourite foreign players. When he comes to New Zealand, he speaks about the Indian attitude: ‘We practiced on them the affectionate condescension we had ourselves received from the English and the Australians’ (197). As with me, as any regular readers of this blog will know, Guha makes up plenty of First XI lists. Goodness me, why stop at the perfect X, when a cricketing XI is just around the corner? Guha even has a First XI on ‘Indian cricketers I shook hands with’ (148).
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| Four of my favourite foreign players: Sangakkara, Sangakkara, Sangakkara, and Sangakkara — all from Sri Lanka |
However, for Guha, the ‘love affair’ became unhinged when he completed a PhD in Sociology, coming ‘under the spell of a Marxist teacher, who argued that cricket was a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle’ (90). Max Weber replaced Jack Fingleton. Like Guha, I had an unhinged season in life, when I went off to the USA for MDiv studies. While India was winning, surprisingly, the Cricket World Cup in 1983, I could be found fanning into flame an identity within the Chicago Cubs’ fandom. But as I had done at Woodstock, I continued to proselytise Americans into a love of cricket. I had my ways of demonstrating how cricket was a superior game to baseball … only to discover Guha, on a visit to Yale, explaining the merits of cricket to baseball fans (91-92) using, to my amazement,
the same points as I use.
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| Getting ready to bat at Hanson Field, Woodstock School’s cricket ground. Each year, the monsoon-induced landslides tended to determine the dimension of the field. |
‘Writing on cricket was therapy’ (97). I concur. I am not confronting Hindu fundamentalism, with its erosion of ‘a plural and inclusive idea of India’ (7). Nor do I battle the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI, the very name is a call to arms) with its corruption, croneyism and conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, in the midst of my own struggles, writing on cricket has been therapy. Just ask Barby.
At one point Guha testifies to how ‘I was a cricketing nationalist as a teenager, but over the years I have become less partisan’ (157). Wow. That is me to a tee. Increasingly, I recoil from the partisanship, even the patriotism. ‘I particularly deprecated the jingoism that was on display when India played Pakistan’ (158). Me too. It has been one of the saddest things about this recent decade, living in India while visiting Pakistan (almost) annually. These two peoples have so much in common. Barby came with me once to Pakistan and sat in the back and translated the whole week for me. While the script could not look more different, the spoken languages (Hindi and Urdu) are 90% the same. Pakistan is a happy place for me. It brings out the best in me. On this blog I’ve repeatedly written about Pakistan (
here and
here and
here and
here, for starters). It is such a misunderstood country, especially by its neighbours. But back to Guha:
The saddest moment of live cricket watching remains the World Cup quarter-final of 1996, played in Bangalore, when I was the only person in my stand (and possibly in the entire stadium) who applauded Javed Miandad when he walked off the ground for the last time as an international player (158).
As a New Zealander, I would have stood up even for Inzamam. He includes an entire chapter on ‘Some Favourite Pakistanis’ (218-249). Good for you, Guha. From the Mohammeds of Karachi to the Khans of Lahore; and from the relationship between Miandad and Imran to his reflections on ‘the four googly bowlers from across the border’, it was wonderful to read.
Guha is lavish in his affection and yet stinging in his critique. I am a bit like that. No one is ever going to say at my funeral, unlike with my mother, for example, that Paul never spoke ill of anyone. It is just not true. But then the affection with which Guha writes about the likes of Bedi and Vishwanath, Kumble and Dravid is just so tender. I love a bit like that too. Sure, he has a few words to say about others, like Gavaskar (‘… it was hard to take a sermon on patriotism from someone who loved his country so much that for many years now he has avoided paying taxes in India’, 269). Then, of course, there is Geoffrey Boycott:
In the 1950s and 1960s, many top English players ducked tours to the subcontinent … Len Hutton, Peter May, Jim Laker, Freddie Trueman. They thought the competition beneath them, and were turned away by the tales of heat, dust, dirt and disease. Even Geoffrey Boycott only came because he wanted to break a world record: no sooner had he done that than he ran away mid-series to join a rebel tour in apartheid South Africa (195-196).
Ouch.
But back to the BCCI. Guha spends two chapters engaging its corruption, croneyism and conflicts of interest. I barely moved that morning, as I read. He was covering the very same years we lived in Bangalore. I watched it all unraveling and now Guha’s commentary on it all was riveting for me. The problems travelled all the way to the Supreme Court of India which then sacked the entire Board, replacing it with a Committee of Administrators (CofA), a group of just four people, running cricket throughout India, with … drum roll, please … one Ramachandra Guha among them. ‘I had long detested the control over the BCCI by scheming politicans and self-important ex-Maharajas. The shady nature of its financial operations stank, Then the Indian Premier League (IPL) began, and the BCCI’s operations became even more dodgy’ (250). He lasted but a few months, ‘Exiting the Establishment’ (279-303). I get so into his story because there is something akin to the biblical prophet here, speaking truth to power, unmasking the influence of money, surfacing the injustices, affirming those on the margins in their powerlessness… This is exactly the kind of thing that winds me up, with my own brand of exiting-the-establishment instincts. The English, with their colonial and imperial instincts to the fore, ran the game for a century and now, it is the turn of the BCCI, the big bullies in the cricketing world, with more than a whiff of the ol’ colonialisms and imperialisms still in play, but in another guise.
Guha doesn’t like the BCCI, or its enfant terrible, the IPL. I concur.
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| With some of my cricketing buddies in Delhi, outside Jyoti’s home in Nizamuddin. |
I hope you got this far. This is the most important bit.
I’ve been back home from India now for exactly a year. Re-entry has been harder than I anticipated. New Zealand seems more insular and more wrapped up in its own problems. I struggle to see where I can fit. I read Guha’s book in the week after teaching an intensive course on Preaching & Communication, at the University of Otago, in Dunedin. One session weighed on my mind for months. I had committed to the general topic, but how was I going to address it, specifically? In the end I named it ‘History, Geography— and Humility’, wanting to make a plea to be more open to learn from distant times and distant places, as a way to cultivate a humility that God can use. Within a couple of days I was lost in Guha’s book, reaching the final chapter, ‘Varieties of Cricketing Chauvinism’, in which he makes exactly the same point, but from the cricketing world: ‘There are two fundamental axes of cricketing chauvinism: of nation and of generation. Every cricket fan almost without exception is born with them; and most cricket fans never outgrow them. (306). I could scarcely believe what I was reading. Rather oddly, I drew great comfort from it. He even urges ‘the embracing of cricketing internationalism’ (308), drawing to mind, for me, John Stott’s call for all Christians to be ‘committed internationalists’.
On the final page, Guha illustrates this with Shane Warne and Wasim Akram, ‘the most gifted bowlers of my time’ (319). They gave their knowledge away to others, whatever the generation, wherever the nation: ‘That neither of these bowlers is an Indian, that one of them is, in fact, a Pakistani, that both are considerably younger than me, are not, one thinks, entirely coincidental’ (320). For Guha, something good can come from a decade other than the 1970s and from a country other than India.
I concur.
Good read, thanks Paul (to encourage your cricketing posts!). I'm very pleased to now be living in Wellington, where I hope, like you have in India, to enjoy more special moments at a special cricket ground. I'm remembering you in prayer as you continue your time in NZ, what a strange time it must be to be "home" yet away from home. Let me know if you're ever down our way, would love to catch up. Elliot
Thanks, Elliot.
Living 'up the road' from the Basin is a definite plus! I'm sure it was difficult to eliminate it totally from the call process :). New Zealand has such lovely grounds for watching Test matches … and I have yet to visit Hagley Oval.
This blog has turned out to be fun as I have had some emails back and forth with the author himself.
Praying that 2021 opens up well for you both in your new environs.
Paul
As I expect you know, I have exceedingly low levels of interest in cricket, and generally give up on your cricket posts early on. However, I found this absolutely charming and delightful. Thank you so much!
Great blog Paul. With so many parallels for you and Guha I can easily see how it must have been a compelling read. And the challenge at the end of the book (and your post) is particularly timely.
Always enjoy your cricket writings. How much are you looking forward to NZ v India in the Test Championship Final.
Matt
Well, well, well, Heather — it is a long time since my last effective proselytizing 🙂
I'll dine on 'charming and delightful' for awhile.
Paul
Yes, Matt, as Test cricket is the pinnacle and as the WTC is such a good idea (although Covid has meant some corrosion has taken place), I am 'all in' as the Americans say.
Although I am very, very suspicious of the invisible hand of the BCCI at work in the shift of the game from Lord's to Southampton. How on earth can you NOT have the final at Lord's? Ah yes, I know why … Southampton is more spin-friendly.
Greetings to the family
Paul