THE LOVE SONG OF A 22YARD STRIP
Full of reportage, history, and trivia, this is a celebration of Indian cricket, its cricketers and the billion or so people who follow it
If there is one sub-genre in literature that historically produces work of both high literary quality and sports historiography, it is that of ‘cricket writing’. I am not talking about biographies or autobiographies of cricketers, but cricket writing as literature. Off the top of my head, I can think of books written by the towering great CLR James, plus others by Clive Lloyd and Tony Cozier from the West Indies; the English PG Wodehouse, Neville Cardus, Michael Parkinson, Mike Brearley, David Gower, Christopher Martin Jenkins, Henry Blofeld; the Australian Don Bradman, Richie Benaud, and so many others. Even modern fiction writers like Simon Raven, Romesh Gunesekera and Shehan Karunatilaka, have written wonderfully in their novels about this beautiful game.
In India, we have fine examples by Ramachandra Guha, Shashi Tharoor, Mihir Bose, Mukul Kesavan, Rahul Bhattacharya, Soumya Bhattacharya, Rajdeep Sardesai, Ayaz Menon, Boria Majumdar — to name a few. Majumdar’s newest book on Indian cricket, Eleven Gods and a Billion Indians, is the latest addition to the list.
Unsurprisingly, the book is a eulogy celebrating Indian cricket, its cricketers and the billion or so people who follow it at large — but it is also a remarkable book of painstaking research, reportage, history, trivia and anecdotes told in an effortless style. This 450-page encyclopaedic book is divided into five parts with multiple chapters. The ‘Prologue’ opens in media res with the 2017 Indo-Australian Ranchi Test Match, a series that was high octane and severely competitive, as it should be — “intense, passionate, and at times, over the top.” The book’s range and content is centrifugally expansive — including sepoys batting for India in the 1850s, to “cricket’s cash box revolution”, “Monkeygate”, captain-coach spats, intricate highs-and-lows in the Indian cricketing saga, Sachin as a God-like figure, present day demigod Kohli, a nod to Indian women’s cricket (for a future book), among others. The ‘Epilogue’ signs off with a moving encounter where the author recalls meeting the same sari-clad candy-seller he has seen for over two decades outside Kolkata’s Eden Gardens, someone who has never been inside the cricketing sanctum sanctorum of India, but is part of the “billion Indians” who make up the wider story of Indian cricket — a lovely human way for this compendium to be bookended.
One of the most moving episodes in the book details Sachin Tendulkar’s last Test Match in Mumbai against the West Indies. After he returns to the pavilion for the last time, we are told that he is sitting on his own. The very young Virat Kohli at the time goes up to him, gives the great man one of the ‘sacred threads’ that he wears on his wrist, saying his father suggested to give it to someone he most respects. It is the respect for this wonderful game, “the game of glorious uncertainties” that is the running thread through this voluminous and remarkable book.
One of the memorable sections of this book is the one that includes archival photographs — numerous facsimiles of letters, posters, scorecards, autographs and other rare images. It is “a photographic history” that words cannot do justice to. The back cover, for instance, shows the letter from the Cricket Advisory Committee written to the BCCI on June 17, 2017 at the height of the Virat Kohli-Anil Kumble standoff. None other than the Indian cricketing triumvirate — Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, VVS Laxman — signed this letter. Among the book’s many strengths and highlights is that it takes the reader backstage, into the corridors of power, into dressing rooms, private conversations that only the privileged are privy to, and presents new material that is not yet part of the public domain. It is equally a great multilayered story that often reads like a thriller or a novel, the reader forgetting that it, in fact, is a book of non-fiction.
This is due to Majumdar’s wide knowledge and flair for language and his concern for accurate reporting. Finally, it is the tone of his writing itself — it is akin to a voice of an avuncular storyteller — keeping listeners/readers’ interest riveted with many diverse plot lines, sidelights, and digressions. This is a must read both for sports lovers as well as for lay readers, and especially those who wish to get a peek into a certain kind of cultural/sporting history through a unique lens. Eleven Gods and a Billion Indians is a very fine book, highly recommended.*