THE FIRST INDIAN CRICKET TEAM
THE FIRST ALL-INDIA CRICKET TEAM MADE HISTORY ON THE FIELD—BUT MORE INTERESTINGLY, ALSO OFF IT
TThe famous Scottish football manager Bill Shankly once recounted this conversation: “Someone said to me ‘To you, football is a matter of life and death!’ and I said ‘Listen, it’s more important than that.’” Many subcontinental cricket fans would happily replace ‘football’ in the quote with ‘cricket’. At the same time, if we cricket addicts were to be truthful, we know in our hearts that cricket has never just been about cricket, especially not in the chunk of geography now divided into India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Prashant Kidambi’s book, Cricket Country, is an important contribution to furthering that realisation, towards reminding us that this strange sport we find so mesmerising was never contained within the confines of cricket fields, that it has always spilled, as C.L.R. James titled his epic memoir, Beyond a Boundary.
Kidambi’s book is, in a sense, about everything but cricket, even as it takes us through the primordial manthan that begins to form the cosmos of the game as we know it today. The book traverses the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, keeping the reader unstably centred in Bombay and (mostly) western and northern India, with brief forays to different parts of the world in the lead-up to the first tour of England by an all-India team in the tumultuous summer of 1911. The story starts with the most local of tussles, between Parsi teams in south Bombay, moves to the cricket arguments between the Parsis and the gora
teams in the city. We observe the Parsi teams that first tour England, the quarrels and rivalries between the Parsis, the Hindus and the Mahomedans (not to mention the Others), and then the denoument of the 1911 tour. Reaching England in that record-breakingly hot summer, one realises the climax is actually a mixture of googlies and doosras and not at all what was indicated at the first release of the narrative.
Appropriate to the era, and the cricket of the time, this is a book that’s meant to be read slowly. There is an abundance of late Victorian English in the quotations of letters and news reports, with turns of phrase we would now find archaic or offensive, with words such as ‘native’, ‘oriental’ and ‘dusky’ appearing almost as refrains. As in a long game of cricket, there are passages where nothing much seems to happen, and yet, it all feeds into the moment when something startling ambushes the proceedings. As you get pulled into the book, there is melodrama, rioting, political manoeuvring and sneering condescension in a tight partnership with nauseating sycophancy, drunkenness, sporting skulduggery and back-stabbing. There are avaricious millionaires and debauched Maharajas, ambitious administrators and murderous revolutionaries.
By the end, you have a picture of a time when the British Empire seemed indestructible; you also have a forensic scan of the various forces that would shortly undermine and dismantle the Raj, not to mention the first signs of the talent and bloody-mindedness that would radically re-arrange the proud stumps of the Imperial Game.