The Grass Menagerie - Ruchir Joshi
How Indians embraced cricket and turned it around over the years. There was a time when it must have been a strange thing to do, like going to the Chidia-ghar or to the spanking new stations at Howrah or Boribunder to watch trans-country trains steaming in; a kind of weird time-pass on a suddenly empty day teased out of the relentless industrial gears of early 20th century city-time.
The spectacle must have been accompanied by a sense of disconnect-the kind you feel when you hear distant neighbours quarrelling in a foreign tongue. The grounds adjoining the big roads would have been open, the action on offer like an underfed mela where not enough happens, only don't blunder too close to where the gora animals were camped, where they lounged around their tents, got up in this strange white vardhi-uniform, sipping their drinks and languidly changing the mysterious numbers on the green-painted boards. Don't go too close, and watch out: occasionally, balls must have come cannoning out of thin air, toppling the chaiwallah's boiling kettle, playing havoc with the Sunday afternoon kirtan on the maidan, smacking into the backs of the locals' unsuspecting heads.
From that impenetrable ritual with its palette of green-brown grass, yellow sticks, red ball, burnt-pink skin encased in cream linen, the game trickled and spread and picked up new pigments. The grass changed underfoot into dust, asphalt, bumpy mud and sand. All sorts of objects became wicket, all sorts of nearly-round things ball, anything from a hand to a stick to a plank, a bat, and playing it were the general janta, fair, brown and almost black skin, now dancing to the minimal music of bat-ball; starting to change the music as they danced.
Within a few decades, the sub-continent's crowds had found their modern Ramlila, their contemporary Mahabharat. Suddenly, there was a visible map of a bizarre country, a falsely precise geometry laid on imprecise humans: triangulars, quadrangulars, pentangulars, Hindoos, Mahomedans, Parsees, Europeans, Anglo-Indians and others; Army, Railways, the coming ghosts of zones North, South, East and West; a rickety model that would feed, eventually, into a contraption of a reality called 'Independence'.
The ageing, evil, incestuous stepfather of an Empire constantly needed to see its own reflection: 'mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the most virile of them all?' it needed to keep asking, and crucial links in the chain of distorting mirrors were the grand stadiums that came up: Eden, Brabourne, Kotla, Chepauk, Green Park. These were the arenas, the modern colisseums where the sub-emperors and their janissaries could ritually sacrifice the natives to their gladiators, slaughter them without actually spilling blood while at the same time claiming to purify that which was impossible to cleanse-the master-subject relationship-through the yagna of the game. These big grounds soon became the only place where the anarchist and the swarajist could be in the same place for the same reason, doing the same thing as the viceroy, the maharaja and the general; criminal and police chief both arrested by the game; untouchable and Brahmin both stripped of caste by some mine labourer from some small cold place with a name ending in 'shire'; Jain seth and the carnivorous nawab both given the same, bitter, but addictive, food for thought.
It takes a while to learn, of course, this fresh and initially nausea-inducing language. Takes a few years to speak in this action-tongue which British-spiced foreign people understand in a way they never grasp our brand of English or our brand of philosophy. It takes even longer to turn the language into something we actually own and control, turn it into something somebody else needs to work to understand, like the befuddled fellow from a 'shire' or St Somewhere or something 'burra', scratching his head, trying desperately to figure out what this woggo from someplace ending in 'patnam' or 'pura' or 'bad' or 'garh' has done to his heroes, to their stumps, to their best deliveries, to their most cunningly laid plans.
It takes a longer while for a growing mass to start participating in speaking the action-tongue properly, takes till essential cricketing equipment begins to include a TV set alongside the old paraphernalia of bat, ball, stumps, pads, etc.
Shot in England before TV properly arrives in India, there is this grainy, early-colour footage from the BBC that many have probably not seen: a short, thin guy-solid strength and stamina, but not a single gym muscle on him-cracks some Englez fellow called Underwood to the point boundary to reach a hundred. From the ropes an avalanche breaks of immigrant anoraks and unsuitable caps, a heaving foot-jungle of bell-bottoms and cheap shoes swirling around the little man's neatly tied pads, all men, all hugging him, kissing him, pasting their side-burns to his like an orgy of velcro, wrenching back his neck, burying him in their love… what must they have smelled like, felt like, to the young man whose only crimes, then, were great hand-eye coordination, greater technique and even greater composure? Maybe, it was a claustrophobic hell, a whole nation of millions wanting to make love to him at the same time; it was almost certainly also a high. In the long and short of it, in their eternal historical pairing, it's something Amitabh Bachhan will never have over Sunil Gavaskar-"Merey paas hits hain, stardom hain, heroyeens hain, terey paas kyai hai?" "Merey paas square cut aur straight drive hai!"
We couldn't have realised then, but in the yet to be named 'NRI world' that was the moment when reality TV began to give big-screen tamasha a run for its money. That was also the moment a great and dangerous love first showed its face: the same crowd that so badly wanted a piece of you when you were triumphant would also, equally badly, want a very different piece of you and your house and your family when you lost. But at that moment, when Gavaskar was first mobbed, Indian Test cricket only had about a decade and some remaining as the only child-by 1985, the upstart younger and cruder sibling would have taken a lion's share of the whole caboodle, the attention, the gold, as well as the flak.
Not that Test cricket wouldn't fight back-across the late 80s, 90s and especially the 00s there would be great moments, amazing turnarounds, epic battles that could only have taken place over the space of four or five days. Ironically, the limited-overs game would draw many more youngsters in, like a teasing appetiser, before turning them on to the subtleties, the full-palate taste of Test matches. Not only television but also the increasing availability of foreign travel would mean that at least the Indian middle-class would find themselves sitting shoulder to shoulder with the English, Australian or South African spectators, joining in with local desis to holler their teams to higher levels of performance. Equally, slowly, places such as Eden Gardens and Wankhede would become pilgrimage spots for anyone who really followed world cricket, in much the same way a proper European football fan feels he has to experience the great stadiums of Brazil and Argentina at least once in his lifetime.
From the dusty pitches of the Raj to the intimacies of the Long Room at Lords is a shorter journey in many ways (one completed with relative ease, quite early on by the Ranjis, Duleeps and Pataudis) than the journey from the boundaries of those same dusty Raj grounds to the Mound Stand. But for a desi, now, sitting in the stands at Loval, Edgingley or Trentbaston or wherever England and grey, it feels oddly like home. It feels like you are visiting an estate you own, a small sprawl in the countryside that you maintain for your pleasure. Going into a cauldron of an Indian ground is work that involves concrete tiers, chemical-tasting water-pouches, barbed wire and heat but here it's a holiday; and one that you deserve, for having put in the hard yards earlier, as sweaty child or teenager, in one of the big arenas back home.
And, as you enter one of these Angrez pleasure-corridas, your seat booked, the beer or cider spilling over your hand as you climb the steps, secure in the knowledge that whatever slaughter takes place in the middle, it is unlikely to be one-sided, some species-memory of those early local grounds-the ones none of us were around to skirt past-occasionally comes alive, not painfully, but as a prelude to deep pleasure.
Joshi is a novelist, film-maker and photographer. http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.do?BV_ID=@@@&contentType=EDITORIAL§ionName=TheWeek%20COVER%20STORY&programId=1073755753&contentId=2691015
AuthorTopic: Ruchir's hidden talent.. (Read 613 times)
July 19, 2006, 06:31:52 AM