Cricket of late has seen some upheavals.
At a time when the game should be flowering in the various exotic gardens beyond the known domains, it has taken an unexpected about-turn.
The thunderbolt comes from the land of Andy and Grant Flower, Alistair Campbell, Henry Olonga, Tatenda Taibu and a numerous other cricket luminaries, that is Zimbabwe. Their cricket board has decided to give up their Test status as a result of a political implosion due to class struggle, which the country is going through now. This kicks the bucket of ICC’s honorable intention of globalizing cricket. Zimbabwe has been one of ICC’s success stories.
Cricket's political resonance, extends beyond the "boundary" of the cricket pitch and, moreover, interrogates the tenuous boundaries that separate culture from politics, race from class, high culture from low. As in C.L.R. James' momentous Beyond a Boundary (1963), the author argues in the preface, "It [the book] poses the question 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?'" Deeply implicated in the workings of intra- and international politics, Cricket is fundamentally unthinkable outside of the context of British colonial rule--much in the same way that African colonialism and decolonization are unthinkable without cricket. Both an autobiographical memoir of his Trinidadian upbringing and a social-historical appraisal of West-Indian cricket, the book foregrounds cricket not only at the center of West Indian cultural practices but also at the nexus of colonial rule and class antagonism that has constructed the West Indian 's precarious national identity.
The situation is a bit different in Zimbabwe’s case where, the game used to be played predominantly by the whites unlike the West Indies. The deterioration in the standard of the game in West Indies has to do more with financial aspirations of the young generation as the traumas of the historical class-struggle must have healed, as they say, Time is a great healer. Whereas West Indies took up cricket as an act of defiance, Zimbabwe is shunning it.
In another example of defiance that has both the connotations of economics and class antagonism, India’s decision to defy the ICC Champion’s Trophy on unviable financial grounds deserves special mention.
It seems here cricket is being used as a handle of defiance by various cultures throughout history.
Just like above, let me also mention that Saurav Ganguly’s ethereal offside-touch is as much an expression of defiance as Virendra Sehwag’s offside-punches, the later’s ignorance of India’s cricket history notwithstanding. The opposition of batsman and bowler serves as a metonym for the broader antagonism between not only colonizer and colonized, but between leader and led, and between nation and individual.
AuthorTopic: Beyond the Boundary (Read 576 times)
April 06, 2008, 02:53:01 AM