Ayaz Memon’s aim with Indian Innings was a collection “of the best cricket writing in India since independence by Indian journalists and authors in Indian publications”. The final product succeeds as an engrossing and thoughtful bird’s-eye view of India’s cricket story over the past 75 years.
There is a marked emphasis on the post-1971 period. The relative neglect of 1947-71, Memon explains, was inevitable given the “lack of enough published material” from a time when sports journalism was “in a beleaguered state” and sports in general “not high priority in Indian life”. Nevertheless, some well-chosen essays do touch on the earlier period, although the collection as a whole picks up steam from the 1960s.
There is a multiplicity of ways in which we can look back on the past of Indian cricket – much like everything else in Indian history. For those inclined towards the ‘great man’ view of history, a credible narrative would be found in the eras of Pataudi, Kapil Dev, Gavaskar and Tendulkar, all the way down to the Dhoni and Kohli periods of Indian cricket.
Also read: Podcast: There is Nationalism and There is Jingoism, Which Gets Ugly When India Plays Pakistan
There would inevitably be some gap years and these would see the domination of a triumvirate, or even a quartet; the Bedi, Prassana, Chandrasekhar and Venkataraghavan era is one; or the time when Dravid, Tendulkar, Ganguly and Laxman were together in the team. In the early 2000s, Pataudi had described the latter grouping Pataudi as “the greatest middle order India has ever had”. There was also the time of the great combination of close in-fielders: Solkar, Wadekar, Abid Ali and Venkat.
Ayaz Memon’s ‘Indian Innings’. Westland Sport, 2021.
There is much in this anthology about these players, yet what also adds value to the book is the occasional shift of focus away from the greatest to those just a step behind, much like Dilip Vengasarkar and Gundappa Vishwanath in the Gavaskar era. Even more poignant is the look at those who did not make it only because they were vying for a slot in an Indian team which, at the time, just had no place for other greats, such as when Clayton Murzello describes the phenomenal Haryana left-arm spinner Rajinder Goel, or Padmakar Shivalkar in Bombay.
Many of the essays in the book are by sports journalists who, in their writings were witness to the making and gradual end of each of these eras. As each great cricketing age faded away, it left behind some wonderful and bittersweet cricket writing about its end.
Mihir Bose’s classic article, ‘Merchant bags his Tiger’, described Pataudi’s dethronement by Vijay Merchant, the then chairman of the selection committee. Bishan Singh Bedi had described the fall as a tiger mauled by “jackals and heynas”. This was unfair to Merchant but it is rare for an era – or even a captaincy – to end without polemical dust. Saurav Ganguly’s exit some three-and-a-half decades later, as Sanjay Jha, recounts raised even more, but that was also because the transition was taking place in a different age.
Alternatively, it is possible to look at India’s cricket history as a subset of wider, more impersonal changes; cricket was only one of the many things changing in the country. Thus 1971 saw Indian cricket enter a new phase of confidence and purpose with overseas series wins against West Indies and England. Notwithstanding the downturns that followed – the famous 42 all out in 1974 at Lord’s – 1971 remains a turning point coinciding with wider political change in South Asia. As Memon notes, “…the Indian summer was not just about delighting in cricket triumphs but also on awakening to our own potential, whatever the walk of life”.
If 1971 is an obvious turning point in which cricket and India both turned together and in the same direction, in 1983, cricket ‘overdetermined’ itself (to stretch French structuralist Althussar’s term) and the Indian team lifted not just the World Cup, but also the spirits of Indians then plagued by a multitude of communal, ethnic and security issues. The triumph, in Rajdeep Sardesai’s view, was cricket liberating itself “from its feudal past” and the victory on colour TV gave the country “renewed self belief as a nation”.
The hyperbole can be forgiven as the stage was being set for even bigger changes in the 1990s when, with the demise of the ‘license raj’, cricket accompanied the nation into the new and more deregulated world of entertainment, TV and sponsorship. Cricket became bigger, brought in its wake even greater corruption and became a real barometer of the nation. Vivek Kamath’s essay on Mark Mascarenhas and Tendulkar evokes that phase and its origins beautifully.
Also read: Hate May Win Some Elections but It Does Not Stand the Constitutional Test or Solve Problems
But even bigger than all this were certain games and tournaments which transformed the landscape in which cricket was played in India. The 2007 T-20 World Cup saw a team without Dravid, Tendulkar or Ganguly, but had Dhoni as its captain, leading a young team into a format still relatively new to India. That Yuvraj hit an English bowler for six sixes in a single over; that the first game India played was against Pakistan and was decided in a super over and finally, that there was a India-Pakistan final, all showed the potential of T-20 in the age of television.
The IPL was born soon thereafter and with it, the brief Lalit Modi-phase of Indian cricket. For better and worse, cricket had, as Sriram Veera explains, become representative of the nation as a whole.
This was, however, a story within a larger story for the longer, more durable process was that of the BCCI becoming the colossus in international cricket it is today. Jagmohan Dalmia, therefore, figures in that story, as he does elsewhere in this anthology, with the BCCI initially showing its heft by defending Indian players. It was to become an organisation you don’t mess with, wrote Urvi Malvania and it became the spearhead of a structural shift, eroding the old cricket establishment hitherto led by England. But the real driver was the monetisation underway with TV broadcast rights and sponsorship; this gave the BCCI clout which no other board could aspire to.
Readers will find in this fascinating anthology much to substantiate these different narratives and many others besides. In any case, there are other angles too, which different essays so ably illustrate. The well-recognised but too-distant potential of India-Pakistan cricket; the unfolding story of how small-town India took over what was, in every sense, a metropolitan game (as detailed by Sharda Ugra and Ramesh Vinayak in this book); the emergence and consolidation of women’s cricket, still not an equal partner but getting there and others.
There are also quizzical glances, such as Supriya Nair’s, on the mannerisms of the game as it is played out and how its theatrics and “rah rah peacocking” do not amount to “subaltern aggression” and leave (a minority of) spectators cold.
All in all, this excellent and carefully chosen collection of reportage and more reflective essays makes for a book that all cricket lovers will enjoy.
T. C. A. Raghavan is a former Indian high commissioner to Singapore and Pakistan.
