The Enduring Appeal of Hero-Worship

This apologia on hero-worship has been prompted by two recent essays in The Wire denouncing the Indian penchant for valorising our cricketers. Pavan Soni’s polemic against idolisation is based on the dodgy premise that treating cricket stars like ordinary mortals allows them “to perform more like ordinary players, gets the rest deeply involved in the proceedings and reduces the overall key-person risk.”

Soni further argues that stardom hurts team interests as star players “not only take their pound of flesh but also result in the rest of the team under-performing, for they are compelled to maintain the performance differential... the ‘Tiger Woods effect’.” I couldn’t disagree more with his formulation.

Sanjay Rajoura, tongue-in-cheek, picks out the 1990s as the breakout time when “hero-worship was established as a national character”. That was also when both Sachin Tendulkar and Shah Rukh Khan attracted a cult following, amplified by a blinkered media that “was getting into the habit of crawling”. While one may cavil at the writer’s impish derision of hero-worship, he is spot on in his observation that whereas Sachin and Shah Rukh are talented, honest and committed, the fact that a politician who has none of these qualities is hailed as the greatest – speaks poorly of our choice of heroes.

Hero-worship is an age-old phenomenon. Way back in the nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle – the great Scottish historian and philosopher – published a series of six lectures (On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic In History) which make the salient point that “hero-worship endures forever while man endures,” a natural and ingrained constituent of human nature. He proposes the ‘Great Man’ theory which holds that all history is “at bottom the history of the Great men who have worked here…the soul of the whole world’s history.” 

We may hate to admit it, but we subalterns are, at best, the bit players in the theatre of history.

The contention that the hype around a superstar adversely affects the team is utter balderdash. Hero-worship can be a force for good. Carlyle believed that “every true man is made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him.” Richard Livingstone said it best when he pointed out that nothing educates a man more effectively than ‘the vision of greatness.’ Contrary to Soni’s understanding of the ‘Tiger Woods effect’, Woods has had a transcendental effect on golf, inspiring his contemporaries, fans and future generations to follow in his wake. What was once an elite Caucasian game has been transfigured into a spectacular popular sport by Wood’s pyrotechnics.

Heroes come in various shapes and sizes. Each epoch throws up a different genre of hero, depending on that society’s predilections and concerns. Carlyle traces the lineage of hero-worship with selective exemplars from history, beginning with the pagan god Odin to the Prophet to Dante and Shakespeare to Cromwell and Napoleon. The hero is a notch below the divine, “not regarded as God among his fellowmen but as God-inspired.”

Ours is the glamour age of the celebrity hero – the sportsperson, the movie star and the flash politician. In India, cricketers are the undisputed numero uno heroes, the cynosure of the sporting public. The skew in favour of cricket can be attributed to the almost obsessive and asymmetric media coverage of the game in the country. The frothy Indian Premier League (IPL) matches hog the electronic media space and sports pages whereas national-level tournaments in other sports and even the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions League merit no more than a few columns. We are cricket-mad.

As a life-long cricket devotee who lived and breathed the game till T-20 corrupted the noble sport, I know a thing or two about hero-worship. For me, hero-worship is a very personal sentiment that could be triggered by genius and achievement or by courage, goodness, large-heartedness, even by sheer swag and attitude. It’s a pure heartfelt emotion, poles apart from the mass psychosis and hysteria of today’s dysfunctional fan(atic)s who have brought bigotry and ugly nationalism into the mix.

My tryst with hero-worship began in childhood, to be precise in 1960 when, listening over a crackling Marconi radio set, I heard the legendary Alan Mcgilvary and Johnny Moyes bring alive the famous Brisbane Test between Australia and the West Indies, a humdinger that ended in a tie. According to Jack Fingleton, the author of the canonical text on cricket titled The Greatest Test of All, that Test series “by taking the corpse of international cricket out of its winding sheet and infusing new life into it, by converting what used to be cricket wars of attrition into joyous events…has set an example which other cricketing countries can ignore only at their own peril."

I claim that at that tender age, I recognised genius. My 11-year-old gut told me that my first hero, Garfield Sobers – the four-in-one phenomenon – was the greatest cricketer of all time and seven decades later, the most discerning cricket experts second that view. I’ve been promiscuous in my adoration of cricket stars. Apart from Sobers, there’s Rohan Kanhai, Viv Richards, Graeme Pollock, Dennis Lillee and Imran Khan. My all-time hero among Indian cricketers is Salim Durrani, the gentle charismatic Pathan whose supreme intent was to entertain the crowd. And he achieved that with elan.

Who is the greatest ever Indian cricketer? The cricket plebeian would unhesitatingly choose Tendulkar – the masterful accumulator of runs. But give me Kapil Dev any day – a match-winner with bat and ball. Even purely from the batting perspective, I would rate Sunil Gavaskar as more accomplished than Tendulkar, as he scored his mountain of runs when cricket was a game played without the protective shell of a fibre-glass helmet. Bare statistics can be misleading. Gavaskar ended with a career average of 65 against the mighty ‘Fire in Babylon’ West Indies, whereas bullyboy Tendulkar reserved his best for minnows Bangladesh, against whom he has a mind-boggling average of 136 that includes five centuries in nine innings.

What of heroes beyond the sports field? Sadly, our world today is out of joint, crippled by anti-heroes masquerading as the genuine article. In our licentious ‘anything goes’ age of thoughtless idolisation, the notion of the hero has been roughed up beyond recognition. Look at what’s happening in the two largest democracies in the world. The anti-heroes at the helm are criminals shored up by a rogue media and deluded people.

Had Carlyle been writing today, he might have felt obliged to include a lecture on anti-heroes who have embraced the noxious politics of division and hate, have never been troubled by a conscience in their pursuit of unbridled power and have fattened on exploiting the basest instincts of their people.

Mathew John is a former civil servant. 

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