Origin of Cricket
Sixty years ago, C.L.R. James’ memoir, Beyond a Boundary, echoed this line from Rudyard Kipling’s The English Flag: “What should they know of England who only England know?” In the preface, James asked, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” For those who don’t know cricket, here’s a précis.
From its 16th-century origin as a children’s game of bat and ball, cricket spread from the southeastern counties of England to almost everywhere that the British Empire planted its Union Jack. Five-day-long test matches between Australia and England began in 1877, with South Africa, West Indies, New Zealand, and India accepted into the International Cricket Council (ICC) every few years or decades between 1889 and 1932; over the next ninety years, six more nations joined the ICC, with Afghanistan being the last in 2018.
World Cup Cricket
Since the faster-paced One Day International (ODI) Cricket World Cup was organized in 1975, some twenty nations from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America have qualified for the quadrennial championship. Reflecting the sport’s roots, the first three World Cups were hosted by England; it wasn’t until 2019 that England lifted its only trophy, and that, too, after a boundary countback rule was invoked when the tie-breaking Super Over also resulted in England and New Zealand finishing level.
Boundary countback. Super Over. Finishing level. Curious phrases from a sport that looks like American baseball but plays quite differently. Excepting the use of a wooden bat to hit a spheroid leather object that fits in a grown man’s palm, the sports’ Venn diagram skews outside the corked center of baseball and cricket balls.
This year’s ODI World Cup was hosted by India, with the host country bested by Australia in the finals. New Zealand and South Africa were semi-finalists; and England was one loss away from last place, placing behind Afghanistan, the new kid on the block.
The cricket world order is changing; the world order has changed.
India Rising
Most Indians believe their country is on the cusp of becoming a global superpower. Writing for the London School of Economics, social historian Ramachandra Guha suggests that the question of superpower status is prompted by the “spectacular success, in the short-term, of the Indian economy, the impressive growth rates of the past decade, the entrepreneurial drive manifest in such crucial, cutting-edge sectors such as information technology, and the creation of an ever larger and ever more confident middle class.”
While Guha caveats this success (“But, the more things appear to change, the more they are actually the same.”), as a scholar of cricket, he, like almost every other cricket fan in India and beyond, could hardly argue that India is not already a cricketing superpower.
Although India did not take home the World Cup trophy this year, words like juggernaut (itself a derivative of the Indian god, Jagannath) are regularly used to describe the country’s cricket ecosystem. The championship match was played in the same stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat where in 2020 Prime Minister Modi feted President Trump in front of supporters swaying to the sound of The Village People’s “Macho Man.” With a seating capacity of 132,000, it is the largest stadium in the world.
Under Modi’s leadership, India projects confidence on the world stage. On match day, billionaires and Bollywood stars boasted that they spent more for a one-way ticket from Mumbai to Ahmedabad (Rs 31,000) than it would cost for a round-trip to Rome. Gandhian village economics—what E. F. Schumacher called “small is beautiful”—is in the rearview mirror, replaced by an ungentlemanly, very not cricket, and very boorish and Trumpian “highest number in history.”
Post-colonial era
In response to “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”James provided a book-length response, a master class on sport as a metaphor for social change. Through the evolution of cricket, one can see fissiparous forces that subtly—and not so subtly—reflect a post-colonial world order. The integrationist British Raj ruled for centuries by reigning houses of the United Kingdom, has fragmented into what must seem to some white Brits to be mutinies by those they once ruled, those with surnames such as Sunak, Varadkar, Yousaf, and Khan (Rishi Sunak is the UK’s Prime Minister; Leo Varadkar is Ireland’s Taoiseach; Humza Yousaf is Scotland’s First Minister; and Sadiq Khan is London’s Mayor).
A similar inversing of the democratizing pyramid is taking place in India with a retreat of Brahmin dominance. Since India’s Independence in 1947, Brahmins have served as prime minister for over five of the seven decades. But now, Narendra Modi, whom some have disparaged as a “chaiwallah” due to his humble origins, has been PM for eight years and is on track to begin a third term in May 2024.
The New Rulers & IPL
A Million Mutinies Now is the title of James’ fellow Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul’s 1990 journey through India. The book argued that India was moving away from a cohesive, centuries-old organizing principle based on caste and clan. Some thirty years later, one must embrace Naipaul’s prescience.
The erstwhile rulers have become the ruled.
Back to cricket. Sort of. Paget Henry wrote in the forward of the re-publication of Beyond a Boundary at its 50th anniversary in 2013, “These new historical forces are primarily ones of individual success and high-level consumption, which are quite at odds with the collective and Puritan codes of 1950s … cricket. These new values and aspirations toward individual success also point to an important shift in the external orientation … from England to the United States.”
Triumphalist Indian cricket now has its Indian Premier League, which more resembles America’s Major League Baseball (with American football-like cheerleaders thrown into the titillating mix) than anything that the sober British Marylebone Cricket Club imagined when it codified The Laws of Cricket in 1788. The IPL’s success is measured by the massive wealth accumulation of the sports board, media outlets and their advertisers, team owners, cricketers, and even the cheerleaders who are reputed to earn 15,000 rupees per match (the average monthly income of a salaried person in urban India is Rs 22,000; when the rural sector is factored in, the average Indian earns only Rs 270 per day).
The new superheroes
More than 70% of India’s population (over 900 million people) lives in villages with social structures still predominantly informed by caste and familial networks. A glance at well-regarded newspapers such as The Hindu and the Times of India suggests that collectivist rural India has taken a back seat to the urban individual. These newspapers play up the ABCs: advertising American-style consumption, bloviating about Bollywood stars and starlets, and commenting on Cricket superstars’ performances.
The current cricketing hero, celebrated by ordinary fans and international sportsmen such as David Beckham and Novak Djokovic is Virat Kohli; he is married to the Bollywood actress Anushka Sharma; both of them are important endorsers of domestic and global brands such as Gitanjali, HSBC, Luxor, Pantene, Pepsi, and Puma.
If James were writing today, he might compare Kohli favorably to Don Bradman, considered by many to be the finest batsman in the 20th century; but in the same paragraph, he would quite likely have used Kohli’s success to make a pithy observation about India and her former colonial master.
In his artful political prose, James would perhaps have written, “India has come a long way on the pitch from Dec. 28, 1983. On that day, the Little Master, Sunil Gavaskar, scored his 30th Test century (goodness, a double century!) to surpass Australian Don Bradman’s record for most hundreds. But now, in this new millennium, the Indians have turned the white man’s game upside down. “
“First, there was Sachin Tendulkar—the Master Blaster—and now India has Virat Kohli, nicknamed Chiku for his childhood big cheeks. The Indians, with their IT and cricketing prowess, now have big bats to rival the cheekiness of the English who wandered in the Brexit wilderness long before they lost their beloved Queen Elizabeth, who at least could be counted upon to remind them of more glorious times.”
The New World Order
During James’ lifetime (1901 – 1989), England was in decline and America was rising. And ascension in the second half of the American Century included a dream of individual exceptionalism in the guise of collective liberation: Jackie from the Negro Leagues played alongside his white counterparts in the Major Leagues; Rosa insisted on riding in the front of the bus; Martin dreamed that his “four little children [would] one day live in a nation where they [would] not be judged by the color of their skin;” and Malcolm argued that the nightmare of white supremacy required a different, more fiery dream.
World orders do not collapse without a fight. The fight can be nonviolent but is more often violent. As a historian and Marxist writer, James argued that one must know the past; as an activist, he was an agent of realizable change; and as a radical, he understood that a post-racial future was asymptotic—ultimately unrealizable but worthy of aspiration.
“Greedily I relived the past, every inch of it that I could find, I took part in the present (particularly a grand and glorious and victorious campaign to make a black man, Frank Worrell, captain of the West Indies team to Australia) and I speculated and planned and schemed for the future; among other plans, how to lay racialism flat and keep stamping on it whenever it raises its head, and at the same time not to lose a sense of proportion-not at all easy.”
O Captain! My Captain!
Perhaps Frank Worrell was a harbinger of Barack Obama and Rishi Sunak; if the West Indies cricket team could have a Black captain, the U.S. could have a Black president and the U.K. a brown prime minister. But at what cost? In James’ aching words, did Worrell, Obama, and Sunak have to “divest [themselves] of [their] skins” to reach their pinnacles?
“Worrell as captain at home or in India was bad enough, but that could be swallowed by the manipulators. What was at stake was the captaincy in Australia and still more in England. Their whole point was to continue to send to populations of white people, black or brown men under a white captain. The more brilliantly the black men played, the more it would emphasize to millions of English people: ‘Yes, they are fine players, but, funny, isn’t it, they cannot be responsible for themselves-they must always have a white man to lead them.’”
Pax Indica
After World War II, the world moved from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana; the idea was that after the sun had set on the British Empire, geopolitically and culturally, international peace would be overseen by America’s hard military and economic power and its soft power of Hollywood-style “Top Gun” rugged individualism.
Perhaps India’s failure to win the 2023 Cricket World Cup can serve as a cautionary tale of hubris and triumphalism, a tale that raises some questions. What skin must India divest itself of to be a full-fledged member of the G-7? Will it continue to jettison its collectivist culture in favor of American individualism? Will its mistrust of American and European hegemony play out in a non-aligned manner? How loudly will it insist that the West became rich through hydrocarbons and must cut emissions faster than the Global South, while quietly allowing Indian industries to continue to pollute India’s sacred waters and choke her asthmatic children?
Many in India argue that with the United States’ tragically inadequate response to the Covid pandemic, we’ve moved to Pox Americana. But it’s not clear that those Indians dare dream of a Pax Indica. And if they do, what would that look like in a country that today pays only lip service to Gandhi, the world’s boundary-busting apostle of peace, who believed in the gendered, but noble, brotherhood of man?
Perhaps one answer comes from Robert Lipsyte’s introduction to Beyond a Boundary: “The brotherhood of the game is only of the game.”
Photo by Marc Kleen on Unsplash