Cricket loves its heros. Tendulkar, Dhoni, Sehwag. Warne, Kallis, Steyn. For the next few months, the game’s hero should be the Indian fan. Here come the world’s two biggest cricket attractions, right on top of each other. The tenth World Cup is underway, somehow strung out to forty-nine games. Then on 8 April, less than a week after its final, begins the first of the seventy-four games of the fourth Indian Premier League.
In any other country, this would be too much of a good thing. In India, too much is barely enough. The games fixtured in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh notwithstanding, it will be Indian television audiences that somehow make Canada v Kenya and Ireland v the Netherlands work as the tournament effectively spends five weeks deciding whether West Indies or Bangladesh go through to the quarter-finals. Then they’ll swap their horizontal tricolours for the IPL replica gear of their favourite franchise and follow that all the way too.
It’s a source of wonder. Forty years ago, India had issued fewer than a quarter of a million television licences. Now there are sets in more than half the nation’s households, and they never shine more incessantly than for the number one game. India is not just obsessed with cricket; it is, as Santosh Desai puts it in Mother Pious Lady (2010), ‘obsessed with being obsessed.’
For cricket elsewhere, that poses a growing dilemma. The World Cup is a misnomer. Cricket is not a global game (that is, followed in a majority of countries in ways not based chiefly on national identity), but a multinational one (dependent, like rugby, on an essentially fixed minority of countries) depending, as perhaps as no other sport, on the latterday financial heft of a single country.
The size and vitality of India’s economy has divided an ancient and widely-loved sport into two streams – the fixtures involving India, as competitor and consumer, and those not. The former are so staggering more lucrative that the latter have a diminishing relative existence. Every new cricket initiative worldwide involves trying to monetise Indian passion, whether it’s Australia’s mooted Big Bash League or New Zealand’s Cricket Holdings America LLC. Young cricketers everywhere hanker for the easy money of IPL: Australian domestic cricket stopped almost to a walk during the IPL auction as players hung on every tweet and text message. Where once the objective might have been to become the next Ricky Ponting, now it is to become the next Dan Christian, made a millionaire overnight last month by the lightning strike of an offer from the Deccan Chargers.
You’d be forgiven for regarding Indian domination of the cricket world as a tired theme. Although it was simply temporarily obscured by Australia’s on-field strength and amour propre, the domination probably dates back more than fifteen years old, to the 1996 World Cup and the Supreme Court’s liberalisation of India’s airwaves.
But what needs to be understood is that the intrinsic qualities of cricket are coming to have less to do with this than Indian gross domestic product and gross political ambition. Ashis Nandy’s contention that cricket is an ‘Indian game accidentally discovered by the English’ has been vindicated not by culture but by capitalism, and also the ballot box.
It’s as simple as this. First imagine that you are a broadcaster or a manufacturer of consumer goods surveying the extraordinary cultural, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity that is India. Especially if you are a Samsung surveying the scene from Seoul or an LG Group from Yeouido-dong, how baffling it must seem. So many Gods. So many markets. How to span them all? Bollywood? Soap opera? Cricket outdoes them all, partly because it effortlessly enfolds elements of the other two – narrative, character and tamasha. No wonder cricket attracts eighty-five per cent of the advertising monies lavished on sport in India.
Now imagine that you are politician. It’s easy really – just abandon all your moral scruples. Think about the appeal to your constituents of a cricket-friendly face and a cricket-minded administration, what an IPL franchise, a new cricket stadium or even just hosting a one-day international might be worth. What a way to evince your common touch, your affinity for vernacular culture.
When the World Cup was last in India, the dominant administrative figures, like Jagmohan Dalmiya and Inderjit Singh Bindra, had deep roots in the game. The administration of cricket in India in the last fifteen years has been transformed by the presences of such political heavyweights as Arun Jaitley of Karnataka, Rajeev Shukla of Uttar Pradesh, Narendra Modi of Gujarat, Anurag Thakur of Himachal Pradesh, Ranjib Biswal of Orissa, Dayanand Narvekar of Goa, Jyotiraditya Scindia of Madhya, Ranbhir Singh Mahendra of Harayana, Lalu Prasad Yadav of Bihar and/or, just lately, Shashi Tharoor and Kuruppasserry Varkey Thomas in Kerala – although, perhaps above all, by Sharad Pawar, the ‘King of Maharastra’, now poo-bah of the International Cricket Council.
So cricket in India is not big only because of its fans’ unique passion, its players’ great skills, the game’s incomparable appeal – and it is certainly not big because of the talent of its administration. It outstrips the game in rival nations because India contains lots more people who want to buy mobile phones and televisions while aspiring to whitegoods and other consumer durables, and also because of the exuberant self-admiration of India’s political and media elites.
What does this mean for cricket? In the near-term, it has meant great rewards for players, who have no objection to being told where to go and what to do providing a king’s ransom is involved, and also improved access and better deals for fans, because they are now also consumers whose disposable rupee is suddenly worth hustling for.
A pre-industrial game, however, does not make a natural fit with a late capitalist economy. At risk is its hold on any independent existence, as a game, as a cultural form, as an institution. Cricket, it is true, has never been truly outside economics and politics – in India, as has been eloquent argued by Ramachandra Guha in A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002), it has been an heir to the fissures and tensions of race, cast, religion and nation.
But within it has been preserved something spontaneous, romantic, transcendant, inspirational – something beyond the market forces to which it is today increasingly in thrall. In this latest incarnation, cricket is mainly an effective means of conveying goods to market; in and of itself it is arguably of dwindling significance.
This happens, by the way, everywhere. At times this summer in Australia, watching the Ashes felt like visiting a shopping mall – and there was something deliciously subversive about watching the team that had come to play cricket win, and the team wheeled out to interrupt the advertisements get rock’n’rolled.
But India’s playing is like the effect of any other two nations squared. Which is actually a diminution of cricket worldwide. One of the qualities of Indian cricket fans has always been their global awareness. They were international followers of the game, long before it was straightforward to be so. They would follow events in, say, Australia or the West Indies almost as closely as they followed their own favourites.
An irony of Indian cricket’s resistless rise is that the game is becoming less global, relatively speaking. While football and the Olympics have maintained their relentless onward march, Test cricket remains a small club; one-day international cricket is little larger. As Amit Gupta notes in Cricket and Globalisation (2010): ‘There are no cricketers who have become global icons and advertising brand names in non-cricket-playing countries – as David Beckham, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan have done for their sports in countries like China.’
China developing a taste for cricket might change the landscape – cricket’s string-pullers would like that, because there are lots more consumer markets to conquer there. But, really, who cares? They’re creaming it at the moment without having to look anywhere else. Let the ICC parachute in some plastic bats. In the short- to medium-term, the name of the game is exploiting a core market that is still growing.
Elsewhere, in fact, cricket is becoming subtly less local. When India visits Australia later this year, it will be transported in an Indian commercial bubble, with its home television audiences in mind: even the hoardings in the grounds will be allocated to Indian brand names. Series that don’t involve India, meanwhile, drift into the twilight of obscure pay-TV channels.
The quasi-domestic Champions League is perhaps the most bizarre artefact of Indian hegemony, a tournament that even when it is not in India is all about that country. Last year’s instalment in South Africa remains in the memory only because of its eeriness: bad cricket being played by ordinary cricketers in front of handfuls of spectators, gyrating cheerleaders and overexcited commentators simply because ESPN, frustrated at having failed to bid for the IPL, had forked out $US1 billion. Here too can be seen most clearly the distinction between what the fans want and what the cricket-industrial complex want them to want. That’s no way to treat heroes.