The Leading Edge

Cricket isn't a religion in India, it's much more important than that

05 August 2018 - 00:00 By Telford Vice

Only in India, a place saturated in all things cricket, could a book called Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer not only be published but loved as a classic.
Only in India, where society is built on thousands of years of meaningful thinking, would such a thing be written by a revered scholar of literature.
Only in India, where the printed word remains so relevant that even newspaper readership is growing, could it be difficult to get your hands on a copy of this book.
I know this because I made it a mission to do so while covering SA's Test series in India in November 2015.
After asking every Indian cricket reporter I knew - about 30 - where I could buy the book or borrow it for the duration of the series, and visiting every bricks and mortar bookshop I could find in Delhi - one website alone lists 5,390 - I gave up and copped out and Amazoned the damn thing.
It cost me 143 rupees, which is R27.91 in this week's money, or less than what I would have paid when this edition was published in Delhi in 1996: 150 rupees.My book, second-hand, of course, was duly couriered to my hotel. I unwrapped the package and was distinctly underwhelmed at what I held in my hands.
A dust jacket of apple green has Italic red lettering above and below a black-and-white photograph of a moment of nothingness in a nondescript match being played in the grounds of a large and stately house.
The pitch is matting, the umpire is one of the players, the bowler is walking back to his mark, the batsman is standing in something like repose close to where short leg might have been, his bat hanging askew from one hand, and there's a goat at extra cover.
Inside unfolds, in the gently impeccable English of elderly Indian uncles educated in the western tradition, 168 pages of exactly what it says on the tin. The author, Sujit Mukherjee, who died in 2003, played five first-class matches but no-one remembers him as a cricketer. More knew him as a commentator on radio from 1975 to 1978.
By the time he published this book his name already appeared on the covers of titles such as Towards a Literary History of India, Some Positions on a Literary History for India, and The Idea of an Indian Literature: A Book of Readings. But that he is probably best remembered for Autobiography tells us much about India.
You will hear that cricket is a religion there. It's much more important than that. Books far more ancient than Mukherjee's meddle in people's lives and tell them how to live on pain of an awful afterlife, but cricket is rudely alive in India and central to millions of lives.The same is true, to lesser but still intense degrees, in the rest of southern Asia.
Pakistanis will contest vehemently that there is anything lesser about their obsession with cricket, and they may be right. Bangladeshis approach the game with a frenzy that extended to them almost carrying away a South African reporter who had wandered lonely as a long white cloud out of a stadium in Dhaka during the 2011 World Cup.
There was no malice in what they nearly did: it was as if they had stumbled on a diamond in the street. He was tall. He was white. He had to be connected to the cricket somehow . Some of the rest of us had to go and rescue him, politely.
Sri Lankans are significantly more chilled about cricket and everything else, but their passion for the game should not be disregarded because it burns more slowly and subtly.
They are cricket's most creative thinkers, hence bowling actions like Muttiah Muralitharan's and Lasith Malinga's.
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka together are cricket's heart, mind, soul and home. There is danger in this because, as Kapil Dev said: "If you play good cricket a lot of bad things get hidden." But it is nonetheless undeniable...

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