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As I spend days lazing away, watching cricket and eating
chakli and
mysore pak, I am returned to childhood summers. Some things never change. Yet, as I watch, I can't quite capture the ease with which I watched those games. What with my consiousness of the racial and class overtones of cricket (not to mention cricket-watching), I'm contantly reminded that cricket is a game that is deeply entrenched in the traumas of colonial and postcolonial history. I don’t suppose anyone with a sense of the history of the game will really deny that – one of the ironies of this history is that, like the English language, cricket is one of the colonial imports to have taken deep root in diverse ex-colonial spaces – the four cricket-playing nations of the South Asian subcontinent, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand and a handful of African nations and England are the only nations wherein cricket is still played on a national basis. And arguably cricket is most popular now in
India and
Pakistan: not only is there no other national game in these countries but it seems as though no other game can possibly encapsulate the metonymic weight of the nation that cricket is accorded. Historians of the game may date this improvement of the qualify of subcontinental cricket in the
1970s and1980s, when teams from Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan began to stake their claims to the trophies but it seems to me that the advent of television across much of the subcontinent in the 1980s also had much to do with the creation of national audiences for cricket’s national teams.
Cricket became the national game and international matches began to take on a fervidly nationalist atmosphere. For instance, the historic rivalry between Pakistan and India – a rivalry rooted in religion, a rivalry that is underlaid with the memories of Partition – has meant that there is no stronger rivalry in cricket than that between India and Pakistan. Other international matches are watched, possibly by similar numbers of people but for sheer partisan intensity, nothing comes close to a close match between these age-old foes. And the size of these audiences (mainly in India, but also in other postcolonial nations) – and the advertising revenues they generate – has meant that the old guard in cricket (England and Australia) have had to give way before the power of these newly fledged national sides and their “boards” of control.
Last week, cricket in India (and by association), cricket in the rest of the world has gone through another shift of seismic proportions. What was once so much the preserve of gentility that a cricket game stood as an utterly comprehensible marker of the leisured privileges of the landed class in England (come on, haven’t you see any of the Merchant Ivory films?) has already become the national pastime of poverty-stricken millions. These days, the audiences for cricket matches in the subcontinent, certainly, but also increasingly across the world, tend not to be ladies with parasols and gentlemen in straw boaters as young men disenfranchised by globalization who see in this sport a last vestige of national pride and identity.
Now, however, the attempt is on to try and convert these questionable national allegiances into city-based sporting franchise audiences. Modelled after the NHL and the NFL, the Indian Premier League has arrived: the 8 city based leagues of the IPL intend to play a series of intense matches over April and May of each year. The games will be in the Twenty20 format, which means that they last for 3 hours or so each – this to ensure that they can be played during the evening hours and on weekends. Much is expected of the IPL; the 8 city franchises were sold off for millions of dollars and yesterday, the successful bidders of these franchises participated in an “auction” of world class Indian and international cricketers. Media outlets in the cricket playing world have since been trumpeting the news that further millions have been spent on “buying” players – the current Indian captain, for instance, has been “bought” for a cool $1.5 million a year for the next 3 years. I’ll repeat that: $1.5 million a year for 3 years, to play in a 2-month tournament that is yet to be initiated. 77 other players, including Indians, Australians, South Africans, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and the odd New Zealander or two have also all been bought, though a number of city franchises have yet to find names for their teams.
So what we have is an intriguing hybrid: a colonial game made peculiarly their own by audiences that are as far removed from its original audiences as we can imagine, a game that is now being shunted in an entirely new direction – a direction influenced more by the enduring popularity of games featuring the Toronto Maple Leafs or AC Milan than the symbolic national pride that has characterized its popularity in postcolonial spaces so far. I’m the first to admit that I don’t know the difference between a Yorker and Yorkshire pudding, but what I do know is my postcolonial history. I’d be willing to bet that this whole cricket thing is a case study of the overarching trajectories of colonialism, postcolonialism and globalization. Go figure.
