Social transformation by cricket

Cricket has been the most unifying religion in India for a long time, but now it is fast becoming a vehicle for social transformation.

Cricket has been the most unifying religion in India for a long time, but with boys from small towns and humble backgrounds making it to the Indian team, it is fast becoming a vehicle for social transformation too.

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When Harbhajan, orphaned son of a junior clerk in the railways says - after winning the first Man of the Match award - that it would now be easier for him to get his three sisters married, it is luminous inspiration for a thousand other boys from struggling families, says a new book.

Every time Irfan Pathan, son of a humble muezzin, opens the bowling for India, he lights up the possibilities for a thousand young dreamers or when Virender Sehwag does something audacious with his bat, a thousand children in the back-alleys of the boondocks know that they are defined only by the limits of their potential.

"From the preserve of aristocratic Parsees and Eton bred royalty, it has seeped down to even the most under-priviliged in India," says the book The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket by Boria Majumdar, a Rhodes scholar.

Cricket has been binding spirit for the nation, an expression for the inarticulate and the voiceless... It has been social mobility, tolerance and secularism, principles that are integral to the survival and flourishing of the modern Indian state, says the book.

The book tells the story of cricket through pictures: which depict the high and low of Indian cricket. Everyone from Ranji and C K Naidu to Vijay Merchant and Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar to Rahul Dravid and Mahendra Singh Dhoni can be seen here.

Cover of Boria Majumdar's book

Majumdar also talks about what he describes as "the shift" - the transformation of South Asia into the nerve centre of global cricket power - a process that started in earnest in 1990s and has been consolidated since.

"The English win (England versus India, 3rd test, Mumbai, 2006) brought me a new truth about the game. Not even an hour had elapsed since England won in Mumbai... Being the cricket mad Indian that I am, I had expected that one and all on the London underground would be discussing cricket and how Flintoff and his men had done the country proud."

But Majumdar says little did he realise that cricket in England was hardly the game it once was. "... Only us South Asians, it turned out, bothered about cricket action back home and got up in the early morning London chill to watch the action on pay Sky TV."

For the English, he says it was hardly a matter of life and death, more a leisurely pastime in contrast to India where "no hyperbole is sufficient to capture the importance of cricket in country's national life."

However, the book says that cricket has also been corruption, power play and infamy. As monetary stakes have increased, so have accusations that Indian cricket officials are not above taking a kickback or two to award telecast rights or even select a player for the national team.

The match-fixing scandal ripped through the heart of cricket and the knowledge that the roots of it are in India has left millions of cricket lovers cynical about the honesty of Indian players. "That dark doubt will always fester in some corner of the Indian cricket fan's mind," he writes.

But despite all this, Indians buy products that their cricketers tell them to.

Majumdar says that if cricket is religion at home, Bollywood is India's best known brand name and both are now too important politically to be left to cricketers and film stars.

"The change of guard at BCCI under Maratha politician Sharad Pawar, who also heads the Maharashtra Cricket Association, is indeed a pointer to what lies ahead. In Delhi and Bihar, the cricket boards are already headed by politicians."

In the years ahead, the marriage between cricket and nationalism, entertainment and patriotism, culture and passion will certainly dominate the face of India both at home and in the diaspora, he says.

On the future, he says, "judging by the body language of India's younger lot of cricketers, the game is in safe hands."