All in the game

Lead review

James Astill’s ‘The Great Tamasha...’ is a story of modern India through the ups and downs of one of it boldest enterprises: Cricket’s Indian Premier League, writes Rahul Bhattacharya.

For two months in spring, the Indian Premier League (IPL) is watched more than anything else on Indian television. Test cricket is played between nations over five days, without guarantee of a winner. IPL matches last three hours and are played between Indian teams owned by businessmen and movie stars. Results are guaranteed.

There have been unforgettable moments. Five years ago, one player slapped another as they left the field. The slapped player was arrested in May and accused of fixing IPL matches. Also arrested was the son-in-law of the cricket board president, who owns a team, on suspicion of gambling on matches. His accomplice was thought to be a C-list actor, who once won the Indian version of Big Brother. Tamasha, the Hindi word for “spectacle,” begins to describe it.

The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption, and the Spectacular Rise of Modern India ends before the IPL’s latest depredations came to light. Would the book have examined them? You cannot say to what extent. James Astill touches only on the finest overlap of cricket and corruption that modern India had to offer him — its Black Sox moment — when, in 2000, a former captain and several players were charged with match-fixing and barred from the sport. The league’s previous brushes with corruption are not explored so much as summarily presented. When you consider the subtitle, corruption is not really Astill’s muse. His interests are wider.

The Great Tamasha is a series of excursions into a cricket-fixated society. For four years, Astill, a descendant of a cricketer who played for England in the 1920s, was stationed in New Delhi as the South Asia bureau chief of The Economist. He devotes much of the book to recounting how Indian cricket went from colonial recreation to national addiction, and while treading this familiar ground, the narrative lacks the propulsion of discovery. The sport’s interactions with race, nationalism, religion and caste, for example, have been treated with greater depth and nuance in Ramachandra Guha’s extraordinary social history A Corner of a Foreign Field.

Astill attempts to make the big themes contemporary, not always with conviction. His grasp of caste does not inspire confidence: Brahmins, he writes, make up less than a fifth of the population, when the figure is more approximate to five per cent; he uses the word veda in place of varna (the Hindu caste classification). Cricket obsessives will notice other errors, like the number of runs India trailed by in its greatest test victory. Readers might be surprised to note that the book claims Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency rule, censoring the press and suspending elections, in 1977, which was when it was lifted.

Astill’s excursions, however, give the book its spice, its masala. The Great Tamasha is a book of breadth rather than depth. It buzzes with field trips and brisk interviews that sometimes bring insight, and more often momentum and freshness.

Astill has an ear pricked for self-incriminations and tactless evasions. In a chapter on administration, he attempts to penetrate the opacity of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. The group is described as a “secretive volunteer organisation” that “did not appear to consider itself bound by the most basic rules of corporate governance.” A longtime chief of a provincial association concedes that no new member has been admitted for two decades. His son captains the state team. In Delhi, another administrator shows the author the “brick-sized wads” of stadium tickets he is compelled to give away to policemen and politicians to grease the system. Asked about membership at his association, he says: “That is a very great question, and I will give you enormous respect and many great parties if you can find out and explain to me how it works.”

The mysteries of this secretive volunteer force could be a matter of trivial amusement, but Indian cricket is an enormous industry. It is also the financial heart of the global game, accounting for some 80 per cent of revenues. The IPL alone is valued at over $3 billion in annual revenues.

The league was created in 2008 by an audacious, wayward businessman named Lalit Modi, who sneaked his way onto the cricket board explicitly to push through an NBA-style city-based league. It was Modi who persuaded movie stars, tycoons (and his own brother-in-law) to put in millions of dollars to buy franchises, and then, for sums unheard of, cricketers from around the world in a televised auction. He hired Western cheerleaders — “white girls in hot pants” — for the sidelines and institutionalised the after-match party, which was often a fashion show. 

Astill calls the IPL the leitmotif of his book for its shiny and hollow symbolism, perhaps also because it allows Indians to reveal how they see modern cricket and modern India. His depiction is close-up and entertaining, peppered with priceless quotations. He introduces Modi to us at an expensive London restaurant, in the process of disdaining a French waiter. It is 2010. The IPL’s third season is over. Modi is in exile, living in a “vast Mayfair flat, serviced by half a dozen servants that he flew out from India on rotation.” Modi claims to have fled for fear of the Mumbai underworld, whose orders to fix matches he rejected. “Controversy was always something I wanted in the IPL,” he tells Astill. “There is a lot wrong with how Indian cricket is run,” Astill writes. “Yet India is run even worse.” In the book’s final scene, set in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi during an IPL match, he wanders alleys “so narrow and overbuilt they were almost tunnels,” which “flickered with fluorescent television light and resounded with television noise,” to find a sweatshop of child embroiderers, cricket fans, for whom watching it on TV is a Sunday treat.