Fever pitch

Defeating the two-time Caribbean giants in the men’s cricket World Cup (WC) in 1983, the Kapil Dev-led Indian side caused two tectonic shifts in international cricket. First, it helped catapult the sport to a symbol of national pride. Second, this win helped managements in the subcontinent veer the game’s power base eastwards, resulting in the organisation of the next quadrennial event outside England for the first time.

Ever since the 1975 edition, the game’s format has transformed dramatically. It has attracted investment, visibility, and scandals in varying measures, depending on the influence and stature of the individual and the team. This not only makes it difficult to comprehend the sport but also to contextualise it. Three books in particular attempt to chart this unique history of the game from various standpoints.

Cricketing Lives: A Characterful History from Pitch to Page by the Associate Professor in Journalism at Swansea University, Richard H Thomas, is an insightful work. Divided into 28 chapters, it traces and documents cricketing history through specific landmarks, incidents, and memorable icons of the sport, including a dedicated chapter on women’s cricket.

What sets it apart from other books on cricket is its style. Additionally, Thomas’ peculiar interest in peppering the narrative with interesting anecdotes helps readers easily sift through the delectable historiography of the game. The story of Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji is a case in point. Despite racism, he stood tall, pioneering the notion that cricket “need not be a white man’s game.” However, the way his personal life unfolds is another matter. Thomas writes: “Though I can be accused of cherry-picking incidents and writings where the Indian team and its icons are mentioned, I’ll offer another snippet anyway. *In the book, Thomas writes,* “[India’s] World Cup triumph in 1983 shocked everyone, not least the Indians themselves. Having been ambivalent towards one-day cricket, India now ‘made it her own.’”

The Lords of Wankhede: Tales Between Two Titles by W V Raman and R Kaushik: Bookending the two title wins — 1983 and 2011, this is a breezy account of Indians’ relationship with cricket and the country’s representatives’ tryst with bringing the glory home. Incidents indicating the subtle tussle for power and control, and not-so-subtle dance of envy also populate its pages. While Raman played for the country between 1988 and 1997, Kaushik is a prolific cricket writer, resulting in the book becoming a heady cocktail of privileged stories and insightful commentary on this beloved sport. Thomas’ observation regarding India’s ambivalence towards one-day international (ODI) cricket is oft-repeated by Raman and Kaushik.

They also take a deep dive into what Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka notes in his landmark cricketing novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew: “Sport can unite worlds, tear down walls, and transcend race, the past, and all probability.” South Africa’s cricket team visiting India, and the Proteas playing a good host when Indians flew to the newly apartheid-free country is a case in point.

The Proteas’ ban on playing international cricket was lifted after two decades. In the 1990s, an adroit administrator and former South African cricketer Ali Bacher recognised the potential to leverage cricket as a tool for the “integration process” to supplement the formal end of apartheid. The political will was executed effortlessly, as the co-authors note in the book. It’d be of interest to cricket fans that the South African teams must include six players of colour of whom two should be black Africans “to meet the transformational targets.”

Interestingly, the third book, Pitchside: My Life in Indian Cricket by Amrit Mathur, also recounts this historic visit. It, however, offers a literary lesson rather than a cricket anecdote, for Mathur’s book is a textbook example of what changes when a story is told from a different perspective. The author was the manager of the Indian team in the 1992 tour. He not only helped chart a plan for the Indian Premier League(IPL) — forever changing the sport — but also held several reputable positions that enabled him to witness several firsts of the game. The above tour also marked the first time the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) quoted a price for television rights. Mathur’s quirky remark summarises to what extent the board was “stumped”: BCCI “didn’t know they owned the rights that [Bacher] wanted to buy.”

Commercialisation has gotten the better of the sport, but the sheer joy of witnessing one’s favourite hit a ton, take a five-wicket haul, or lift the World Cup remains unparalleled. As the country waits in anticipation for the next champion, it’s only fitting to help oneself to books that help one relive the joy of those classic moments — as if Kapil Dev scored an unbeaten 175 against Zimbabwe only yesterday and Mahendra Singh Dhoni hit it out of the park on Nuwan Kulasekara’s delivery just the other evening — to bring the trophy home after 28 years.