Cricket is big, but Lankans love their rugby

The rugby World Cup has just about kicked off in France.

If you were in Sri Lanka, you would have certainly known that by now because almost every giant screen, even those installed in public playgrounds, is consumed almost entirely by behemoths with twinkle toes. 

Even ‘tuk tuk' drivers have the games playing on their phones and discuss with anyone who is willing to listen. In Sri Lanka, everyone is in on rugby.  

An hour and ten minutes away, in India, save for a niche population, most of them aren’t aware that the quadrennial event is on, let alone with the level of detail that the Sri Lankans fuss about. 

It’s peculiar that two nations with such similar cultures, a colonial hangover with near-identical symptoms - including cricket - should approach yet another remnant of the colonisers in such contrasting manner. 

Diving into the genesis of the sport in the two countries doesn’t yield an answer for the timeline of inception is almost uniform. In fact, the sport was first played in India, officially, in 1871, whereas it would be eight more years before Sri Lanka would witness their first game.

In India, not much later, there were at least three clubs - Bombay Gymkhana, Calcutta Cricket and Football Club (CCFC), and Madras Cricket Club (MCC) - which diligently observed the sport. Sri Lanka had the Colombo Football Club which did the same. 

But, since the patrons of these clubs mostly happened to be of the Caucasian variety, it was only they who got around to playing the sport. So, even though the sport was established over 150 years ago in both these spots, it took a long time before the indigenous people got around to playing it.

“After independence, a lot of those clubs had local patrons and they stuck to playing rugby,” says Chris Dharmakirti, a former member of Sri Lanka’s national team. “It was a matter of pride for a lot of them. When people, who were not of aristocracy, saw that it meant so much to those higher up in the hierarchy, they started to aspire for that. Rugby, in a sense, became an ideal, something to work towards. Something to say you have arrived in life.”

Dharmakirti continues: “Even when schools started adopting rugby, it was mostly the "elite" schools which played rugby, but over time, even "non-elite" schools started playing. Rugby became level-playing ground for people from starkly different socio-economic backgrounds to come together. It united Sri Lanka.”

One could make a case for the trajectory being similar to the one cricket assumed in India before becoming the preeminent sport of the nation. Cricket enjoys more than healthy patronage here, but rugby keeps up. 

“A lot of it is because of the school system,” says Maas Savangaan, a Sri Lankan who is now based in Bengaluru. “Parents in Sri Lanka take a lot of pride in their kids playing rugby. My father captained Sri Lanka in the past and I went on to play for clubs there. It’s very much the same for other kids here. There’s a sense of fraternity and community that you feel when you belong to a school and play rugby.” 

Lankan journalist, Ravi S, reveals that close to five thousand people attend school matches during the season and the atmosphere is comparable to international cricket matches. Although it’s hard to believe, it feels like there is some truth to it because the R Premadasa stadium has barely seen more than 10,000 people, even when Sri Lanka are playing. “They even have sponsors for the B Division tournament these days,” here says. 

Tarun Appanna, a former Indian player, is trying to resuscitate the sport in India, and has done a rather august job of it, but there’s only so much a person of passion can do in a country.  

“See, we have the numbers,” he says. “We have over sixty-five thousand registered members in the Rugby Union in India, but we don’t have a school programme like they do in Sri Lanka. We’re trying to take the sport to tier two cities now and put a grassroots programme in place.”

That said, he reveals that nearly every state in India has a rugby team and they all diligently show up for the Nationals. “…but the problem is to get city-dwelling people to work with people from the rural districts. There is a disparity there and we are trying to remedy that,” he says.

It’s interesting that rugby has that effect in India. In Sri Lanka, meanwhile, the waiter is watching the World Cup with his arms over the shoulders of a highly influential member of an illustrious club. They laugh in unison. England hammered Argentina, but it was rugby in Sri Lanka that won in the end.