The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  Cricket in Patna, so lovingly described by Sujit Mukherjee in his Autobiography of An Unknown Cricketer, a memoir of his playing days in the 1940s and 50s, was dying. To advertise this fact, in 2004 representatives of Lalu’s Bihar Cricket Association staged a hunger strike outside the BCCI’s annual general meeting in Kolkata. Unless the board recognised their association, they further threatened to launch a ‘fast unto death’ outside the home of India’s president. But the board was unmoved.

  Then Pawar got hold of the BCCI in 2005 and appointed a commission, headed by Arun Jaitley, to review the issue. Its recommendations were due to be voted on by the board the following year. In the run-up to this event the Bihari cricketers renewed their lobbying. They wrote to India’s president threatening that 25 first-class cricketers would immolate themselves outside his house unless their cry was heard.

  In a way, it was: the Indian board decided to leave things as they were. It vowed to merge the BCA and the JCA and keep Bihari cricket in its former undivided state. Lalu welcomed the plan with the proviso that his body would be in charge of the merger.

  But the JCA took that decision to court and soon enough the Bihari cricketers were back on hunger strike outside the BCCI’s office in Mumbai. ‘All we want is to play cricket,’ their leader Mrityunjay Tewari implored.

  More than a decade after Bihar’s bifurcation, the issue remained unresolved. Yet a solution was quietly emerging. The JCA would retain, de facto, Bihar’s first-class status (which is why Lalu’s boy, Tejashwi, had played for it). The BCA was meanwhile vying to be accepted by the Indian board as an associate member, a status that would in due course lead to full membership.

  That was probably the best Bihari cricketers could hope for. But it was far from clear when, if ever, it would happen. Lalu’s organisation was meanwhile impoverished and largely inactive. Its leader’s political influence had collapsed. At a state election in 2010 Lalu’s party won just 22 of the 243 seats. Having lined up behind a powerful politician, the BCA was now saddled with a leader uninterested in cricket, who lived in Delhi and was reviled in Bihar.

  On a dark night in Patna – as most nights are, there being few street lights – I called on Lalu’s point-man in the city. His name was Abdul Bari Siddiqui. A sturdy Muslim, built like a boxer, Siddiqui ruled over Lalu’s party and the BCA in his leader’s absence. He was sitting outside his bungalow, in a cloud of mosquitoes, chatting with some friends.

  ‘I ask you,’ Siddiqui said tragically, as a skinny servant brought the tea. ‘Is it right that everyone should harass us terribly only because Lalu Prasad Yadav is our leader and president of our cricket association?’ Siddiqui shook his head. ‘No, I say, this is unsporting! Whenever politicians enter sport, the politician prospers and the sport suffers.’

  This was a bit rich, I suggested. Besides his cricket duties, Siddiqui was also the deputy head of India’s national badminton association. ‘Ah, yes!’ said Siddiqui, perking up. ‘Only I, Siddiqui, am different. I am a politician, yes. But actually I am a sports person. As a boy I played badminton, I also played cricket.’ His cronies nodded approvingly.

  Well, in that case, I suggested, perhaps he had better take over the BCA from Lalu?

  Siddiqui looked delighted. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Why not?’

  At 7.30am the next day I turned up to the Sanjay Gandhi Stadium in Patna. I wanted to see what cricket had survived in the city, and had been directed to what was, I was told, the second-best cricket ground in Bihar. But it was not much of a stadium or ground. It was a rectangular patch of wasteland, strewn with bricks and sparse patches of grass, with a collapsing brick wall running along one side. Opposite was a small concrete stand, with space for a few hundred people. Arvind Pujara, it turned out, had exaggerated: the Railways ground in Rajkot was not the worst in India. Compared to the Sanjay Gandhi Stadium, it was Lord’s.

  Yet the stadium was packed on that early morning, with over 100 youths playing noisy games of cricket. Most were using piled-up bricks for wickets. They did not appear to be especially poor, not by Bihari standards. Most of the cricketers wore shirts and jeans, not kurta pyjamas, and looked well fed – in a state where more than half of children are stunted by undernourishment. Their shouts included a lot of English words: ‘Bowling, bowling – Shabash!’ ‘Hit it!’ ‘Keeper! Keeper!’ ‘Out!’ This was the middle class of Patna at play.

  In the centre of the action, I spotted a teenaged youth, fielding in the covers, who was leaning on a bamboo stick to stop himself toppling over. He was a cripple, with skinny and twisted legs, obviously wrecked by polio.

  I walked over to introduce myself. The fielder’s name was Gyan Prakah and he looked a lot less pitiful up close. Above his ravaged legs, Gyan’s torso ballooned into muscular arms and shoulders, hugely developed by the effort of dragging himself around with the stick. As I had walked up to him, with my friend and translator, Utpal Pathak, a Patna-based journalist, I had worried that he might feel patronised by our attention. Not a bit of it. Gyan, who was aged 18, seemed at ease with the world and keen to discuss his cricket.

  He and his friends played at the Sanjay Gandhi ground almost every day, he said, apart from when it was flooded during the monsoon. They took it in turns to arrive early – often by 4am – to claim a good pitch. Then he nodded at the crevassed patch of mud on which they were playing. Apparently it was a good pitch.

  I asked Gyan if he could bat. ‘Of course I can bat!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m mainly a batsman.’ With his strong shoulders, Gyan could support himself on his stick with one hand and wield the bat with the other. ‘I’m very good at hitting ones and twos,’ he said and, to his friends’ delight, mimed neat dabs and cuts with one hand in the air. His friend Dharmendra acted as Gyan’s runner and also did the calling. Gyan was a baby when polio wrecked his legs: having no memory of walking, he was a poor judge of a single.

  ‘But sometimes when Dharmendra-bhai is about to run, I shout, “No! No! Stop!”’ said Gyan and his friends fell about laughing, for this was obviously a standing joke. Gyan also bowled leg-spin, but not too well, he admitted.

  As the sun climbed and the working day approached, the cricketers began drifting away. Gyan, hopping along on his stick, turned to wave as he went. Then a more serious-looking group of cricketers, young men wearing whites, walked out to inspect the potholes in the middle of the pitch. After this inspection they summoned the groundsman – a tiny old man nicknamed Gabbar Singh, after Bollywood’s most celebrated villain – to heave out a roll of thick coconut matting. Once pegged down, this provided the surface on which most first-class, and even Test, cricket was once played in India.

  These young men were some of Bihar’s best cricketers and chief victims of the ongoing fight over control of cricket in the state. Utpal had got in touch with one of them, an off-spinning all-rounder called Kundan Kumar, ahead of my visit and asked if he would meet us for a chat. ‘No problem, but we can do better than that,’ he had said. ‘We’ll organise a game for you.’

  Kundan was a short 21-year-old who divided his time between studying at Patna University and working on his father’s fruit stall. He was also a handy cricketer. He had represented both Bihar and Jharkhand at several age-group levels and had recently helped Bihar Under-22s to victory in a 40-over tournament. But that had been a rare event. ‘Right now my career is over,’ he said. ‘There’s no good cricket in Bihar.’

  Earlier in the season Kundan and two friends had travelled to Jharkhand and played a few games for a district side there. Their hope was to get picked for the state side in Jamshedpur. ‘Jharkhand is the key,’ he said. ‘If you can make it into the state side, your career can take off.’ But none had managed this and Kundan said he didn’t have the money to give it another go next season.

  The game was ready to begin, with Kundan and his team-mates due to bat first. I left him lounging on the boundary and walked out to observe the action from mid-on. Kundan had not exaggerated about his friends’ skills. The opening bowle
r, a muscular teenager, slung the ball hard into the matting, whence it skidded through fast. And the batsmen were even better. Both came quickly on to the front foot to drive the ball hard, sending it racing over the wasteland through extra cover. The fielding was also good: the returns came in low and fast to the stumps. Most of these players, I guessed, would walk into a good English club side; but no English side would play on their pitch.

  Returning to the boundary, I asked Kundan and his friends who their best player was. As soon as Utpal translated the question, they started laughing. The best player, they said, was Pintu Kumar – he was easily the best player on either side. An older man, aged 28, Pintu was sitting a few yards away. He was poor, rather hapless and a well-liked figure of fun. Yet Pintu, an off-spinning all-rounder, was apparently well known in Patna as the best Bihari cricketer never to have been given a fair chance.

  ‘How good is he really?’ I asked, unsure whether the joke was on him or me.

  ‘No, no, we’re not kidding,’ Kundan assured me. ‘Pintu is brilliant, that’s the whole point. He’s never been coached but he’s a natural. He’s much better than the rest of us. You have to see him play.’

  I asked if Pintu was better than Tejaswi Yadav, Lalu’s son – and Kundan and his friends fell about.

  ‘Most of us are better than that guy!’ he said. ‘But Pintu’s much, much better. You can’t even compare them.’

  Playing for Patna a few years before, Pintu had hit two centuries and five fifties in seven innings. He batted like a street-cricketer, trying to hit almost every ball, and when he was on the go there was no one who could bowl to him. Fast bowling, spin bowling, it was all the same to Pintu – he just stepped forwards and walloped it. But he had never been picked for Bihar or Jharkhand. He was penniless, entirely without influence, and the selectors had always found one reason or another to ignore him.

  ‘Hey Pintu!’ Kundan called over to his team-mate. ‘Come here and tell this white guy what the selectors said about your teeth!’

  Wearing a shy smile, Pintu came over, hunkered on the grass, and did as he was asked. After he was inexplicably left out of Bihar’s Under-15 side, Pintu explained, he had asked one of the selectors why. He was told he had too many teeth for a 14-year-old, and had therefore been ruled as over-age.

  ‘So what did you do next, Pintu?’ Kundan said, smirking, because he knew the answer.

  Pintu grinned. ‘I went to a dentist and asked him to take some of my teeth out,’ he said. Thankfully, the dentist refused. ‘The big men didn’t want me because I was much better than their sons and I didn’t have a godfather of my own,’ said Pintu. ‘That’s why I was never picked.’

  Denied opportunity in Bihar, Pintu went off to play cricket for Sikkim, the tiny Himalayan state next door. But, as an associate member of the BCCI, it does not contest the Ranji Trophy; and Sikkim’s cricket association is almost as penniless as the BCA. So Pintu moved on to Kolkata, where he was hired by a club and paid 22,000 rupees for a four-month season. He considered that pretty good money. But he was homesick for Patna and soon returned there. Now he had no job and no regular cricket. He didn’t even have any kit.

  Out on the matting, the first wicket fell, and Kundan sent in Pintu (wearing borrowed pads and gloves) to show what he could do. I walked back out to mid-on to watch, as Pintu defended the first two balls he faced. Then he charged forwards at the third, and took an extravagant, point-proving swipe. He missed the ball by a foot and was stumped, yards out of his crease. Shoulders slumped, Pintu trudged back towards the boundary. And laughter rang out around the ground.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Boundaries of Belief

  In the heart of south Delhi is a crowded Muslim village called Nizamuddin. Built around the shrine of a 13th-century Sufi saint, it is a honeycomb of winding alleys and small bazaars selling meat, votary scarves and sticky heaps of dates. It is malodorous, wonderful and I often wandered there – especially on Thursday evenings, when Nizamuddin’s streets swelled with pilgrims from across India. Evensong in the shrine, after the custom of the Chisti order of Sufism, is one of the cultural highlights of Delhi. Yet one hot afternoon in March 2011, I went to Nizamuddin to watch cricket.

  India were playing Pakistan in the World Cup semi-final, in Mohali. Even by the standards of a great sporting rivalry, this was a big game. The winner would be through to the final of the tournament in Mumbai. The losers would face the fury of their millions of disappointed fans. It was also the first cricketing encounter between India and Pakistan in either country since an attack on Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists, carried out in November 2008.

  The jihadists had landed in the city in an inflatable dinghy, having originally set sail from Karachi. During a three-day rampage, which was covered live on Indian television, they shot up a railway station, a restaurant, a Jewish centre and a couple of five-star hotels. By the time the last terrorist was cornered and killed, 175 people were dead, including nine of the attackers. The surviving jihadist, Ajmal Kasab, a brainwashed Punjabi, was sentenced to hang by an Indian court (he was executed in November 2012).

  Bilateral cricket ties between India and Pakistan were frozen after the attack, and Pakistani players banished from the IPL. This was a familiar occurrence in India–Pakistan cricket. Between 1952 and 1977 cricket’s most bitter rivals did not meet on the field of play, owing to the animosity arising from two of their four wars. Yet in the modern age of international tournaments, this complete estrangement was no longer possible.

  Tensions were running high ahead of the game in Mohali. If the Pakistanis won, they would contest the final in Mumbai – a prospect most Indian media considered intolerable. Almost every pre-match report included excited descriptions of the no-fly zone and other security arrangements in place at ‘Fortress Mohali’. According to the Times of India, ‘Commandos armed with Heckler & Koch 9mm MP-5 sub-machine guns, corner shot guns, Glock 17 or Sig Sauer pistols and poison-tipped knives, would take charge of the outer field’.

  Around two o’clock on a fiercely hot afternoon, I strolled through deserted streets to Nizamuddin. An impromptu national holiday had been called to allow public-sector workers to stay home and watch the game. Many private companies had followed suit, including Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, which had given its workers a half-day off ‘to cheer the Indian team to victory’. It was typical of India’s biggest private-sector company to make its gift performance-based.

  Turning into Nizamuddin, I made for the main bazaar, hoping to find a crowd. It felt slightly dishonourable, but I wanted to perform a small experiment – a version of the ‘cricket test’ once meanly proposed by the British Conservative politician Norman Tebbit, to ascertain the national loyalties of British Asians. I wanted to see whose side the Nizamuddin crowd was really on.

  In the bazaar, a couple of hundred men and boys crowded around a television set placed under a spindly thorn tree. Most wore prayer caps and beards, but their features and hues were from all over India. Dark-skinned Bengalis and lighter Keralites, pudgy Punjabis and slight Biharis were crowded together, watching the cricket. They were pilgrims and Koranic students, who were staying in a large madrassa that fronted onto the bazaar. Evidently it had no television set.

  As I shuffled into the crowd, feeling rather clean-shaven, India were batting and Sehwag in full flow. With his usual chutzpah, he smacked anything too straight to the leg-side boundary and, with lavish drives, anything wide through the covers. He hit nine fours off his first 23 balls. After each blow, the television cameras swept around the ground, showing the wildly celebrating Punjabi crowd. This Muslim gathering was more restrained.

  ‘Who do you want to win?’ I said to the rather fat young man I was squeezed against. He turned to me with a look of surprise. ‘What?’ he said. He was a Tamil from Chennai, it turned out, and could speak some English.

  ‘Er, who do you think is going to win?’ I asked, embarrassed now.

  ‘India!’ he shot back. ‘India!’ his compa
nions joined in.

  A few minutes later, Wahab Riaz, a young fast bowler who was bowling beautifully, trapped Sehwag on the back foot and appealed for his wicket. The Nizamuddin crowd tensed. Dozens of hands clutched prayer caps. The umpire’s finger began its slow ascent to send Sehwag on his way, and an excited hubbub filled the bazaar – though whether of delight or dismay, it was hard to tell.

  In the early years of India–Pakistan cricket ties, it was only natural that some Indian Muslims would have conflicted loyalties. Before India’s bloody partition, the community had been very prominent in Indian cricket. The Muslims won the Bombay Pentangular in six of its last ten renditions, between 1934 and 1946. Muslims were also well represented in India’s national side – 13 of India’s 52 pre-independence Test players, a quarter of the total, were Muslim. They included some of the great names of the era, players such as Mohammad Nisar, the burly Punjabi who led the attack in India’s inaugural Test match in 1932, and Syed Wazir Ali, who top-scored in both Indian innings of that game and scored six centuries on the tour. Immaculately turned out, in pressed flannels and a natty cravat, Wazir was known as the best-dressed cricketer in Asia.

  Then, in 1947, India lost some of its best Muslim cricketers and cricketing terrain to Pakistan. When the first India–Pakistan Test series was played in 1952, the Pakistanis fielded two men who had previously played for All-India, including their captain, Abdul Hafeez Kardar. They also included a 17-year-old refugee from Junagadh, Hanif Mohammed, who would go on to become Pakistan’s first great batsman. Hanif was the original ‘little master’ – the moniker later given to both Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar. Mohammad Nissar and Wazir Ali also migrated to Pakistan, though neither played for their adopted country.

  India also lost most of its Muslim intelligentsia to Pakistan: civil servants, academics and lawyers. The Muslims who remained in India were mostly poor, illiterate and congregated in poverty-stricken parts of the north and east. If they played cricket at all, they were ill-equipped to take advantage of the changing system of cricket patronage, which favoured educated, middle-class players. In the 1950s and 60s, only four of India’s 72 Test players were Muslims. That was much less than the remaining Muslim portion of India’s population, which was around 14 per cent. The next three decades were worse: only three Muslim Test players out of 99 in all.