The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  Given this progress, it is striking how few Dalit cricketers have emerged since the Palwankars. Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit newspaper columnist, thinks there is a surge of low-caste cricketers waiting to happen. ‘The Dalit middle-class is in its formative stage, busy in settling stage-one priorities like education and housing,’ he told me. ‘Sport will belong to stage two.’ Meanwhile, the absence of Dalit cricketers looks all the more painful set against the cricketing performance of the Hindu priestly caste.

  Brahmins account for less than a fifth of India’s population. Yet since 1970, according to calculations by Madhusudhan Ramakrishnan of ESPNCricinfo, well over a third of Indian Test players have been drawn from this privileged caste. And that understates its dominance of Indian cricket. A best-ever Indian Brahim side, post-1947, would be almost the best-ever India side. It might look something like this: Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar, Dilip Vengsarkar, Gundappa Viswanath, Rahul Dravid (wicketkeeper), Sourav Ganguly, V.V.S. Laxman, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Ishant Sharma, B.S. Chandrasekhar. If opened to other castes, Kapil Dev would come in for Sharma; one of the Vijays, Merchant or Hazare, might come in for Vengsarkar. There would also be a heated discussion about the wicketkeeping position. But otherwise India’s best team could be entirely composed of Brahmins.

  Their prominence is unsurprising. Brahmins, who in ancient times were the only Hindus permitted to read, tend to be India’s most educated and privileged Hindus. Nor has their cricketing prowess excited much comment in India. Low-caste politicians are not much interested in cricket. They can also take consolation in Brahmins’ dwindling political influence. Up to 1970 around a third of India’s chief ministers were Brahmins. By 2012 only two out of 30 were.

  Yet a few Indian commentators have been angered by the Brahmin cricket tradition. ‘Cricket in India has been a truly casteist game,’ wrote Siriyavan Anand in Outlook. ‘It does not require much disciplinary training to infer that cricket is a game that best suits Brahminical tastes and bodies ... Having too many Brahmins means that you play the game a little too softly, and mostly for yourself.’

  Brahminical tastes may be one thing, but Brahminical bodies? If they are of a type, it is not consistent. The difference in height between Vishy and Sharma is more than a foot. Caste and race are not the same thing. In fact, all Indians, whatever their caste, tend to get bigger and lighter-skinned the further north and west they are found.

  Yet it is not only critics of Brahmin prominence in cricket who have sought physiological explanations for it. R. Mohan, one of India’s most venerable cricket journalists and a Brahmin himself, told me: ‘I would think there’s a genetic reason for it. Cricket, with its rules and cerebral nature, is a more intelligent game than football or hockey. At the same time it is less physically demanding. So Brahmins, who are not the strongest men, took to it quite readily. They also took to chess. At the same time, I imagine the complexity of cricket put a lot of less intelligent people off.’ Mohan is not unusual among upper-caste Indians in holding such views.

  I met him in Chennai, a historic stronghold of Brahmin cricket. Almost since its inception, cricket in Chennai and throughout the state of Tamil Nadu has mainly been run, watched and played by members of two Brahmin sub-castes, the Iyengars and Iyers. (The former worship Vishnu and not Shiva; the latter worship both.)

  Almost all the state’s first-class players were, until recently, Brahmins, mostly recruited from a handful of Brahmin schools. Of the top 12 clubs in Chennai, seven are to this day sponsored by Brahmin-owned companies, including several by India Cements Limited, which also owns the Chennai Super Kings IPL side. The Chepauk Stadium in Chennai is in the heart of a Brahmin-dominated suburb, and its crowds, even today, are reckoned to be up to half Brahmin. This is despite the fact that Brahmins represent only around 3 per cent of Tamil Nadu’s population.

  Yet this Brahmin grip on Tamil Nadu’s cricket is exceptional. The state gave birth to one of India’s earliest low-caste political movements, in the 1930s, and it has been run by low-caste politicians for most of the time since. Hence its aggressive low-caste jobs quotas. Mohan told me that his two daughters had both scored 98 per cent in their school-leaving exams, yet had been unable to win a place at a good university in Tamil Nadu. He shook his head sadly: ‘It’s become a total hotbed of opposition to the upper-castes, which is understandable, of course, because they had a good innings for so long ...’

  Even in cricket, the Brahmin grip is weakening. Mohan was formerly cricket correspondent of The Hindu, one of India’s main English-language newspapers and another Tamilian Brahmin redoubt. The paper is based on Chennai’s Mount Road, in a fine stone building with cool corridors, a faint smell of ink and an atmosphere of industry and suppressed excitement. It is a reminder of what wonderful institutions newspapers can be. The Hindu’s owners, an extended Iyengar family, have also provided several cricketers to the state side. They include the paper’s editor-in-chief, N. Ram, a Marxist intellectual and once a handy wicketkeeper, and K. Balaji, formerly a batsman and now the paper’s business manager. (The initial in Tamil names usually refers to the father’s name.)

  Balaji and his brother K. Venugopal, the deputy editor, warmly welcomed me to The Hindu. Yet they suggested my inquiry was at least a decade out of date. Back in the 1970s, when Balaji was playing, the Tamil Nadu side were entirely Brahmin. ‘It’s not like back then now,’ said Balaji. ‘Nobody knows or cares about such things.’

  All the same, I asked the brothers if they wouldn’t mind performing a simple test. I picked up a copy of that day’s paper, pointed to the scorecard from the previous night’s IPL game, and asked if they would please tot up how many of the Chennai Super Kings team were Brahmins. Of eight Tamilians in the match squad they reckoned that, on the basis of their names, at least six were Brahmin. ‘Ah,’ said Venugopal. ‘That’s rather surprising.’

  Yet the brothers were also right. Cricket in Tamil Nadu is becoming less centred in Chennai, partly due to the work of the state cricket association, which has helped provide most of its districts with a turf pitch. As a result, more than half the state’s current Ranji Trophy side hailed from outside Chennai and, by the brothers’ reckoning, more than half were non-Brahmin. The pitch is becoming a little more even.

  The only Dalit cricketer known to have played for India since the Palwankars was Dodda Ganesh, a journeyman seamer from Karnataka, who played four Tests in the 1990s. But another, better known, player of that era is often claimed to be a Dalit: Vinod Kambli, Tendulkar’s childhood batting-partner. He is in fact from a lowly fisher caste and not a Dalit at all. But that detail has rarely got in the way of what is, after the Palwankars, the second great caste saga of Indian cricket.

  The son of a poor mechanic, Kambli grew up in a crowded tenement, or chawl, in central Mumbai. He shared a single room with up to a dozen relatives. His father, though poor, was a keen club cricketer. And after seeing that little Vinod had a knack for batting, he started taking him along to games, sitting behind the handlebars of his motorbike, and encouraging him to practise.

  When Kambli was 13, his father took him to Ramakant Achrekar, one of Mumbai’s fabled coaching gurus. Achrekar declared the boy outrageously talented and arranged for him to be given a place by the Shardashram Vidyamandir High School where he coached. There Kambli met Tendulkar, who was another young batting prodigy, albeit from a middle-class Brahmin family.

  Kambli and Tendulkar, the younger of the pair by 18 months, became firm friends. Under the stern eye of Achrekar, they netted together for half the school day and played together for the school team. Achrekar was a tough taskmaster, who sometimes rewarded stupid errors with a whack with a stump. But Sachin and Vinod made few mistakes. Both were brilliant – though Kambli, Achrekar later said, was the more naturally talented.

  On Azad Maidan in February 1988, in the semi-final of the Harris Shield, the schoolboy batsmen went berserk. Playing against a slightly lesser cricketing school, St Xavier’s (Sunil Gavaskar’s alma
mater), they put on 664 runs in an unbroken stand. Kambli, by then 16, scored 349 not out and 14-year-old Tendulkar 326 not out. By the time Achrekar – who was not at the ground – learned of this run glut and demanded that Tendulkar, the captain, declare the innings, at least one of the opposition bowlers was in tears. It was the highest recorded partnership in cricket history. And when St Xavier’s finally got to bat, Kambli, bowling off-breaks, took six wickets.

  Tendulkar began his first-class career with Bombay the following year. He scored a century in his first game, and made his Test debut the year after that. Kambli had to wait a year longer to play for Bombay – which he celebrated by hitting his first ball for six. He made his India debut in a one-day game in 1991, and his Test debut in 1993 against England. He then went on one of the most brilliant opening runs in Test history. Kambli hit four centuries, including two double-hundreds, in his first seven Tests.

  Against spin or English military-medium, he was murderous. He loved to dance down the pitch, with his nimble footwork, and hit the ball straight back over the bowler’s head. But he didn’t like fast, short-pitched bowling, and as soon as opposition bowlers realised this, he started to struggle. Against the West Indies in 1994–95, Kambli was worked over by Courtney Walsh and Kenny Benjamin and had a woeful series. He was dropped soon afterwards, having played 17 Tests and averaged more than 54 per innings. He was only 23. But he would never play another Test match. India was about to unearth several batting gems, in Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and V.V.S. Laxman, all of whom were more easily managed than Kambli.

  He was good-hearted, but a rule-breaker who turned up late for practice and liked a drink or four after the day’s play. He still played more than 100 one-day internationals. But Kambli was often dropped, shunted up and down the order, and his one-day record was, for one so talented, undistinguished in the end: an average of 32.5, with only two centuries. The abiding image of his career is not those early centuries or those easy sixes. It is of Kambli at the World Cup semi-final in Eden Gardens, walking off the field in tears after his innings was prematurely interrupted by the rioting crowd. He looks, in retrospect, like a harshly treated cricketer. And in a television interview in 2008, Kambli said he knew where to place the blame. ‘I always felt discriminated against by the cricket board because of my caste and colour,’ he said.

  I wanted to hear more about this, and arranged to meet Kambli at the flat in Mumbai where he lived with his Anglo-Indian wife, Andrea. The couple was out when I arrived. But a maid opened the door and ushered me inside. The flat was tiny and decorated for Christmas, which was just a few days away. Its sitting-room was sparsely furnished, with a huge television, a picture of Vinod and Andrea on their wedding day and a Teletubbies doll. The toy was for the couple’s newborn son, Jesus Cristiano Kambli.

  After I had been waiting an hour, Kambli burst noisily into the flat, wearing a yellow tracksuit and beaming. Andrea puffed in behind him, pushing Jesus Cristiano in a pram.

  As I introduced myself, I gave Kambli my business card. Glancing at it, he attempted a joke. ‘Ah, The Economist! That’s what I call Sachin these days, a big economist!’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘He’s ... like an economist ...’ Kambli said hesitantly, realising that the punchline didn’t quite work. ‘Economist, you know? I mean he’s rich.’

  Poor Kambli. He had played for India over 100 times and had a first-class average of nearly 60. His had been a brilliant cricket career. Yet almost the only thing anybody ever asked him about these days was his old school friend. He had naturally assumed this was why I had come to see him too, Tendulkar having scored his fiftieth Test century only two days before. Kambli said he had already received over 150 calls from journalists asking for a comment on this achievement.

  He had spoken to as many as he could, though none had offered to pay him and money was a worry.

  Kambli had spent most of his cricket earnings and Pepsi advertising fees on the high life or alimony to his first wife. A second career in Bollywood had been a flop. Kambli was a terrible actor. A third attempted career, in politics, was also looking shaky. The previous year Kambli had contested a seat for Maharashtra’s state assembly for the Lok Bharati Party, another low-caste outfit. But he had lost. Now he was pinning his hopes on a late return to cricket, in an unlikely bid for an IPL contract. He told me he had been netting every day and was hitting the ball as well as ever. But he was 39, had a gammy leg and hadn’t played any serious cricket for a couple of years.

  I told Kambli how much I had enjoyed watching him play and he smiled: ‘Thank you. That’s so nice of you.’ He spoke superb English – a legacy, he said, of the convent school he had attended before Shardashram.

  I also said his record suggested he had been unlucky and he nodded grimly. Why was that? I asked.

  Kambli shrugged. ‘I don’t know, it’s very hard to say ...’

  ‘But you said you were discriminated against ...’

  Kambli suddenly looked very uncomfortable. ‘I said that because there was an influence. At that time the selectors were influenced by things ...’

  ‘By your caste, you mean?

  ‘My caste, that’s what I said.’ He was looking very glum.

  ‘Is it what you really think?’

  ‘Out of 100 per cent I think it contributed 1 per cent. Maybe,’ he said. ‘The other 99 per cent, I don’t know.’

  That didn’t do much for the Bollywood film plot. But I thought it sounded about right. It was the 99 per cent that did for Kambli: the weakness against short-pitched bowling, the reckless flashes to gully and the annoying indiscipline. Perhaps, if he had been from a rich family, if he had had a powerful patron, he would have been given more opportunities. But he had had plenty all the same.

  We talked for over an hour, about cricketers and cricket. Kambli was warm and delightful company. But I had a plane to catch, and so stood and made to leave. Kambli, seeing this, then dived into the pram to bring out Jesus Cristiano for me to admire. He hoisted the tiny baby into the air, as if acknowledging the applause of an imaginary crowd, his face shining with delight.

  ‘Look at him! Isn’t he beautiful?’ he said.

  Kambli insisted on accompanying me outside, to help me flag down a taxi and direct the driver. As the taxi nosed into the Mumbai traffic, the cabbie, no longer able to suppress his excitement, swivelled around to me and said: ‘Kambli? Vinod Kambli?’

  When I confirmed that indeed it had been he, the driver started laughing. ‘Kambli! Vinod Kambli!’ he said, chuckling fondly, as he savoured the cricketer’s name.

  Around 6pm in springtime the north Indian sun begins to cool and dip over Shahabpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh. Shadows of mango and poplar trees start to creep across its fields of yellowing wheat. This is when Ravendra Prasad, a 13-year-old Chamar boy, feels the tug of the village cricket pitch.

  So long as his father Sarju can spare him from their work, hauling and skinning the carcasses of cattle and buffaloes, Ravendra downs tools and heads for Shahabpur bazaar. Behind it is a rutted wasteland. This is where the village boys gather to play cricket.

  One day in March, as the spring harvest was beginning, I accompanied Ravendra there. A few women were threshing corn on the stony outfield, singing harvest songs as, with a rattle and swish, they beat the dry staves on the ground. There would be no time for cricket when the harvest was in full swing. But that was a week away yet, and a crowd of youths and boys were playing hard, in tight-fitting polyester shirts and trousers. They used a splintered bat, a hard rubber ball and piled-up bricks for wickets.

  By crowded north Indian standards, Shahabpur is a medium-sized village, a few miles north of the Ganges. The nearest city is Allahabad, 30km away, at the confluence of the holy Ganges and Yamuna rivers, where Ranji’s ashes were scattered. The village has around 10,000 inhabitants, who lived in caste-based hamlets, separated by brick walkways and fields of vegetables and wheat. It is in north-Indian villages such as this that the caste
system survives in India. Many Shahabpuris do the same work their families have done for centuries, as blacksmiths, potters, washerfolk and so on. They rarely socialise across caste lines, and never inter-marry.

  Around a third are Dalits. They are the poorest people in Shahabpur, and Ravendra’s family was the poorest of them all. Besides disposing of dead animals, Sarju mended shoes in the village bazaar: hence his nickname, Mochi, or cobbler. As a reviled skinner, tanner and leatherworker, he earned a pittance, and no friends. The family’s mud-hut was surrounded by a thorn stockade and separated from any neighbour by an expanse of turd-strewn wasteland. Sarju and his wife Sushila, who worked as the village midwife, another unclean occupation in Hinduism, were never invited to the village weddings. When my translator Utpal and I had stayed with them, sleeping alongside the family on string-beds, during an earlier visit to the village, Sarju said we were the first visitors he had ever entertained.

  Standing beside me on the cricket pitch, Ravendra pointed out one or two of his classmates among the players. I called one over for a chat, whereupon all the boys, taking this as a signal, abandoned the game and came flocking to join us.

  ‘Are these friends of yours?’ I asked Ravendra.

  ‘Not really,’ he said boldly. He was a handsome boy and very proud. ‘But they let me play with them. There is no discrimination here.

  ‘But,’ he continued with a fierce look, ‘still their families will not let me enter their homes. They will not give me food and they will not give me a sip of water from their cups.’

  ‘Is this true?’ I asked the cricketers.

  None replied.

  ‘And when you have houses of your own, will you also deny him entry?’