The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  This was high-rolling stuff. Wadia told me how Modi had first approached him and Zinta to invest in the IPL at a society wedding, on a beach in Thailand. ‘Lalit said this is going to be big and he told Preity, “Look, it will help your career, it’ll raise your profile.”’ We were sitting together in Wadia’s lofty Mumbai office, overlooking 50 acres of mothballed cotton-mills which his family owned. Once the heartbeat of a great industrial city, this was now one of the world’s most valuable tracts of real estate, and Wadia had been charged with turning it into office blocks and luxury apartments.

  The great-grandson of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, he was another spoiled super-rich kid. But he had more charm and a lot less ambition than Modi. He was friendly, in an absent-minded way, and gave an impression of not being terribly bright. He liked to suggest he had been drawn to the IPL as a means to express his own frustrated sporting ambitions. ‘You know, I would have liked to be a professional sportsman but my father would not have allowed it,’ he once told me sadly. But when I reminded him of this, sitting in his office, he seemed embarrassed. ‘Umm, I wasn’t so much a cricket person,’ he said, in his public-school accented English. ‘But I would say I was a sport person. At one time I used to play squash, badminton and tennis all in the same evening!’

  Like Wadia, around half the IPL’s investors, including Reliance, GMR and India Cements, had no obvious commercial tie-up with cricket. But they were impressed by Modi’s pitch and, being family-based firms largely unencumbered by the views of shareholders, their bosses were more or less free to invest as they pleased. Another sort of IPL investor saw in cricket an opportunity to flog other products. In the case of the Bollywood stars, this meant themselves. In the case of Mallya, it meant his airline and booze. Indeed, the fact that advertising alcoholic drinks is technically illegal in India made this especially desirable. Mallya named his team Royal Challengers Bangalore after his best-selling Royal Challenge whisky; just as he had named his Kingfisher Airlines, launched in 2003, after his best-selling Kingfisher beer. Kingfisher also became the official sponsor of the IPL’s umpires and of five other IPL teams. ‘Mallya got the concept immediately,’ Modi said approvingly.

  Another auction, in February, produced more big-money headlines. The team-owners bid annual wages of $42 million to hire 78 Indian and foreign cricketers on three-year contracts. A few traditionalists reviled this exercise as a ‘slave auction’ – most Indian cricket fans loved it.

  The costliest pick, India’s T20 captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni, was bought by the newly named Chennai Super Kings for $1.5 million. The most expensive foreigner, the walloping Australian all-rounder Andrew Symonds, went to the Hyderabad-based Deccan Chargers for $1.35 million – much to his astonishment: ‘If I could tell you why, that would probably be quite a good news story, but there is no sort of logical sense to what each player’s worth,’ Symonds told the Sydney Morning Herald. Six players went for over a million dollars, including three so-called ‘icon players’, Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly, whose sides, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata, had promised to pay them 15 per cent more than their nearest team-mate. This made them among the world’s best-paid sportsmen, earning as much per week as top English footballers.

  In fact there was an obvious logic to the bidding: team-owners paid through the teeth for Indian internationals. Ishant Sharma, a young fast bowler, went to Kolkata Knight Riders for $950,000; Shane Warne, the great Australian leg-spinner, to Rajasthan Royals for a mere $450,000. Robin Uthappa, a journeyman India one-day player, was bought by Mumbai Indians for $800,000; the Australian Adam Gilchrist, one of the most destructive batsmen in the history of cricket, went to Deccan Chargers for $100,000 less. This was partly because Indian stars could draw a crowd. But it was also because the franchises would have to field at least seven Indians in their XIs, putting a premium on Indian talent.

  It was madness and utterly compelling, just as Modi had hoped. He presented the auction in faux ideological terms, as a display of the impartial force of the market. ‘I believe in free markets deciding everything,’ he once said. ‘Let people decide. In certain cases you might lose, in others you might win.’ Middle-class Indians loved that idea. Yet this was a market defined and regulated by Modi, who had enforced a $5 million salary cap per franchise. That was far more generous than it needed to be – most of the players having signed pre-auction agreements with the BCCI to play for much smaller sums than they were eventually bought for. Sharma’s reserve price was a mere $150,000. Yet Modi had, in effect, made sure to inflate those sums. This ensured his new creation eye-catching headlines, the grateful support of the world’s players: and also upset the economic balance of world cricket.

  Symonds, of all people, had acknowledged the risk in this, even before the player auction. ‘The way things are heading, loyalty is really going to become a major issue, particularly when you can make more money in six or eight weeks than what you can in a whole season,’ he said. ‘Loyalty versus money always makes for an interesting debate. Who wouldn’t be tempted to take a job offering more money for less work?’ To cricketers used to playing all day, day after day, the IPL looked like a spectacularly good deal.

  Some in the BCCI made placatory noises about their commitment to defending the primacy of Test and international cricket. But it was hard to see in their actions any long-term plan for cricket beyond perpetuating their own heft and privileges. The IPL was the vision of no one with a serious interest in cricket’s future good. It was primarily a response to Chandra’s attempted putsch, created as a defensive measure to shore up the BCCI’s jaded monopoly. However redolent of the new, zesty India the tournament would come to seem, it was in this way an indication of how little India was changing at the top.

  On a misty evening in April 2008 I turned up at the Feroz Shah Kotla to see what all the fuss was about. The previous evening the first IPL match had been held in Bangalore. Pitting Mallya’s Royal Challengers against the Kolkata Knight Riders, it had surpassed even Modi’s wildest hopes for the new T20 tournament. The lasers and fireworks were spectacular, the dance music deafening. There were models on stilts and a delirious full house. Sharad Pawar was jeered. The Washington Redskins cheerleaders, prancing around in little yellow shorts, almost caused a stampede. Then there was the cricket.

  Opening the innings for KKR, the New Zealander Brendon McCullum hit 158 off 73 balls, including 13 sixes – a feat of hitting that was previously almost unimaginable. The stadium was in ferment, with Shahrukh Khan dancing gleefully for the cameras as his side notched up a total of 222 for three. It was a rubbish game of cricket, with Bangalore all out for 82. But, for millions of Indian viewers, this was the cricket of their dreams. It was purest tamasha.

  As the sixes flew from McCullum’s bat, Modi gazed around the Chinnaswamy in wonder. ‘It was only when Brendon hit what he hit that I knew it would work,’ he told me. ‘I was sceptical till then, I had my doubts, I was always afraid deep down. At the end of the day, if the consumer didn’t buy it, there was nothing more we could do. But it was incredible. It was slam-dunk cricket, the ball was being hit out over the ropes, you had people screaming and shouting and jumping and women and children and Calcutta city glued to the TV. The next day I went to Brendan and said: “Thank you very much for making my tournament a success.”’

  By the time I turned up to the Kotla the crowd was a gyrating, buttock-rolling mess. The game, between Delhi Daredevils and Rajasthan Royals, had already begun. As I worked my way towards my seat, through a scrimmage of whirling limbs, I caught glimpses of the green luminescence of the pitch and cricketers in blue shirts. But I had no idea which team was which or who was doing what.

  Reaching my seat, I grabbed the arm of a man jumping up and down next to it, waving a card printed with the figure 6 above his head.

  ‘Who’s batting?’ I screamed in his ear.

  He shook his head, grinning joyfully, to indicate he had no idea either. ‘Sorry!’ he shouted, and took off again.


  There were still some who doubted Modi’s claim that a sports revolution had begun. They included senior figures in IMG, which was being paid lavishly to produce the tournament. The doubters questioned, in particular, how long Indians could remain interested in a contest in which the outcome hardly seemed to matter.

  A handful of IPL teams quickly attracted local followings, especially in the traditional cricket centres of Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. But the loyalties of most IPL viewers were fungible. They were bestowed, game to game or at best season to season, according to the biggest India star on view. Or according to the biggest hitter of sixes – or ‘DLF maximums’, as they were known in the IPL, after the construction company that had paid $50 million to be the tournament’s title sponsor.

  IMG also feared the IPL would stretch the patience of female viewers. Most Indian households had only one television set and ‘the Indian housewife’, an archetype much fretted over by TV executives, was believed to wield ultimate power over the remote control. This fear was heightened by the unprecedented cricket bombardment that the IPL represented. Its first season featured 59 matches in 45 days. Wasn’t that too much tamasha even for Indians?

  Apparently not. With average attendances of 58,000, the IPL drew the second biggest crowds of any tournament after America’s National Football League. And its television ratings were stunning. The IPL’s inaugural season drew a cumulative TV audience of over 100 million people watching at home, based on the conservative estimate of India’s main eyeballs counter, TAM. Many others watched, uncounted, in restaurants and bars. Amazingly, around 35 per cent of these spectators were women. The tournament’s final, played between the Rajasthan Royals and Chennai Super Kings in Mumbai, was watched by at least 36 million.

  Almost as wonderfully for advertisers, the tournament’s viewership was otherwise fairly consistent. It suffered none of the precipitous drops seen in international tournaments when India was not involved. The IPL’s cumulative television audience was almost 20 per cent higher than that of the 2007 T20 World Cup as a result. Indians, it seemed, would watch any game so long as there were Indian celebrity cricketers on view. ‘In the IPL there are always Indians playing, so it’s always your team playing,’ Multi Screen Media’s CEO, Manjit Singh, told me excitedly.

  Better still, the IPL was most popular with India’s youngest consumers, those aged 18 to 35. Their fickle attention was the Holy Grail for advertisers in a consumer goods market predicted to quadruple over the next decade and a half. ‘Fifty-over cricket got a huge crowd, no doubt. If Tendulkar’s batting, if India’s winning, everyone watches it,’ G. Srinivasan, the league’s head of marketing, told me. ‘But cricket was not cool before Twenty20. That’s why young people love the IPL.’

  What was the appeal? Three reasons were most obvious, including, to be fair, the cricket. But it was not the main reason for the IPL’s success. Even by the slapstick standards of T20, the first IPL season was a poor sporting contest. It provided plenty to shout about, with roughly a quarter of the runs scored as sixes, mostly by foreign players. They occupied nine of the top ten spots in the tournament’s batting averages and eight of the top ten in the bowling averages. Yet because the franchises were only allowed to field four foreigners at any time, the standard of IPL play was very patchy.

  Set alongside the Australian, South African and Pakistani stars who provided most of the best performances, India’s best players looked like overrated celebrities, and the lesser ones looked like over-promoted club players. Dhoni came 12th in the averages, which made him the highest-placed Indian to have played more than five matches. Tendulkar came 30th. Deluged with easy money, some pampered Indian cricketers seemed hardly to care about their performances.

  ‘All the focus is on money, fame, celebrity, when it needs to be on the team,’ Jeremy Snape, a former England one-day spinner working as a sports psychologist with the Rajasthan Royals, told me during a later IPL season. ‘I tell the players that constantly. But at the end of the day, when the guy goes back to his hotel room, he opens the paper and he’s on a double-page spread with a Bollywood star, he’s just done 15 commercials and he’s paid X millions ... It can be distracting.’

  But these shortcomings were not admitted by the IPL’s organisers or the television commentators, who were in fact employees of the board. Their job was not to criticise the cricket, but to sing the tournament’s praises. And they did so slavishly, led by two former India captains, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri, who also sat on the IPL’s governing council. Shastri hailed Modi as ‘Moses’ – for bringing cricket to its promised land. Yet, for unimpressed Indian cricket fans – and there were some – the tournament also offered a genuine cricketing compensation. This was in the success of its least-fancied team, Rajasthan Royals.

  Under thrifty management, the Royals had spent less on players than any other side. After the player auction Modi had actually fined the franchise for failing to spend enough. They were the only team not to have hired a big Indian star. But they had instead hired several good foreigners and, in Shane Warne, an inspired captain. He gave his younger team-mates blokish nicknames – the ‘Goan Cannon’, ‘Rock Star’ – and told them they were great. Accustomed to India’s more whip-cracking style of leadership, they adored him for this. ‘For me there is God and then there is Shane Warne,’ said Yusuf Pathan, one of the team’s stars. ‘There will be no one else like him. He changed our attitude towards the game in such a short time. All of us who played under him were ordinary domestic players. He made us into world-beaters.’

  The Royals won seven of their last eight games to reach the final, against Chennai. They won that game off the last ball, with their Australian captain at the crease. Whatever cricketing credibility the IPL had, it owed largely to Warne. Even Modi was in awe of him. ‘What Warnie did in the locker room ...’ he told me wonderingly, ‘I mean, how Warnie kicked their butts ... amazing. He’s fantastic, a great, great guy. Warnie is the one person you need to talk to.’

  Another aspect of the IPL’s appeal, as Sundar Raman had acknowledged, was money. At some IPL grounds, the incoming batsmen’s salary was flashed up on the scoreboard as well as his batting average. And the tournament’s gusher of ad revenues, its fat wages, its soaring ‘brand value’, seemed to make as many headlines as the cricket. ‘Indian Premier League valued at over $2-bn; KKR richest team’ (Indian Express, 10 May 2009); ‘IPL brand value doubles to $4.13 billion’ (Times of India, 22 March 2010). This is how some Indians enjoyed the IPL. It was a new form of Indian cricket nationalism, a substitution of commercial for sporting success.

  The volume of advertising that was driving this success was unseemly. The IPL was sodden with it. There were ad breaks between innings, between overs and in any half-beat pause in the play. By the second season Modi had introduced a seven-and-a-half minute ‘strategic timeout’ – a euphemism for an extended ad break – into each innings. Many viewers found this annoying. Many switched channels during the breaks. Yet it was possible that some actually enjoyed this advertising assault.

  It identified Modi’s baby with the hungry new consumerism of these high-growth times. This was another great change coincidental with the IPL. In 2004 India had about 20 shopping malls; by 2012 it had more than 300, selling Nike trainers and Timex watches, snazzy foreign brands that wealthy Indians had long been denied access to. This development was graphically evident in a new city on the outskirts of Delhi, Gurgaon, which was built by – and sometimes referred to as – DLF, the IPL’s title sponsor. A cluster of steel and concrete high-rises, Gurgaon mushroomed in the 1990s to provide the plush office and living space that India’s crowded capital lacked. And when foreign companies swarmed into India after its economy was opened, Gurgaon is where many set up offices. Their neon-lit logos cluttered the city’s skyline, vying for the highest perch, in front of the smokiest mirrored glass, to advertise American Express, Coca Cola, Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft and other famous firms. Nowhere in India is so reminiscent o
f China’s tearaway growth.

  When I first visited Gurgaon, I noticed my driver, Chandra, shooting astonished sidelong glances at its skyscrapers and malls. I asked how it had looked when he had previously visited the city. ‘Sir, forest ...’ he said. Chandra could not have afforded to shop in DLF’s malls; but he still liked the IPL. This was one of the big contradictions within the tournament – and of Indian television more generally. Only a tiny portion of wealthy Indians could afford the snazzy mobile handsets, cars and motorbikes advertised on it. Many have expressed a fear that this will generate resentment and social unrest. It may. Yet, so long as India can maintain its recent high growth, creating a promise, at least, of greater opportunity for all, those fears are probably exaggerated. Laxmi, the goddess of wealth, is one of Hinduism’s most popular deities: poorer Indians also aspire to her blessings. ‘I’m sure at some level these ads generate frustration for many people. A sort of, you know, “Here’s that damn car again and I still can’t buy it” feeling,’ Uday Shankar, the boss of Star TV and a keen observer of Indian society, told me. ‘But I am also sure the experience generates hope.’

  It was appropriate that the man most associated with India’s new culture of shopping was one of the IPL’s most prominent investors. This was Mallya, India’s self-styled ‘King of Good Times’. A middle-aged roué, famous for his collections of luxury homes, classic cars, yachts and Bollywood starlets, he was an emblem of Indian excess. Every Kingfisher Airways flight began with a video message from Mallya in which he assured passengers, in his fruity bass voice, that the cabin crew had been ‘picked by me personally’ and instructed to treat every customer ‘as if you are a guest in my own home’. It was a line that said a lot about Mallya. He was ambitious, impressive, yet faintly scurrilous and, like many wealthy Indians, had little facility for irony. If any gesture spelled the death of Gandhian frugality, it was when Mallya snapped up the Mahatma’s sandals and spectacles at a 2009 auction in New York for $1.8 million.