The Hindu : Sport / Cricket : A magnet for long-distance nationalism

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Friday, Sep 17, 2004

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Sport - Cricket

A magnet for long-distance nationalism

Mike Marqusee

There are said to be 50,000 U.S. passport holders permanently resident in London, but not more than a score of them turned up for the USA's Champions Trophy match against New Zealand at the Oval last week. The team didn't give them much to cheer about and the spasmodic chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" sounded forlorn as they echoed round the near empty ground. But then, Americans abroad rely on means other than cricket to assert their national identity (such as invading other countries and imposing their will overseas by force of arms).

For the Indian and Pakistani fans who will fill Edgbaston to the brim on Sunday, it's a different story. So far, this is the only Champions Trophy match to have sold out and the only one to boast any sense of occasion. And that is because Birmingham is home to one of Britain's largest south Asian communities, a community welded together by a devotion to cricket largely unshared by the majority of the population.

But it is also a community divided by that devotion, and on Sunday we'll see precisely how the volatile dialectic of unity and division will play itself out.

These days, ethnic minorities comprise just under 10% of the British population. Of those about half — some 2.5 million people — are of south Asian descent, including some one million "Indians" and 750,000 "Pakistanis" — most born in the U.K. and nearly all U.K. passport holders.

Birmingham itself boasts a 30% ethnic minority population. Across the larger West Midlands region (Edgbaston's catchment area) there are 180,000 Indians and 160,000 Pakistanis. Among the Indians there are 56,000 Hindus, 103,000 Sikhs and 21,000 Muslims.

It's because of these figures that English cricket authorities made sure this tie was played in Edgbaston. However, the neat ethnic labels disguise a complex process of mingling and interchange as well as one of differentiation, often arbitrary and increasingly venomous.

Back in 1990, Norman Tebbitt — one of Margaret Thatcher's senior ministers and in those days the country's chief nationalist ideologue — launched a notorious attack on British Asians who supported India or Pakistan at cricket despite years of residence (or even birth) in Britain. "Which side do they cheer for?" he demanded. The "Tebbit test" became an index of racism — and defying it an index of resistance to racism, and one that united all those of south Asian descent.

But much has happened since then. In the 80s, people referred to themselves as South Asians or British Asians or (among the more politically conscious) as "black". But in recent years, other definitions have come to be preferred: "British Indian" and "British Pakistani", which are ominously morphing into "British Hindu", "British Muslim" and "British Sikh".

In the streets of Birmingham, it's not hard to find young men who've never actually been to south Asia, who speak in broad Brummie accents, who share the hybrid culture of the inner cities but nonetheless support either India or Pakistan with ardent ferocity and view each other as sworn enemies. Among these communities the recent India-Pakistan rapprochement and the spirit of the cricket series played earlier this year have hardly registered.

Cricket is a magnet for long-distance nationalism, the double-edged sword of diaspora romanticism. In a fluid society where self-definition is open-ended and subject to multiple, shifting pressures, the cricketing entities we call India or Pakistan,seem reassuringly clear-cut, something you can be `for' or `against'. Will the crowd at Edgbaston on Sunday be able to revel in the game's pointlessness, or will it turn into a proxy for battling identities? The last time India and Pakistan met in England was during the World Cup of 1999, played in the midst of the Kargil crisis. Despite foreboding in the British press the match passed without any significant incident.

The same is likely to happen on Sunday. The recent polarisation among British Asian youth is worrying, and in various ways it has already spilt over into the cricket arena. But it's important to remember that there are other factors at work here, including a long-established, ecumenical diaspora culture in which the love of cricket is a binding element.

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