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New cricket, old nationalism

The purist and other traditionalists will keep on arguing about what the new Indian Premier League that began on Thursday can do to the game of cricket. Ideally, cricket should provide entertainment and joy to the connoisseurs of the game. But, we no longer live in an ideal world and cricket also serves a purpose other than merely staging a contest of skills and temperament between two groups of eleven men. In India, cricket has been touted as one of the major sources of pan-Indian national solidarity. Will the new format, most aggressively promoted in our face, distract from that sense of solidarity?

Pop sociologists have delineated at length how cricket passion has emerged as an emotionally cementing experience in India, that too at a time when neither “national” leaders nor grand ideas nor historical memories seem sufficient to generate a sense of fellowship.

On the other hand, the cricket team has become a metaphor for a multi-cultural, pluralistic and accommodating political culture in a republican India. Remember that moving television ad a few years ago: the eleven players are first shown gracefully displaying their regional/religious identifies and then, moments later, proudly donning the Indian cap in the dressing room. A perfect and tangible showcasing of the “unity in diversity” idea. Cricket produces a narrative that can be felt in almost every living room in this age of mass communication. A Virender Sehwag is serenaded as symptomatic of the rise of new middle castes, and a Mahendra Singh Dhoni is celebrated as the coming of age of small town India.

Indeed the market forces and the advertising gurus were the first to gauge cricket’s potential as a vehicle for mobilising national pride and manufacturing parochial envy, instigating rivalries. Multinational companies were quick to move in. A cola company, for instance, would finance an advertisement campaign calculated to inflame the Indian cricket fan’s passion, and the same company will launch a similar sale pitch, premised on a similar “stoke the frenzy” strategy in Pakistan.

This combination of market forces, cricket administrators and mass media managers has found the most potent expression in India. Every single cricket series – whatever be the format — is sought to be sold as yet another summons to national honour and glory. A good day in the field for the Indian cricket team effortlessly produces national euphoria in the streets and cockiness in the television studios; a bad day generates gloom and name-calling – the rival captain’s sportsmanship is doubted, the umpires’ competence challenged, and the match referee’s fairness is questioned.

This cranking up of primitive emotions so far has been focused on the “national” team. Anil Kumble is entitled to our devotion, support, affection and applause because he leads a team consisting of fellow-Indians; and, opposing Kumble is a Ricky Ponting or a Graham Smith, leading men who belong to different country and race. We have been only too glad to accept the invitation to surrender emotionally to the “us versus them” dichotomy of the cricket ground.

Now the same mix of market forces, mass media managers, cricket administrators and cricketers are about to seek our attention and even steal affection on a different footing: not only the teams are “privately owned” but each team is a mixture of different nationalities. Rivals of yesterday would be team-mates, pitting their wits and skills against another “Indian” captain and his assorted mix of players from different countries. Not long ago Andrew Symonds’ was face we all loved to dislike; now fans would be wheedled into cheering him.

All this possible emotional turmoil will be sorted out, with a helping hand from experts in manipulators of mass emotions. What would need to be watched is whether after the new format cricket will still retain its capacity to generate pan-Indian emotional bonds. Minus this familiar fount of national fellowship, the sense of citizenship will suffer erosion. That will only mean that our leaders and institutions may have to find new ways and means of re-forging national bonds.

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