In his classic work on cricket, Beyond a Boundary, the West Indian Marxist CLR James makes the point that most anecdotes about cricket are boring to the non-aficionado because they begin and end with cricket. But in James' view, cricket was the grand sport of social and historical drama. It is therefore impossible to look at cricket as simply any sport. The story of cricket, for James, was the story of empire and race, of domination and resistance. In his time, the captain of the West Indies team was always a white man. James led a successful campaign to install Frank Worrell as the first black West Indian captain through 1959-60. For years now, no white man has represented the West Indies at cricket. Yet empire and race endure. The West Indian batting legend Viv Richards once famously said that every time he smashed an English bowler to the boundary, he was paying back the erstwhile colonial master. Nor is this an odd, freakish sentiment. In the winter of 1933-34, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) team toured India.
Ram Guha records the comments of two young Indian cricketers as they watched the incomparable CK Nayudu score a memorable century against the visitors. "Nayudu had driven away all fear of the foreigner from my mind", wrote one. "We madly cheered each shot past the boundary not only as a cricket performance but also as an assertion of our resolve to throw the British out of India", wrote the other. Decades later, the Hindi feature film Lagaan drew upon these historical memories to concoct a charming and delicious brew of cricket and romance, empire and resistance.
Cricket, the quintessential colonial game, the white man's sport, has been made his own by the coloured man. Such is the massive following of the game in South Asia that on occasion, such as when India and Pakistan met in a recent World Cup match, television viewership has exceeded the population of Europe. On this most recent meeting, made memorable by Sachin Tendulkar, the cricket itself was sublime. But only a fool would have pretended this was merely a game. It was, without doubt, war minus the shooting or, to use Guha's twist, riots minus the stabbing. When the German tennis champion Boris Becker lost a Wimbledon match in the second round after two consecutive title wins, he could afford to say to a shocked public, more or less nonchalantly, "It wasn't war. Nobody died". Tendulkar and Akram, Ganguly and Younis have no such luxury.
A Corner of a Foreign Field is about all this: what makes cricket more than simply a sport in South Asia. The book is divided into four sections. The first, 'Race: Domesticating a Game' is about the origins of the sport in India, and its gradual spread among the natives. If, for the colonial masters, "the slow stateliness" of the sport, "the graceful clothes that the players wore, the greenness of the grass, the understated gaiety of the lunch and tea intervals", all these were an "extended escape from India", for the emerging Parsi bourgeoisie it provided an opportunity "for strengthening their ties with the overlord and for renewing the vitality of a race that had lived too long in the tropical sun". Guha recounts the fascinating story of how Indians won for themselves space in the Maidan at Bombay, the cradle of Indian cricket, and how the sport spread to other cities of the empire: Calcutta, Madras, Karachi, Aligarh, among others. He observes that while in England, cricket was originally a rural sport which gradually spread to cities, in India it has been, from the outset, an urban sport.