Untrained in political theory and unversed in the discipline of cultural studies, I had thought that the story of cricket in India told in The Tao of Cricket (first published in 1989) could be a handy trope for having my say on the tragicomic spectacle of an ancient society running breathlessly to become a modern nation-state. I felt the story worth telling since India's intellectual and media elite seemed to love that panting, perspiring race and eager to pay the price of the deculturation and homelessness that often went with it. The diseases of the rich and the powerful have a charm of their own.
Precisely because its political analysis was unacceptable and painful, The Tao of Cricket has been read more as a cultural history of cricket than as a deviant political psychology of popular culture. As a result, many have been unhappy. Cricket lovers have felt betrayed because the book is not adequately sensitive to the nuances of the game; the serious scholars have been unhappy because of the levity of my tone and cursory treatment of weighty issues like state, nationalism, popular religion, development and progress. To a lot of Indians though, my story of cricket might have been a disappointment, but not its politics.
Cricket has a way of taking over its South Asian fans, even when they self-consciously resist being taken over. Cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims cricket to be a "hard cultural form" with values, meanings and practices that are hard to break; it changes those socialised into it more than it itself changes. No wonder even some of the hard-eyed cricket nationalists in South Asia seem to have secret selves. They want India to win all their matches, but they also enjoy the game's laid-back, languid style, representing the rhythm of a lost lifestyle and invoking an imaginary, idyllic homeland in the past that paradoxically serves, as in some Chinese traditions, as the blueprint of an alternative future.
This inner tension of cricket has sharpened in South Asia in the recent past. This is surprising, for cricket itself has been changing globally. A.s it has become a billion-dollar enterprise, it has softened as a cultural form. Spectator demands have begun to push it further away from its original cultural role as a typically 19th-century game, enshrining pre-industrial values in an industrial society and serving as a critique of the latter.