Table Of ContentThe Tao of
Cr i c·k et
To
Uma
The Tao of
Cricket
ON GAMES OF DESTINY
AND DESTINY OF GAMES
Ashis Nandy
OXFORD
VNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVBRSITY l'RBSS
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Contents
Preface v1
Preface to the OUP Edition x1
Tradition, Transgression and Norms 1
The Wistful Camel and the Eye of the Needle 52
Victory, Defeat and the Future of the Savage 90
Notes 123
Index 146
Preface
. This book was originally conceived of as a waming to my wife, who
wants Indians to always win in cricket. It has turned out to be m essay
on lhe future of traditions and 6n the politics of cultures. As a student
of political cultura I have written it with mixed feelings. My knowl
edge ofc ricket is matched only by my skill in it. and my underslanding
of the social context of cricket in different countries is mosdy second
hand. I can al best be called a keen lay observer of India's new national
game. On lhe other hand, my interest1in the way the Orient lllld the
Occident define themselves and each other in ow times is old and
cricket has been, over lhe last one hundred years or so, a slale on which
different cultures have written their intersecting self-definitions. Be
cause it is a game. and a game is only a game. some cultura have been
less defensive when defm ing themselves in relation to cricket than. say.
in relation to literature, warfare or science. Cricket al this plane has been
a 'truer' projection of cultura and ofe ncounlen of cultures 1hm m111y
other forms of human self-expression.
It is to re-read these projections in lhe case of India lllld imperial
Britain thal I have trespassed into an ll'C8 so alien to me. I have been
guided by the belief that some arguments about colonial, neo-colonial,
anti-colonial and PQSt-colonial consciousness can be~ beaer in lhe
language of international cricket than that ofp olitical economy. Henc:e,
hidden in lhe following pages are thumbnail sketches ofp rocesses such
as diffusion of innovations. b'ansferof technology. Third World nadon
aliliD. Oriental and Occidental despotisms, development. social engi
neering, growth of professions and science. Readers may also diicover
in 1he book indirect analyses of the subtle psychological processes
involved in domination and deculturation-identification with lhe
agresaor, intemalization, turning against the self, reaction-fommion,
lllld ritual neutralization of imposed cultural ·calqOries. Unking the
concerns with lhe two kinds ofp rocesses lie ac:oncem with the problem
is
of dissent in a world where the idiom of di!lellt incraainalY being
defined a1 the centres of conformity.
Apart from the heavy kMld I have fon:ed crictet to any Ind the
vii TM Tao ofC rick.et
our
panial treabnent I have meted out to some of the vital issues af
times, there is one other reason for my discomfort with this book. My
original plan was to write a book comparing the problems of collective
and individual culpability under three conditions: playful collective
warfare (cricket), playful privale warfare (stories of individual crime
and its detection) and proper, organil.ed, scientific violence (modem
warfare). I had hoped to show that the emphasis in the first case was on
trlditions as the ultimate repository and ar6i~ of norms; in the second.
on scientific rationality and Weberian rational-legality. I wanted to
round off the analysis by showing that it was through the expert
•management' oft ransgrasions of the second kind of norms--thc ones
auociated with scientific rationality and rational-legality-that we
have sought a solution to the third and probably the most serious
problem of our times: war. Yet these rational, scientific nonns arc the
ones which have shown themselves particularly incapable of coping
with the problems oflarge-scale modem violence. Implied in this mode
of formulating the problem is the awareness that the escape route may
lie through a return to the public morality associated with some forms
af cultural traditions-a morality which recognizes the continuity
between the aggressor and the victim and locates that continuity in the
on-going struggle for cultural survival.
I could not pursue these arguments to their logical end because
international cricket turned out to be a particularly complex affair
which invited serious compuison5 with some other human enterprises.
Perhaps I shall now have to spell out my general argument more fully
elsewhctc. In the meanwhile those interested in cultural encounters
between the East and the West may enjoy this playful interpretation of
a game which is men than a game. The interpretation is written with the
awareness that cricket is a threatened species of play-a Victorian
putime of leisUTCly seriousness and self-denying stoicism, about to die
a natural death in the post-second-war-world . It is also written with the
awareness that when cricket goes, it is bound to ~e awa)C with it
something of the meaning of life of many of my generation. If on the
other hand the game survives the vicissitudes of OtJr time-and many
hope against hope that it docs 50-'.-it wiU perhaps survive as a defiance
and critique of modernity in a world moving towards post-modernity.
It is with that awareness that the game and its environment have been
discussed in the following pages-as an interface between the .old and
.t he new, the fantastic and the real, the moral and the amoral, the.
visionlry and the pnctical, the playful and the serious, and the informal
and the technical. If I have tried to capture something of the c0mbina-
Pre/a« viii
tion of noscalgia. mqic. stoicism and play in cricket. it is not because
1.d o not recogniu the interface or naively believe that cricket tnldition
aUy blMl no place ·for progress, hedonism. science, success-hunt and
hard competition. It is merely to register my feeble procat against the
efforts to tum international cricket into anocher area of life in which mis
ancient civilization is being fo rci.bly fitted into the sWldardized model
of a modem nation-state.
One final ci:>mment for cricket fans and cricket ·scribes. This is an
account of the game from outside. Iff or that reason it seems to some that
I have imposed a new mythic structure on the game. I do not apologiu.
The goal ofm is book is exactly that. This is not a social history ofc ricket
and if I had not stumbled on cricket. I would have found some other
excuse to make the points I have made in the following pages. But.
perhaps, in mat case. I may not have enjoyed making them so much.
In me event some venturesome cricket-lover decides to plod mrough
the book and if he or she happens to be unacquainted wim.my other
writings, a word on the theoretical structure of the book to make the
plodding less painful. In the following pages I view cricket as medium
of self-expression at four planes: traditional English cricket ( whieh is
in many ways a reflection of earlier social hierarchies but is also
unwittingly a criticism of the values associated wim modem industri
alism). modem cricket (increasingly an endorsement of the hegemonic.
urban-industrial managerial culture and a criticism of the pre-industrial
values now associated wim defeated ways of life), imported cricket (the
cricket which was exported to non-western societies as a criticism of
native life-styles from the point of view of the industrializing West but
which, as reconstructed by the natives, brought out the latent function
of the game in the West and became a criticism of the common cultural
principles of capitalism, colonialism and modernity) and new cricket
(the cricket which by its dose identification with the industrial
managerial ethos is bccOming increasingly ·an endorsement of the
ruling culture of the world and a criticism of the victims of history).
This book derives its odd structure from my understanding of the
interplay of these four aspects of cricket. True. mis four-fold classifi
cation is difficult to sustain in the case of a game as nuanced as cricket
and I have often faltered in my analysis. But it is also true mat had it not
been for this perception of cultural encounters in cricket. I would have
considered this essay totally superfluous.
A very large number of people have helped me wim this book,
direcdy or indirectly. I am particularly indebted to Surapriya Mookerji,
T.G. Vaidyanathan, Ram Guba. Arun Mehta, James Manor, B.C.
ix The Tao ofCriclcet
Plrekh. Premen Addy. Tejinder WaJia. and Maielte cwt. Val...._
secretarial help has come from Bhuwan Otandra. Anil and M.K. Riyal.
Parts of this essay draw upon articles published in T#w Tiwws tfI ndia.
Tlrr lll11Stratnl Wrdly of India and in the India lntrrnational Crntrr
Q11artrrly. Other parts draw upon papers presented at a meeting of the
R11j11va11"' group at Mysore University. Mysore. in May 1985; al a
colloquium on •Traditions. Transfers and Traductions• al College
lntcmational de Philosophic. Paris. in October 1985; and al a seminar
on• too Years of Indian National Congress• al SL Anthony•s College.
Oxford. in November 1985. The section comparing cricket and poput.
cinema in India was written fora book being edited by Y ogendra Malik.
An earlier version of the section on Ranji was given as the Third
Punitham Tiruchelvam Memorial Lectun: al Colombo on 16 March.
1986. Extracts from it were published in Tlrr Stat~sman. 16 February
1986; Tlrr Island. 23-4 March 1986; Daily NR?s. 25-1and29 March
1986; and Frontlinr. ~17 May 1986.
The elaborate footnotes should convey the idea that this work is
primarily an attempt to put hundreds of micro-interpretations within 1
larger conceptual fnme. I am therefore especially pleful to my
JRCursors who have made possible this work by ~ir insightful
comments on a game which mirrors so faithfully the political psychol
ogy of cultural encounters in our times.
"Ei1her you know what lhe pne m cricket is. or you do not. If
you do, you cannot accept the dicbun. .. that in cricket the end
juslifies the means. It is a lie that cricket is a business. . •. •
. -C.B. Fry
•. .. all lhe bowlers wanted to hit me ralher than the wicket. They
wmmd to make MR that I would not bowl for the rest of the match
or the series. It was difficult to play the fast bowlers.'
-8.S. Clandrashekhar
•Alas. having defeall:d the enemy, we ourselves have been
defealrd. ••. This our victory is twined into defeat.'
-The Mahabharata
