Teachers, especially in the collegiate classes come across certain batches which are closer to them and show a tendency to learn more than what the textbook provides. I had one such batch and the class was led by half a dozen students who picked one chance or another to lead discussions beyond the textual matter. Some of them are still in touch and refer to the classes whenever there is a chance. One of the subjects that sparked heated discussions was cricket. Those days, as a practice in the class, idioms and phrases that occurred in passages of lessons were identified and sentences were made by students in class as a practice. I would seize every opportunity to make model sentences with idioms and phrases using cricket as the subject and invariably framing them against it. One among the half a dozen students complemented my examples by his own sentence each in support of cricket and normally that was a time when both the teacher and the students were led off the topic under learning and it was never decided who won the argument.
I would quote to them that it was George Bernard Shaw who said that cricket was a game played by eleven fools and watched by elven thousand fools. He termed it a frivolous pastime. It is ununderstandable how cricket can be called a game at all when it is played between two unequal teams, eleven on one side and just two on the other. Also, cricket is an expensive game and hence not a common man’s game from the point of view of playing as it goes on for a long time to finish unlike football or tennis. In addition, cricket players are not permanently skilled people because even the greatest hero of Indian cricket walked away from the field without gaining any runs. This does not happen in other games. Therefore, the defined set of skills in cricket are vague and imperfect. Any play of competitive game must have a common minimum level of personal achievement as scores or points. A player who performs below par is removed from the team. Cricket does not have such a rule. Significantly, cricket is a slow game and it does not have room to reach peak performance levels. Notably, runs made is the calculating factor as the catches made or the wickets taken are not counted for a win. Deplorably, cricket is a highly packaged and highly produced game modelled on western colonial attitudes to put down the common games of the natives. More than anything else, cricket does not touch the common man as cricket looks down on them from the high pedestal of the dukes or the barons, and as a game, this does not reflect the society which is the primary function of any form of sports or games. All these arguments that I would put forward used to get on the nerves of the students.
As reflections of the expressions of society, arts or sports should not only be culturally representative of the people but also be able to encompass common man’s participation. Unlike in cricket, stars of other competitive games such as Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, LeBron James, Lionel Messi or Tiger woods will never fail in their endeavours of playing a very active and extremely productive game. Strong in comparison a Sachin Tendulkar or Sunil Gavaskar can return to the pavilion with a big zero, and that too at the beginning of the play itself. How can a man credited very high in the game go as low as that, people ask? Is unpredictability a quality of any player despite the drama and the accolade provided and also the public acclaim as a support? In the field of arts, the division of films is the most powerful. We don’t come across an Audrey Hepburn or a Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren or Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton or Laurence Olivier or Brad Pitt or Michael Caine or Tom Lewis or Kate Winslet or Helen Mirren or a Raj Kapoor or an Amitabh Bachan or Sharukh Khan or Vaijayanthi Mala or a Nargis Dutt or Alia Bhat, or Ilaiya Raja or A.R. Rahman acting or singing a second rate performance as a cricketer does.
Dina Wigmore in his book Test Cricket History refers to the dethronement of cricket from its high pedestal by quoting cricket as an internationally recognised event and its position in the world of sports. In 2019, 86% of the people interviewed referred to cricket as the best sporting event. But in 2024, it came to almost close to half at 49%. In his book, he enumerates the factors that contribute to cricket’s influence on people. They are the fashionableness associated with stardom created on players and the money involved that is accumulated in the hands of a few players and organisers. Ormax Media’s Sports Report of 2024 states that cricket commands 612 million Google searches and that 86 million out of them are urban. Sports sociologists have plenty to condemn cricket.
The interest involved in RCB and PBKS attracted 10 million Google searches during the match. Sociologists think that in India cricket has become a religion and its emotions are equally associated.
John Hawkins is considered the pioneer in slave trade which started in the second half of sixteenth century at the initiative of the colonialists. Humphry Morice, Edward Colston and a few others are considered very famous for slave trading. They brought slaves bought from countries which they colonised and auctioned them to higher bidders. It is another story that Edward Colston’s statue erected at Bristol was pulled down by the public in June 2020 and later thrown into the harbour after it was pulled through.
Indian Premier League has replaced Edward Colston and others. The difference is that the slave traders did not have star hotels to do the auction. How unbecoming it is to read the news about the auction of cricket players in the IPL. They are sold for crores and neither the organisers nor the newspapers have any shame in reporting it. In the highest societal citadels powerful conglomerates sit together and auctioned humans who were known for their skills in a sporting event. The difference between people like Colston and IPL are two fold, one is that the former were not in a society where freedom and equality were respected. The second is that the modern slaves are those who have enslaved themselves to the auctioneers who in turn will make plenty of money at the expense of the common man who rushes into the stadia. Both the auctioneers and the auctioned make plenty of money from the common man who rushes to the stadia. Entry prices are going up as the auctioned modern slaves and the auctioneers are making easy money, unparalleled in the history of any sports or games in the world.
Slave trade was officially abolished in England through the Slave Trade Act in 1807. All the same, slavery continued until Slavery Abolition Act was passed by the parliament in 1833. Till then slaves were continued to work as apprentices. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment of abolishing slavery in 1865. However, in the twentieth century, an auction takes place in a free country like India where the constitution does not permit anybody to auction anyone else.
The recent tragedy at Bengaluru has opened the eyes of sociologists and psychologists including some of the thinkers. A study of the history of the progress of cricket in India makes some of them think that cricket is a colonial legacy protected and produced by the privileged classes to exploit the common man. The aspirations of the people are internally touched by the players and not the game which is both slow and uninteresting as they do not have the appeal of football or tennis. However, stardom is created and bestowed on the players and it is the stars that attract the people. In a republic, there are very few wars between and among people. Sociologists are of the view that wars create a sort of emotion that looks for winning. The cause may not be known and that the leader who gives the dog whistling for war offers enough emotional satisfaction to the hero -worshipping commoner. What happened at Bengaluru proves this theory. Hype is created around persons, that they play and the supporters look for a win, and when they win, the catharsis happens. Sometimes, before this or by side of it, tragedy occurs, and, the winners get everything and the common man is the loser. This is how the Europeans lived colonialism. Thus, cricket is not only a remnant of colonialism but also colonial social burden that makes emotional people lose balance and also never return to the normalcy. It may not be wrong to say that the game cricket and its stars are a curse to the love of game of common Indians.
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Prof. Sunney Tharappan, is Director of College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru. He trains, writes, and lives in Mangaluru.
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