David Crane

Is Indian cricket no longer cricket?

Ramachandra Guha condemns the cronyism, corruption, corporate greed and vanities that threaten to ruin the game he once loved

Bishan Bedi at Lords in 1974

There is nothing in world sport, ‘nothing in the history of the human race’, Ramachandra Guha modestly reckons, that can remotely match the passions that surround Indian cricket. I have no idea how many listeners or viewers hung on every ball of Ben Stokes’s Headingley heroics last year, but it is a safe bet that had it been Sachin Tendulkar or Sunil Gavaskar batting, and an India victory over Pakistan at stake, then you could add as many noughts to that figure as will accommodate a cricket-mad population edging its way towards the one and a half billion mark.

The Commonwealth of Cricket is part celebration, part elegy, but before all else unashamedly the book of one of those tens of millions of India’s cricket fans. Ramachandra Guha is an historian, environmentalist, journalist and political biographer of wide-ranging distinction, but save for a dismal-sounding phase in his Marxist twenties, when E.P. Thompson edged out the cricket writer A.A. Thomson in his pantheon, cricket has been his obsession and the cricketers of his youth — Viswanath, Prasanna, Chandrasekhar and the ‘Sardar of Spin’ and most combative of them all, Bishan Bedi — his earliest heroes.

It was not long before Guha discovered that his cricketing idols were best worshipped from a distance

‘There are no cricketers like those seen with 12-year-old eyes,’ the old Middlesex and England leg spinner Ian Peebles once wrote, and The Commonwealth of Cricket is a testimony to that. Guha is open-minded enough to admit Virat Kohli to his all-time Indian XI if not quite to his heart, but just as with Cardus and Archie MacLaren’s Lancashire, or Alan Ross and the Sussex side of the 1930s, old memories, affections and loyalties die hard. Guha recalls:

It was in the same summer of 1970 that I shook hands for the first time with a Test cricketer.

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