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the great tamasha
some less distinguished cricket. The batting side, sprawled along the boundary in the morning sunshine, was younger and more boisterous than the Brahmins. I asked their scorer, a young man with a muddy tattoo on his writing arm, who they were. ‘We are the Marwari cricketers,’ he said, giving the name of one of India’s most prosperous Hindu business castes. ‘And who are you playing against?’ He looked up in surprise: ‘They’re Marwaris too.’ The habits of centuries die hard. As this might suggest, the communal organisation of early Indian cricket reflected how Indian society was arranged. This made it displeasing to a small, but increasingly vocal, group of Bombay liberals, who viewed sectarianism as an obstacle to India’s development. Yet it was also the main reason why the Bombay Pentangular was so successful. The tournament originated in 1892, in an annual fixture between the Parsis and Europeans of Bombay. In 1907 the Hindu Gymkhana was admitted, to make a Triangular contest, and the Hindu–Parsi games soon became especially popular. The Parsi crowd, which prided itself on its knowledge of cricket and the prowess of its players, barracked the Hindus mercilessly, calling them ‘Tatyas’, or ‘bumpkins’. The Hindu spectators responded by calling the Parsis ‘Kakdas’, a nickname derived from the Hindi word for ‘crow’, which referred to the Parsis’ custom of leaving their dead to be picked to pieces as carrion. The Muslims were accepted into the tournament in 1912; and pretty soon the Hindus against the Muslims became its most fiercely contested and popular game. By the time Gilligan’s men came to Bombay, in 1926, the Parsis, whose tiny community represented less than 1 per cent of India’s population, were slipping behind. They had won the Quadrangular in six of its 14 years and would win it once more, in 1928. But afterwards the Hindus or Muslims won every year and the Parsis began to fade from Indian cricket. The contribution of these remarkable people had been enormous. They had injected the game into the bloodstream of Bombay’s middle-class society, where it would thrive. Yet they and the Pentangular were not the only reasons for Indian cricket’s rapid spread in the early 20th century. Outside the cities, a major new source of cricket patronage was emerging.
The Great Tamasha.indb 18
5/3/2013 11:07:46 AM