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introduction
its enormous cricket obsession, become consistently competitive with the teams of much smaller cricketing populations. In a country with a poor record of harnessing the talents of its vast population, this is a significant failure. Elite and popular, unifying and exclusionary, polite and uproarious, Indian cricket is as contradictory in nature as India itself. For a cricketloving foreign correspondent, this offers rich pickings. Watching, playing and, more often these days, talking about cricket are among my greatest pleasures, and India has provided unrivalled opportunity to indulge them. There must be Indian politicians, businessmen and taxi-drivers who do not like to discuss Tendulkar’s batting or India’s prospects against the Australians, but I have rarely met them. Cricket, the shared inheritance of the British Commonwealth, is how I have got closest to India. It has also given me a more than useful vantage on to it because, in cricket, a lot of India is revealed. It is not always pretty. Indian cricket is perhaps, on balance, a force for unity. Yet caste, religious and regional differences have been played out on many Indian cricket-fields; with plenty of ugly nationalism evident in the stands. These are the big conflicts of modern India, great wrestlings over community and identity, and throughout its history Indian cricket has reflected, and sometimes been shaped by, them. That is the rough end of Indian cricket politics; the everyday version, the game’s administration, is also pretty unforgiving. Controlling cricket has always been a big prize in India, vied for between princes, businessmen and politicians. But in the past decade or so, that contest, waged in boardrooms and even the Indian parliament, has become a lot more vicious. This reflects the enormous wealth that has flooded into the game – due to the wildfire spread of Indian television and the accelerating economic growth underlying it. When Tendulkar began his long international career in 1990, India had roughly 20 million television households. By the 2011 World Cup, in which Tendulkar played, it had 160 million. This media revolution is transforming India on a scale that is still hard to comprehend, spreading popular culture and a trickle of prosperity to the furthest parts of the country. And cricket, as the most valuable, popular and ubiquitous product in Indian media, is at the heart of this. In a time of great change, Indian cricket is the zeitgeist.
The Great Tamasha.indb xii
2/28/2013 9:58:41 AM