by Mayukh Ghosh
India is a country with lot of passionate cricket fans but, rather disappointingly, not really teeming with rational and level-headed ones. Often the stories heard from uncles and neighbours who grew up in the 1960s and 70s overshadow the actual events that had taken place. Most of the few books which cover the cricket in India during that period suffer from the same shortcoming.
A series which has often led to such tall tales is the one against England in 1971. A tale of great triumph but the facts are seldom separated from the fiction.
Arunabha Sengupta, after tackling the tricky subject of ‘cricket during Apartheid’, has now come up with a book which intends to do that.
Growing up in Calcutta in the late 1970s Arunabha ‘started off’ with a domestic game.
‘My first memories of watching cricket are of a Duleep Trophy game at the Eden Gardens in the late 1970s. I was six, so I don’t remember much of it apart from being offered an apple by a fellow spectator. Now when I look back at the scorecard I realise that Chandra and Venkat had bowled all day. Which is funny because they play such big roles in this book and I have no recollections of having watched them bowl.’
But that was not significant enough to turn the game into an obsession. He had to wait a few more years for that to happen.
‘It was in the summer of 1986 that cricket for me crossed the fine line between love and obsession. Yes, like every other Indian kid prancing around in his shorts, I had been elated by the 1983 triumph. Like every other 11-year-old’s my spirit too had climbed into the Audi during the celebratory drive around the MCG in 1985.
‘But it was the Test success in England during the 1986 summer that converted me into an addict. And given my interest peaked in 1986, Dilip Vengsarkar became an early hero for me. From 1986-88 he scored 1631 runs in 16 Tests at 101.93 with 8 hundreds. It was quite something to interview him for this book as well as the earlier Sachin and Azhar at Cape Town.’
The four books by Sunil Gavaskar marked his entry into the world of cricket literature, as was the case with most Indian kids during those days. And then there was the usual next step of tasting Neville Cardus and his brilliant pieces on cricket which often bordered on fantastic fiction.
He later realised that Cardus, even though he wrote magnificently, would never become a writer he could look up to. He found the qualities he admired in the likes of David Frith, Ray Robinson and Gideon Haigh.
But the absolute favourites?
Two other names.
‘If I make a list of favourites probably the two west-country men will top it – Stephen Chalke and David Foot. They touch my soul in a curious way, mixing cricket, research, factual accuracy and beautiful use of English language to tell very, very human stories. All these names mentioned above elevate cricket writing to the level of literature. The latest addition to that list is David Woodhouse whose Who Only Cricket Know is one of the best cricket books I have ever read.’
Cricket journalism in India has not been the most mature, especially when it doesn’t concern the matches the national team plays in, and often uninterested if names like Tendulkar, Kohli and Dhoni are not involved. After his rather chancy entry into the field, Arunabha tried to make a difference.
‘For a long time as I worked around the world as a Process Consultant, I remained a passionate cricket follower and at the same time produced a few books – all of them fiction. There was one early cocktail of the two when I wrote Bowled Over, a collection of stories in each of which cricket played a role. But I mainly stuck to fiction.
‘Things changed in 2011 when I started writing for CricketCountry, and became quite a prolific cricket columnist producing an article a day for nearly five years.’
Cricket books was a natural step from there, but with a special genre as a connecting link.
‘In 2016 I combined cricket and fiction again, writing Sherlock Holmes and the Birth of The Ashes. It was a Holmes pastiche set at The Oval, 1882, and I was delighted when Stephen Chalke listed it as one of the top 10 cricket books he had ever read.
But then, there were experiences that were less memorable. In London one rather senior member of the cricket writing fraternity thoughtfully thumbed through the novel, looked up and asked: “This has no photographs?”
‘It made me realise that cricket books and cricket readership are slightly distinct from general books and readership. There have been splendid writers in the genre and there are of course very perceptive readers. That is however not a very representative sample. It is also a genre that is rigidly defined by stereotypes and templatisation, not very well known for experiments and creativity. Which makes sense when you think of cricket in the broader sense, with the MCC, the Long Room at Lord’s, societies and all that.’
He has tried to dispel cricketing myths for years and some of his pieces and books have been a direct result of that endeavour.
It has been no different this time. He says about Elephant in the Stadium:
‘It has been a long, personal journey to seek answers. Answers to very probing questions.
‘The seeds were sown long ago. When celebrating the 1986 triumph in England I remember being told about 1971. “That was the great triumph!” and “This 1986 English side is a poor one. That had been a great team. The best in the world at the time.” I knew from the statistics that of the top-order batsmen in that 1971 Oval Test, only Edrich and D’Oliveira ended with Test averages of 40-plus. Not the hallmark of the best side of the world. Besides, in the series they had missed Boycott in two Tests and Snow in one. They had just managed to beat Pakistan after a close tussle and serious help from the weather.
‘The Indian win of 1971 had been nowhere near as comprehensive as the clinical demolition of 1986. The Lord’s Test could have gone either way. At Manchester, the only time they actually played on a green top, they had been saved by rain. And the Oval magic had been produced by a freak bowling spell on the fourth afternoon when England had been right on top. But the myths continued to be laced around the 1971 triumph. The victory was almost reconstructed as pre-destined in retellings, the cricketers developing more impregnable auras of invincibility down the years.
‘Many of the heroes of 1971 were excellent cricketers, but the near-mythical qualities attributed to them are often far beyond the numbers they left in their wake.
‘Even after all these years, 1986 has never reached the height of nostalgic romanticising that still laces that pioneering triumph. The subsequent series win in 2007 has been all but forgotten. And by the time Covid stopped the 2021 series with India 2-1 up and one Test to play, Virat Kohli’s men were expected to win in every corner of the world – overseas wins were too frequent and familiar to bother with seasonings of mythologised ingredients.
‘The myths of 1971 often jarred with my mind. They still do. The favourite cricketing phrase ‘it was much more than numbers’ does not appeal to me.
‘But all these years later I do understand the 1971 phenomenon. Why the victory was so important. It was not just because it was the first triumph. There were plenty of other factors that are a legacy of a complex history. And some of these factors are quite confusing parameters even in the modern day, especially when it comes to cricket and its periphery.
‘The book was to a great extent a crystallisation of this understanding.’
He adds about how personal circumstances helped him along the way.
‘Distance did help. After living and working around the world I settled down in Amsterdam and became a Dutch citizen. The perspective lent by time and space helped me make sense of the history that had perhaps been too close for me to look at back in India.
‘For example, I realised that I had walked countless hours through the serpentine lanes of north Calcutta and under the colonnaded verandas and balconies of the Grand Hotel, taking the contrasts of architectural and urban planning features for granted. Seated in Amsterdam, those everyday images were translated into palpable history. The pillared and porticoed mansions of Dalhousie Square and Chowringhee, originally built for the Europeans, the densely populated sectors towards the north, historically inhabited by Indians, where I grew up along with many of my friends as the second generation after independence.
‘Distance also helped some memories to resurface from long-neglected corners of the mind. The Benson & Hedges World Championship triumph of 1985 for instance, India beating Pakistan in the final at the MCG. I remembered the posters in the stands that day. One proclaimed “Down Under, India is Thunder”. Another observed “Benson ’n Hedges Final. Bus Drivers versus Tram Conductors.”
‘Away from cricket, along with Indians at home and expatriate Indians I also got to know the Indians who came from Guyana, Trinidad, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda to England, and from Suriname to the Netherlands. I sought out others as well, the ones who had come from East Pakistan, and thereafter Bangladesh, with memories of the war of 1971 that cast its looming shadow even as cricketing history was being made under the gasometers at The Oval.
‘I interacted with several Indians who have been living in England for years, some of whom had been at The Oval on that day. I realised the complications of the Immigration Bill that was then being discussed in parliament, the ripple effects of the genocide-ravaged East Pakistan as the series was being played.
‘I also spoke to Englishmen who had been there – in whose memory the India-Pakistan War is rather faint, but the trouble in Belfast still reverberates, of Northern Ireland going up in flames.
Apart from the retellings of the 1971 triumph, there was another fact that bothered him.
‘That fact was the skew in historical retelling. The very Anglo-Australian slant in most of the cricket history that is documented. And as an extension, the western slant to much of history.
‘After the publication of my book Apartheid: A Point to Cover, I received an email from a fellow cricket-writer – an Englishman without any prejudice in his makeup. It read, “I was especially taken by the early chapters in your book about the pre-apartheid history of cricket in South Africa, with the reminder that cricket there was segregated from the beginning, with the collusion of the British.”
‘This was in 2020. And this realisation is not restricted to just cricket. Even today the role of the British in the complications of their erstwhile colonies is rather sketchily known by the British themselves – a legacy of a deliberately skewed curriculum that is very recently and reluctantly going through adjustment and correction.
‘The same unawareness that today manifests itself in a murky trail of social-media footprints, leading to enquiries and even axing of some misguided cricketers from the national cricket team. The same unawareness that results in huge controversies in Yorkshire cricket – controversies that are, at least initially, tried to be brushed aside as “mere banter”.
‘It has effects in cricket-writing as well.
‘There have been reviews of my earlier cricket books, a heady mix of flattering, balanced, and critical as can be expected. Alongside, I have experienced a few unvoiced, and occasionally voiced, queries: why does an Indian writer write so much about topics such as the Ashes and pre-1970 England-South Africa Test matches? The very early chapters of Apartheid: A Point to Cover that talked about early South African history were objected to in certain traditional quarters as irrelevant digressions when one could write about more comfortable matter like local English cricket club archives and the Beatles.
‘And I can tell you I am not the only one to have encountered this. It does seem quite often that the swim-lanes of cricket history are strictly defined, and other than a privileged few, historians are supposed to splash up and down the lanes allotted to them. The legacy of the British ‘Man on the spot’ from days far far back in time still dogs the cricket-writing world to a great extent.
‘Even some of the “progressive and liberal” members of the traditional ivory towers, who have evolved enough to pat themselves on the back for criticising the Empire and British policies of the past, tend to bristle with indignation when such criticisms are heard from voices belonging to former colonies, written in the wrong colour. It is a very complicated minefield and a very uncomfortable one at that. The tendency is to air-brush such complexities away.
‘This book does not adhere to such conventions.’
The perceptions were, of course, way more skewed in 1971.
‘Even as India played Warwickshire, Britain-based Australian journalist John Pilger interviewed the Indian prime minister in Delhi. Pilger’s opening question to Mrs Gandhi was, “The description of India as the world’s largest democracy is often used by people in Britain to congratulate themselves on having exported a successful model of Westminster government. Could an Indian, hungry and without hope, really regard himself as a member of a democracy?”
‘The hunger, squalor, extraordinary economic problems … all that was beyond question. However, it is fascinating to note that the British still ‘congratulated themselves on having exported a successful model of Westminster government’ to the Indians. For me with my Indian background, the patronising tone, along with a palpably fatuous boast, is quite difficult to come to terms with. However, I am sure even now the question sounds extremely reasonable to some.
‘On the eve of the first Test match, a correspondent of The Times was at the Tripura border of East Pakistan. He interviewed a Mukti Bahini general who had been a grade-two General Staff Officer in the British Indian Army. When informed by this old military man that East Bengal freedom fighters had killed between 15,000 and 20,000 West Pakistan troops, the journalist wrote, “The figure seemed so high that I would have been altogether sceptical if it had not come from an officer who belongs very much to the old British Army tradition.”
‘Such perceptions still ruled the world view – after decolonisation and the dissolution of the Empire. The perceptions of superiority and inferiority, of virtues and vices, of truth and lies, that were directly and uninhibitedly linked to racial and national profiling. Beliefs rooted in the archaic concepts of Social Darwinism.
‘In 1971, the Indians often accepted these illusions as they struggled for the most basic necessities of life, battling against poverty, malnutrition and illiteracy. Those were the days when India arrived in England with a 0-15 record in the 19 Test matches they had played in the country. Back home, only six cricketers of the Indian squad had their own cars. The daily allowance on the tour was a princely £3.
‘The victory of 1971 had immense significance – a major equaliser for the national psyche. Elephant in the Stadium examines the many reasons for the myth and magic that still surround the triumph, including the complex historical relationship between Britain and India.’
Mihir Bose says in the introduction: ‘Arunabha, like one of those fabled Indian taxi drivers, take us downmany byways which means we read not just about events on the field in 1971, but events going back to the start of Indian cricket and extending far beyond cricket to society, culture, India-British history, activities of far-right groups in Britain, the genocide carried on by the Pakistan army in then east Pakistan in 1971, which led to war between India and Pakistan and the Indian army creating a new country, Bangladesh, and even the prosecution of the D.H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Churchill and Gandhi also make appearances. And while at first glance all this in a cricket book seems absurd, Arunabha shows how it is relevant to the story of Indian cricket. This makes it a path-breaking book.’
A book about a tour that happened fifty years ago poses the usual challenges. He faced them and took some decisions which, even though unconventional, made sense.
‘The book recreates the cricketing action from a number of sources. Mainly contemporary newspaper accounts and books. The learning has been that eye-witness accounts can vary a lot.
‘For example take Gavaskar dismissed leg before to John Snow for a duck in the second innings at The Oval:
‘According to John Arlott, “Gavaskar played no stroke at a ball he thought to be passing down the leg ide: it proved to be a late outswinger and he was plainly and dejectedly lbw.”
‘According to Sunder Rajan, “The batsman offered no stroke to one that appeared to have been pitched on the off stump.”
‘According to Gavaskar’s own version in Sunny Days, “I was given out leg-before to a ball from Snow which clearly pitched outside the leg stump and to which I offered no stroke. But then you don’t question an English umpire’s decision, do you? They are supposed to be the best in the world.”
‘So much for eyewitness accounts. Zeroing in on the true facts from these accounts was always challenging. Of course, Abhishek Mukherjee did the first fact-check edit of the book, which was a huge help. Richard Whitehead was one of the most insightful editors that one could hope to get. Sreeram Iyer and Mayukh Ghosh could be counted upon to provide the correct facts whenever there was any doubt. That way I did have a crack team to work with. And working with Pitch Publishing is always a pleasure.
‘One thing the book religiously does is to avoid interviews and accounts of cricketers who participated in the series. I know if participating cricketers are still around it is expected that there will be interviews featured in the book. A part of the templatization and stereotyping in cricket writing that I have mentioned.
‘The problem with that is not all the cricketers who played in the series are available. Some are no longer with us, some who have much to tell us are not very keen to give interviews, some other memories have started to become a bit fuzzy. And then there are always others with little to tell who cannot be stopped from giving interviews – and are so used to after-dinner-talks that their version has displaced and distorted the actual events long, long ago.
‘If we take a lot of trouble to get to interview a couple of available individuals, the book tends to lay a lot emphasis on the accounts and the narrative suffers in being twisted around anecdotal embellishments. ‘There are interviews in the book, but of other cricketers and of others who were linked to or affected by the tour in various ways – not-cricketers who played in the series.’
Arunabha Sengupta with the late Rahul Mankad (left)
Despite things going as per plan, he has one regret.
‘A major chapter of the book deals with Vinoo Mankad and Mankading … how the term was coined and was cast in negative shades. I also point out that Mankad was the first to do it in Test cricket, but there were several who had done the feat in FC and other cricket. Lord Harris was one of them.
’Rahul Mankad, my very close friend, did provide some sterling inputs about how he was called “The son of the notorious Mankad” by Paul Sheehan as late as in 2012 in a cricket gathering. That is what Anglo-Australian skew does to cricket history, redefining the boundaries of decorum depending on who is on strike. Rahul also provided me inputs about his experiences as a club cricketer in England in the 1970s which make for some eye-opening reading.
‘It will remain my eternal regret that he passed away days before the book was published. He was looking forward to it with a great anticipation.’
The book will be available from 2nd May 2022.
Pitch Publishing, as they keep on doing, has once again supported a good work.
The ghosted autobiographies of the big names will always rule the charts but it is important as readers we understand the projects we should support.
Just for the honest effort they involve, if not for anything else.
This is one of them.