Interview with Prof. Ashis Nandy, Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, 26 April 2007


Are cricket and national consciousness linked in India?

Yes. There is a link and the link has been strengthened by the expansion of the Indian middle class, which is the class that has been the primary repository of national consciousness, if we might call it so.

Can you identify the factors that strengthen this link?

I don't think globalization has much to do with this. But media, politics and colonization certainly have played their roles, significant roles at that. I would put it this way: it is the media that has given cricket a coverage that only a country starved of media content for its television channels could. Indian television was opened up-and the privatization of the television industry took place-in the 1990s. These new channels that came up didn't have enough content to fall back on. So, most channels depended on Bombay films and cricket. Cricket had the advantage that it was either a day-long game or a five-day-long affair. Once you decided to broadcast a cricket match, you took care of at least a day's programming. But even before that, for state-run TVs too, cricket tests were the easy way out. Nowadays, they often show parts of a Test match, I remember seeing on television entire test matches-they showed all five days of a match, morning to evening, even though India had then only two television channels. It was thinkable then.

So, the media played its part. As for politics, it probably has been the less influential in shaping the course of events, but it did promote nationalism, though not necessarily national consciousness. And cricket was an easy peg to hang nationalism on. So that's the way politics came in. Colonialism was more important because the English specifically promoted cricket in India as the national game of Britain. It was certainly not the most popular game there - football was - but cricket became the national game by virtue of being an exclusive, elite game. A bit like tennis, you could say. Also, because the rulers thought or at least promoted the belief that the values of cricket were the values that typified the English in India, cricket in some ways came to reflect Britain's civilizing mission, the white man's burden. More so, because cricket has traditionally thrived on inner norms or internalized conventions, rather than on outer rules.

Why do you think that cricket is so popular in India?

My book on cricket begins with the proposition that cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English. It's because I recognize that many things that are pushed into the unconscious in other parts of the world are much more likely to burst into the open in the culture of South Asian cricket.

First, in cricket you don't only play against the other side. You also play against your own destiny. Cricket is a game that is notoriously subservient to the vagaries of fate and when you play the game, you have to play dice with your own fate. And that's a theme Indians love. Because of its duration, cricket, particularly test cricket, cannot but be a slice of life - the handicaps for the two sides can never be equalized. When it rains, it does not rain equally for both sides. The twenty-two players are never on the field at the same time and, while one side may bat in bright sunshine, the other side may have to bat when there's a cloud cover and the ball swings. In this sense, in cricket you have to know how to grapple with what your fate has in store for you. That's why cricketers are so superstitious.

Second, only in South Asia and perhaps in the Caribbean, do people have the time and energy to follow a game that lasts five days. Cricket is a Victorian pastime and today a North American or European would find it frighteningly boring. Australia, in this respect, is an exception. In the five days a test match usually lasts, Neville Cardus once pointed out, nothing much happens on the ground and, hence, there is always the chance for character to reveal itself. A core attraction of cricket is exactly that. It allows a viewer to read character in addition to scorecards. This also probably explains why cricket has the richest literature among all sports. Things are changing though; cricket is not what it used to be. It is being updated, modernized, and incorporated in the cutthroat commercial-managerial culture of modern sports.

Third, cricket is a nineteenth-century village game. This shapes much of the culture of the game. Norms and values which the industrial revolution and urban cosmopolitanism superseded survive in cricket. To that extent, cricket is a critique of modern life. As a result, those who are negotiating the urban culture and modern industrial life for the first time, and those who live with the memories of the rhythm of village life, find cricket particularly attractive. That built-in criticism of the urban-industrial vision becomes a tacit endorsement of the deeper values of these neophytes, values that they have not been able to shed, despite being told, by the wise and the knowledgeable, to shed them as avoidable nostalgia and romantic hangover of the past.

Why do you think cricket has become more popular than hockey?

It is the media again. The media has made it more popular than not only hockey but also football, which is a much less capital-intensive game and should have appealed to a largely poor country. Actually, both football and hockey were more widespread - perhaps also more popular - in India than cricket till a few decades ago and had a more diverse audience and players. Things began to change once running commentary on radio and, then, TV became a constant feature of Indian life and, almost by default, cricket became a more persistent presence in the country.

Do you think that it had anything to do with India winning the World Cup in 1983?

Marginally. Winning wins new adherents or fans in countries like Australia, where the middle class is in a majority, not in India. In India, not only is the middle class in a minority, a sizeable portion of it does not have middle-class culture, only middle-class income. Indians are more moved by the idea of grand defeat and the mix of heroism, style, defiance, and tragedy that goes with it. That is why Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi remains a more respected captain than more successful captains like Mohammad Azharuddin and Saurav Ganguly.

This idea of grand defeat is accompanied by the built-in protection against total defeat that a multivariate game like cricket provides. You might lose a Test match but someone in the team scores a century for the first time or a brilliant young spinner picks up five wickets. There are always secondary results in cricket that are compensatory or consolatory. Other games have such compensations to a much lesser degree. Cricket in this sense, too, is a slice of life that is not entirely dominated by the polarity between victory and defeat.

Do you think cricket is a unifying factor within India?

Because people are unified on cricket, it does not mean that they are unified on other things. I doubt if cricket nationalism is transferable to other domains of life in South Asia. On the other hand, many who are rabid religious or ethnic chauvinists, when it comes to cricket, shelve their chauvinism to admire everyone playing for the national team. Both are parts of the same story.

In the past, there have been stories of Indian Muslims supporting Pakistan against India, however, during the 2003 World Cup there seemed like there was much less evidence of this happening. Why do you think this was so?

Whenever the Muslims are angry or feel victimized, they support Pakistan or any other team, for that matter. In Kashmir once, when India played the West Indies at Srinagar, the entire stadium backed the West Indians, who were mightily surprised. The Indian players and the Indian government were red-faced though.

This is not unique or strange. In England, even the West Indians settled in England for three generations or more root for the West Indies team. Even the BJP supporters among the Indians who are British citizens support the Indian team, not the English. They do not practice what they preach to Indian Muslims. Enoch Powell, an ultra-nationalist, went to town with that sort of crowd behaviour in England.

Actually, this is a normal behaviour among the minorities. Clive Lloyd once confessed how shocked he was when he found Indians settled in West Indies for more than a century supporting the Indian team. Recently, the Indians in South Africa were angry when the Indian cricket team did not play well against South Africa; they all rooted for India and felt humiliated when South Africa won. And these Indians had been in South Africa for generations. When the Sikhs were angry with the Indian state in the 1980s and 1990s, many of them supported foreign teams playing Indians. They do not do so now.

It does seem like Indian Muslims are supporting Pakistan less now, can you think of any reason for this?

I don't know and I don't care to know, because this business of support is transient. When the Indian Muslims were very angry after the Gujarat riots, many Muslims began to support Pakistan. Perhaps now they are not doing so because they are happier after the BJP lost the 2004 elections. That may be one of the reasons why they are less demonstrative in their defiance. Also, at the moment, there are two or three Gujarati Muslims in the team; many Indian Muslims perhaps think that it is time to support to India.

Do you think the regional quotas in cricket create a 'pan-Indian' national team?

This is a debatable issue. I don't know, frankly. Affirmative action by itself ensures some degree of dispersal of representation and diversity. One might lose something in the process, particularly if the best eleven cannot be chosen because of quotas. On the other hand, affirmative action yields many long-term benefits. Society gains what the game loses. But then, South Africa has shown that even cricket gains something from such affirmative action. The talent pool for the game expands enormously in the long run.

Do you think there is a South Asian consciousness in cricket?

If by South Asian consciousness you mean South Asian nationalism, I doubt if anything like that exists. I do not think South Asians will support a South Asian team as enthusiastically as they support their national teams. But if by South Asian consciousness you mean a shared South Asian culture of cricket, of course it exists. Whatever I have said about the cultural psychology and cultural politics of cricket in India also applies to other countries in the region.

Do you think there is such a thing as Indian national consciousness?

I began by saying that, if you talk of middle-class India, there is such a thing as a national consciousness, in the sense in which the term is used in the West. Otherwise, most Indians have regional and vernacular ties and these cross-cutting ties create a sense of a community. The concepts of nationality and nationhood, if you take their strict technical definitions, are less salient in India. Here we live in communities. These are much older than the Indian nation-state and are much closer to people and their daily lives. It is absurd to expect that people will disown these community ties and overnight become Indian nationalists or give priority to something akin to national consciousness. However, the expanding Indian middle class has stretched the scope and range of national consciousness and I cannot guarantee that in the future things will remain the same. National consciousness is now part of the global idiom of politics - the way terms like nationality, nationalism and national interest are.

So do you think there is a difference between nationalism and national consciousness?

Of course. National consciousness is national awareness, shared consciousness. Nationalism is an ideology, a proper ideology of the nation. It is different from patriotism, which is a sentiment or emotion.

Do you think cricket can be a form of 'affirmative action'?

Spectator sports and entertainment often are. And so also democratic politics. These three are the most open sectors of Indian society. Irrespective of class, caste, religion, language, you can make it in these domains, provided you have the skills. They are now the standard channels of social mobility for the underprivileged and the oppressed.

Links between Indian nationalism and consciousness are made much bigger in the English language press than in the vernacular - do you agree with this?

Probably at the beginning it was so, but now the vernacular press has picked up the cue, because that is one way of making their publications attractive to the middle-class reader.