Cricket and the Indian society

Before we talk about the complicated, co-dependent relationship that Cricket has with India, let us first take a moment to understand the relationship societies have with sports as a whole.

Despite many attacks on the utility of sports by several critics over the course of centuries, they have stood the test of time. Unfathomable resources are still spent on the sports industry in one way or the other, be it in the training of athletes, their remuneration for hitting a ball or jumping over a bar or in the ever-increasingly sophisticated gear they use.

So, clearly, sports are not going anywhere. They have survived till date from the Greek civilization and in all probability, the idea of competitive sports predates the civilization by millennia. So what exactly is the allure of these acts that would seem baffling to the uninitiated?

To understand this, we must return to the times before the dawn of civilization. Humans, biologically speaking, are a predatory species. We have front facing eyes which gives us stereoscopic vision, helping us get a better bearing on depth and distance which gives us an invaluable tool in hunting.

We have a predisposition towards working in groups to take down larger prey. Due to our biology, humans are a competitive species and not a co-operative one like ants or bees. As a result, we seek out competition because we are hard-wired to do so.

With the dawn of civilization, we were forced together in communities that were closely knit and for the survival of these groups of people, it became imperative that we culled our sense of competition and co-operate with others. Sports were a non-violent, less harmful way of satisfying our cravings for adrenaline while still making sure that the society survived even after a contest.

And the strategy has worked well so far and shows no signs of dying down. This has been the trend for almost all of recorded history.

However, there are some nuances that go into the relationship between Cricket and the Indian Society. You do not need me to tell you how pervasive Cricket is in the Indian psyche. The country used to come to a standstill when Sachin got onto the pitch and TVs were broken when India lost to Pakistan in a match.

Cricket has been able to incite passions far greater than most other ideas have in India in a very long time. The last time I believe something unified India so greatly and uniformly, we had been fighting for our independence from the British!

But when you think about it, Cricket is not a game very well suited to India. Logistically and geographically speaking, there are far more apt games for the country. When you think about it, Cricket is one of the most equipment intensive sports out there. You need bats and balls and stumps and protective gear and a whole lot of other paraphernalia just to even have a game on the standard level.

Games like football need just one ball. Add on to the fact that Cricket is a very long and time-consuming affair. Barring the recent inventions of T20 and ODIs, cricket matches lasted for 5 days straight and before that, there had not even been an upper limit on the time that a match had to end in.

Think about it, players would be standing around and playing in the sun for days at an end. I do not know what British summers are like but in an Indian summer that would entail a heatstroke. So why did Cricket capture the imagination of the sub-continent in such a powerful way?

Well, the answer to this lies in the colonial history of the country. Cricket is still touted as “the Gentlemen's Game”. Back then, British nobility played it when they were done with their cups of Twining's Tea and had slapped someone with their glove and invited them to a duel to the death for offending their senses.

One of the major victories of the British rule had been to convince the Indian diaspora of the superiority of the British way of life, even though it made no sense whatsoever in context of Indian climate (seriously though, why else would you drink hot tea 3 times a day in a country as hot as India?). And thus, suddenly, Cricket became the game that the cultured elite played; Maharajas, Gore Sahibs and the other exclusive people that had the time and propensity to indulge in these smaller pleasures of life.

The trend has continued of course. Cricket has catapulted itself beyond all other games in the country and captured the fantasy of a billion hearts and never let go. I would be lying if I said that Cricket has not had an influence on the cultural identity and psyche of the Indian populace. Many common phrases that we use in our day to day life have been lifted from the vocabulary of Cricket and Sachin Tendulkar has become the canon for describing an analogy of greatness in any other field.

I do not bemoan the practice. Neither am I bitter for the British to have handed us down a sport. All I am doing is merely pointing out the origins of the practice. Once we have understood where it all begins from, we can finally widen our horizons and give other sports their due in this nation.

We are a nation of 1.2 billion that gets ecstatic over 1 gold medal in the Olympics while the others go home rolling in Gold, literally. So until we wean ourselves off from the monomaniacal obsession with a colonial traditional legacy, we shall be giants in one sport played amongst 20 nations in all, and dwarves everywhere else.