Monthly Archive for May, 2011

By Anna Della Subin, Bidoun

“I came to associate cricket in my own boyish and starry-eyed way with all that was good, noble, and worthwhile. Today the game is spoilt, and spoilt rotten. The days of innocence have been gobbled up by sponsors and Sodom.”

From 1892 to 1946, India’s premier cricket tournament was fought on the pitch by a pantheon of adversaries: the British, the Hindoos, the Parsees of the Zoroastrian Cricket Club, the Muslims of the Mohammedan Gymkhana, and, as of 1937, a team called “The Rest,” made up of Buddhists, Jews, and Indian Christians. (The Rest never won a match.) The Bombay Pentangular, as it was finally known, was abolished in 1946, condemned for its forthright communalism. And yet, like most things in India, the Pentangular has undergone an unlikely reincarnation. This year, India’s regional film industries — the lissome fivesome of Bollywood, Mollywood, Tollywood, Kollywood, and Sandalwood — will slug it out in the inaugural season of the Celebrity Cricket League. In this latest phase of the ongoing metastasis of a stodgy sixteenth-century British gentlemen’s game into mega-Asian sportainment, the league hopes to cater to (and cash in on) the hundreds of millions of Indians for whom cricket and cinema are two faces of the same god.

The Victorians thought that the edifice of civilization could be built on the values of cricket alone. The edifice of cricket, in turn, is built on the Test match. Thirty-three hours of play, stretched out over five days, Test cricket is an exercise in humility. Excellence at cricket requires self-denying stoicism, sportsmanship, and a continual refinement of one’s relationship to the Laws of Cricket — an actual document, safeguarded by the Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord’s Ground in London. A cross between baseball and a garden party, the luxurious pace of the cricket match makes the character of the player nearly as important as his athleticism, requiring precise psychological evaluations of opponents’ strengths and weaknesses on the field. Players are obliged to halt the match for lunch or even tea with enemy cricketers and the umpire, no matter how nail-bitingly tense the game. It is a sanctified lull, not unlike the evening recess in the epic battles chronicled in the Mahabharata — a recurring trope of Bollywood films — during which mortal enemies chat pleasantly, discoursing on this and that, until it’s time to rest for the morning’s war.

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Photo Courtesy of Bidoun.org

By Aditya Dev Sood, 3 Quarks Daily

A man is hurtling towards you from some twenty paces away. He leaps to hurl a projectile at you with all his might. You can duck, you can flinch, or you can swat it away with your blade, stylish, balanced of body and mind, having yet again defended your wicket. There is tremendous fury and violence in cricket, only just restrained by the the spatial logic of the playing field and the ritual logic of each set of six balls, each over bowled by a different bowler.

The great cricketing theorist Douglas Adams was the first to explore the symbolic logic of the game. What are those three stakes, planted into the ground in a row, delicately supporting the bails above? Do they, for instance, relate to the fundamentals of architecture as expressed in the Stonehenge? My own view is that they represent a kind of abstracted straw or wooden man, his two legs and dangling middle stick now all that remains of his dismembered body, his stump. Each team must protect its carcass of a king from the slings and arrows of the opposing side.

Unlike baseball, which is played within a single Cartesian quadrant, excluding the howling crowds behind its two perpendicular foul-lines, the topography of cricket has a bipolar, side-switching logic. There are two stumps on either side of a cricketing pitch, which is twenty-two paces long, and two batsmen from the same team defend those wickets from alternating sides in subsequent overs. Members of the fielding team range all around them in every direction at various distances, resulting in a panoptic field of observation, evaluation and reaction which eventually extends to us spectators, sitting in thrall outside the boundary line.

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Photo Courtesy of 3QuarksDaily