Love and Hate in the time of IPL

If you are one of the millions of people watching or merely following the ongoing Indian Premier League (IPL) matches, there is something very elementary that you are either unaware of or simply don’t care about. People claiming to be connoisseurs of the game, which somehow also means they care much more, allege that what you have been watching has a basic problem- it’s not cricket.

The subtext is that by not being ‘real’ cricket, it becomes something else. They warn you against the mix of money, carnival and low brow action as it lures you to commit the sin that sports ascetics should refrain from – entertainment. In fact, you have to feel even more guilty as IPL also deprives the poor farmers of water. So, as the Indian judiciary sometimes believes in its delusionary flight of activism, you may be abetting farmers’ suicides too.

A day after the current edition of IPL kicked off early this month, seasoned sports journalist and Deputy Executive Editor of The Hindustan Times Kunal Pradhan attacked the tournament for abandoning the task of educating a new generation about nuances of the game and “dumbing it down for the idle channel-surfer”.

Like all cricket romantics, he disparages the carnival of fours and sixes and craves for the leisurely contest between the bat and ball. The latter is a way of giving an exclusive sanctity to test cricket as the only genre which will have the nod of the purists. It can have the approval of social theorists-cum cricket historians such as Ashis Nandy as well.

One may still remember how Nandy intellectualised the relevance of test cricket at the defining moment of T-20’s ascendancy- India’s 2007 title win in the inaugural T2O World Cup in South Africa. Replying to a journalist’s question few days after the win, Nandy had described test cricket as “the only game known to humankind that is a living criticism of the urban-industrial vision and modernity.”

There is nothing wrong with Pradhan’s fascination for the appeal of test cricket as a test of technique, temperament and strategic endurance in the classic format of the game. That’s something that is unique with the format and can be preserved and enjoyed that way. But, what Pradhan rules out is the possibility that other formats also bring a different kind of joy to a large number of people.

Erecting a hierarchy of joyful experiences is an old way with which high priests of arts tend to protect their turf of exclusivity- say, like looking down on playback singing in films seen against the classical vocal rendering. Democratising joyful reception of any form of skilful performance entails that it be defined by the people seeking joy, and not by some abstract standards of it.

That’s precisely why IPL has been able to make inroads into viewership of non-followers of game, acquiring new converts for the game. In his mild rebuttal to Pradhan’s piece, Rajesh Mahapatra makes this point. That’s a process triggered by local T20 leagues in England almost two decades back but caught India’s imagination only after inaugural T20 World Cup of 2007. No wonder the following year, 2008, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) thought the time had come to blend viable commerce with the growing interest in the shortest version of the game. Pradhan also restores the centrality of amusement to any sporting pursuit. Like many other forms of recreation, the original appeal of sports lies in having purposeless fun. Any effort to arrogate to oneself some ‘spiritual experience’ or ‘cerebral stimulus’, as opposed to mass entertainment, is simply subjective.

It’s not that the product of T-20 specific skills doesn’t have eloquent admirers. For former cricketer and commentator Ravi Shastri, it’s ‘scripture compressed’, while social scientist and cricket enthusiast Shiv Visvanathan observes, “Speed can add to adrenalin, exaggerate drama enact a fable called cricket in all its nuances. IPL, in this sense, becomes sheer poetry.”

Then, there is also a tinge of snobbery in downplaying a different skill set needed for a different genre of the game. Even if the context is, as Pradhan puts it, “shorter boundaries, fielding restrictions that weigh heavily towards batsmen, dead pitches, additional power plays”, the ability lies is what you can do within the given conditions. It requires a different kind of mindset as well as a wider repertoire of skills. That is why many good test players like Cheteshwar Pujara fail to perform in the shortest format.

However, there are players like Steve Smith excelling in all formats. You also have examples of players like David Warner, labelled as a T20 specialist in the early phase of his career, who diversified their style to become successful in the longer cricket formats test as well. But, there are always have tales of Eoin Morgan or Yusuf Pathan who haven’t been able to make that transition, of course.  This, however, doesn’t rein in old school voices like Bishan Singh Bedi, a gadfly anyway, from attributing any Indian failure in tests to IPL.

Almost four decades back, in the 1970s, there were similar snooty attitudes towards the emergence of one-day cricket of 50 overs(to begin with was 60 ). But, within a short period of time, it got mainstreamed as a regular feature of international contests. Later, even Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer’s innovations like coloured clothing, white balls and day-night matches were derided as ‘pyjama cricket’.

Both survived the test of time and soon were recognised even by cricket pundits as serious formats for testing specific cricketing skills. Packer’s ways of ‘trivialising gentleman’s game’ were actually very serious in changing the way the paying public in stadiums and TV viewers watched cricket.

Apart from this, the critics of IPL fuel the ingrained Indian scepticism about anything that involves a commercial venture. In the process of demonising the capitalist nature of the annual event, they somehow forget that money is central to not only attracting talent but even nurturing it.

In fact, capitalism has made it affordable to talk about the fanciful fads of ‘socialist’ sporting contests, if there are any. Far from what IPL naysayers would make you believe, infusion of capital in T 20 leagues, profits being a legitimate return for it, has given a fresh lease of life to cricketers across the world.

It hasn’t only enriched the established names but empowered a whole new generation of budding cricketers to look at the game as a viable career move. It holds promise for lifting them not only from obscurity but also from career- threatening poverty. For instance, the latest IPL auction in February 2017 had two remarkable happy stories. Left-arm seamer Thangarasu Natarajan, the son of a porter, got a deal of Rs 3 crore to play for Kings XI Punjab this season and medium pacer Mohammed Siraj, the son of an auto-rickshaw driver, got Rs 2.6 crore to play for Sunrisers Hyderabad.

Once the envy of foreign press and cricket bodies of other countries, the cash-rich IPL is now being seen as an opportunity for players to get rid of their financial insecurities and concentrate on improving their skill set. The British press reacted very excitedly to Ben Stokes’ £1.7m contract with the Rising Pune Supergiants and the £1.4m purchase of Tymal Mills by the Royal Challengers Bangalore. In a piece for The Guardian carrying the headline “With IPL’s millions, this is surely the best time to be a top-level cricketer”, Vic Marks wrote, “Stokes is fortunate to be playing at a time when the England hierarchy is quietly encouraging links with the IPL”.

In wake of the reports of alleged financial irregularities by some team owners and controversies surrounding the then BCCI president N Srinivasan,  historian and cricket aficionado Ramchandra Guha had questioned why responsible and established corporate houses like Tatas and Mahindras were not willing to own IPL teams.

He had also dubbed IPL as ‘tamasha’—that oft familiar stick to beat anything in India when it doesn’t conform to your way of doing things. The same word, meaning spectacle, was used for annual literature carnival of Jaipur Literature Festival by authors who now rush to attend it. Clearly there is a space for tamasha  for the simple reason that people, including serious ones, actually like a good tamasha; a lot of serious stuff can also come along with it. Guha also questioned, and this time justifiably so, the limited representative nature of IPL as didn’t have teams from populous states like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

Guha might be willing to be too grim for a process which was not even a decade old. Financial irregularities couldn’t be a pretext for throwing the baby with the bathwater, otherwise, hugely successful football leagues like the English Premier League would not have survived. With media scrutiny and judicial intervention, there is a sense that the league has now reinvigorated itself with normalisation and settling of things following a cleansing process.

There is, however, a strong case for expanding the representative character of IPL by having teams from more regions in the country. And also having entrepreneurs invest in such teams in a way that people identify with their regional teams.

Ironically, Guha’s ‘tamasha’ jibe might not have found favour with one of his favourite cricket writers CLR James. In his work, which has the status of a classic in cricket literature, Beyond a Boundary, James bemoaned that cricket in 1950s and 1960S had slowed down. The defensive approach had made cricket dull and too much loaded in favour of safety rather than risk and adventure. Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan writes:

“James calls this style of cricket a “welfare state attitude to the game”, a drive to mediocrity emphasising the defensive push, where cricket evoked security rather than play or risk. James contrasts it to the Golden age of cricket, where Trumper and Ranjitsinhji were legends. James adds that many of these cricketers were not just extraordinary players but extraordinary men. For them cricket was a metaphor for a larger more creative attitude to life.”

What, obviously, Guha also underestimates is the potential of  T20 making the test cricket financially viable for cricket bodies. The losses cricket boards incur because of thin attendance and plunging viewers’ interest in five-day games could be compensated with the money generated by the game’s shortest version. This week cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle was alluding to the same on Twitter.

Last year anti-IPL activism took a bizarre form, almost something that can be called drought-shaming. On April 28, 2016, the Supreme Court upheld the Bombay High Court order of shifting of all IPL matches scheduled in Maharashtra after 30 April to other states in view of the severe drought. Apart from tokenism and assuaging misplaced activism, there was little reasoning as cricket grounds don’t use potable water and BCCI had assured it wouldn’t be used in future too.

Except for trivialising the issue of the water crisis in Maharashtra, it was puzzling to think about the quantity of water that could be saved by not having a few cricket matches in the state. Former cricketers Sunil Gavaskar and Rahul Dravid saw it as yet another case of IPL becoming a soft target for headline-hunting activists.

Journalist Rajdeep Sardesai attacked the media for its hypocrisy in ignoring farmers’ issues throughout the year but crawling out of the woodwork to make frivolous cases against IPL. He wrote: “We’ve suddenly found an attachment to the faceless kisan but because images of parched earth and taps running dry can be deliciously contrasted with cheerleaders, celebrity cricketers and corporate czars at Indian Premier League games. What can be a better way to speak up for the beleaguered farmer than to make cricket’s multi-million dollar extravaganza the villain for the season?”

Obviously, people could see through the smokescreen of drought-shaming. What was, however, interesting was that judiciary couldn’t. It rewarded the gladiators of outrage.

In their disdain for people’s entertainment that propels IPL, the cricket romantics may be seeking protection of their own esoteric turf of exclusive lovers. In denying innovation and enterprise a chance in mass evolution of game, the activists accuse the money power of doing things which it’s always capable of doing- changing the narrative, including lives. Both of these charges against IPL thin out as its success is powered by people who care least for them. People who fill  the stadium, people who are glued to TV screens and people who may be now checking scores of last evening’s game.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26