IT has been debated in boardrooms and at dining tables. Is Indian cricket making too much money? By recent accounts the levels have reached obscene heights, with the price for television rights touching Rs 1,400 crore. But if you really look back in time, money in Indian cricket has always been a bone of contention. This book by cricket historian Boria Majumdar sums up the apology that has been sought by India’s creme de las creme for being successful. As Majumdar sums up India’s social history around their cricketing folklore, he brings out interesting facts on how commercialisation is not really a new venture. Only the character of how the game is sold has changed. The chapter on the Bombay Pentangular being discontinued for reasons other than stated, for example, is very interesting. The official reason given for the extremely popular Bombay Pentangular — played traditionally by five teams named on the basis of their religion, Hindus, Parsis, Muslims, etc — being discontinued in the mid-forties was that it was ‘‘communal’’. This is also the reason given by practically all historians of the game. But here Majumdar claims that the actual reason was the fact that the Pentangular made a profit of about Rs 1.5 lakh, quite a huge sum in those days. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) was just born in 1928 and did not quite relish competition for its own Ranji Trophy and promptly used every trick in the book to stop the Pentangular. This is very interesting when modern day gurus of commerce in the BCCI like Jagmohan Dalmiya and I.S. Bindra get all the credit for pumping in the moolah. Today the volume of revenue has increased and new ways of getting something back from the game have been invented. The last chapter on BCCI’s first foray into selling television rights in 1992-93 and the long drawn legal battle has been highlighted in detail by Majumdar. He notes that this was one round which the BCCI won hands down, forcing the government to re-think the status of Doordarshan, for the national broadcaster lost out on years of monopoly. Majumdar claims the birth of Prasar Bharti as a corporate entity owed much to this loss. Wonder what Mandi House would have to say about that. Unlike other books on Indian cricket history written by such luminaries as Ramachandra Guha and Mihir Bose, Majumdar does a decent job of compiling 223 years in 500 pages. As BCCI’s first official historian, he sums up events over the 75 years of the board’s existence rather very well, not being afraid to take a sustained look at murky group politics in the 1950s. The fight between probably the best known pre-Independence administrator, Anthony De Mello, and the Bengal lobby makes for interesting reading too.
