It146;s Anybody146;s Toss

Boria Majumdar, in essence, challenges the Obituary Syndrome. India has a problem criticising things and people dead and gone: actors, films...

Boria Majumdar, in essence, challenges the Obituary Syndrome. India has a problem criticising things and people dead and gone: actors, films, books, works of art, artists, athletes8230; you get the picture. Writing on cricket has much too often veered toward hagiographic profiles or a simplistic polarisation: all those who have quit the playing field, especially those who played their cricket before endorsements and television rights made them millionaires, are good, and those who have reaped the benefits of commercialisation are bad. The result: the complexities and compelling life stories of the men who have peopled Indian cricket are erased.

This is, then, a welcome salvage operation. Majumdar looks back at cricketing history in India without sepia-tinted glasses. The protagonists of his book represent the 8216;8216;purer8217;8217; times; before either commercialisation or the rest of post-Kerry Packer negatives had touched the game. But he asks more than a few troubling questions and answers them with meticulous research. He distills his material from long-forgotten newspaper clippings 8212; articles by, as he puts it, 8216;8216;day-to-day historians8217;8217; 8212; as well as out-of-print classics and official archives. The result is an exciting tour through 8216;8216;what actually happened8217;8217; and 8216;8216;who did what8217;8217;, through the many intrigues and controversies that have plagued the game down the years.

One criticism of the book, however, that some readers might have is that most pieces in the selection are reworked from previously published essays. If, for instance, you are a regular reader of Wisden Asia Cricket, you8217;ve probably gone through a few of these already. These stories about Lala Amarnath, Ranjitsinhji, Vijay Hazare, Anthony De Mello, Pankaj Gupta, Vizzy HH The Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, the Maharaja of Patiala, et al, who played and ran cricket in the country in its early Test years, may be familiar to some. Even so, a recap is always interesting.

Did you, for starters, know there was an umpire in Maharashtra called Prabhakar Balkrishna Jog, whose refusal to toe the line of M.G. Bhave the bossman of the time and persistence with trying to expose Bhave cost him an international career? And Jog, as competent as the others of the time, retired without a Test match to his credit.

Then there8217;s the story of the banning of the Bombay Pentangular, which we all thought was because of the communal nature of the meet the ban happened in 1946. Majumdar proves in one of the best essays in the book that the Pentangular was banned because the Board of Control wanted the Ranji Trophy to become the pre-eminent tournament within the country. And not because of fears that the Hindu vs Muslim matches could inflame communal feelings. It didn8217;t. Cricket doesn8217;t.

There are so many other stories. Vinoo Mankad8217;s run-ins with the powers that be; Lala Amarnath8217;s series of problems with everyone concerned De Mello chief among them; the problems over the naming of the Ranji Trophy another very interesting piece; Ranji8217;s own misdemeanours in annexing the Jamnagar throne, which rightfully belonged to someone else.

Petty as well as high-level politics, treachery, betrayal, corruption, money laundering, ego trips and parochialism. If you thought cricket was a gentleman8217;s game, Furore will rid you of any such notions for good.

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It does more than that actually. The history of cricket in India 8212; as writers like Ramachandra Guha and Majumdar himself show 8212; provides a viable narrative in which to situate social history and sociological investigation. In tracking the way in which the game has over the decades been consumed and analysed, Furore provides a context for current cricket mania. It rescues cricket from simple, and simplistic, renditions of breathless run chases.