On the Shelf

• Runs and Ruins: Sunil Gavaskar. A sophisticated Sunny Days, a “kiss and tell” book released just after the 1983 season, in which the West Indies annihilated us at home. Didn’t pull punches while writing on a controversial season, one bang in the middle of the Gavaskar-Kapil war.

• A Corner of a Foreign Field: Ramachandra Guha. His magnum opus, though he’s written other books on cricket.

• Patrons, Players and the Crowd: Richard Cashman. Probably the first social study of “modern” cricket

• The Wills Books. Mudhar Patherya on cricket and Lokesh Sharma on the Olympics were the best. Great production values is what set these books apart. Again they were trendsetters.

• Cricket Delightful: Mushtaq Ali. A throwback to an earlier age, famous for the story of how Vizzy, as a captain, offered to bribe mushtaq on the 1936 tour of England if he ran out opening partner Vijay Merchant.

• History of Indian Cricket: Mihir Bose. Complements Guha’s work.

• Hell with Hockey: Aslam Sher Khan with Matin Khan. An expose of the rot that was setting in in Indian hockey by the late 1970s. Not great literature but stuff of minor scandal.

• Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer: Sujit Mukherjee. Has also been praised as fine tribute to the romance of cricket.

• The Making of a Legend: Rajindra Amarnath. Lala biography by his son for its sheer gossip value. Cricket meets Stardust school of writing.

A Story Called Jaya
The Mahabharata has had many retellings since its first origins as Jaya. Post-1947 efforts include painstaking projects to distill the original from later interpolations, to tell it to children, to locate 20th century notions of humanity in it and to use its narrative structure to tell the story of modern India. Some important Mahabharata milestones:

• Mahabharata: C. Rajagopalachari. Perhaps every schoolchild’s first introductory book.

• Mahabharata — A shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic: R.K. Narayan. A breezy recap of the millennia before Malgudi

• Mahabharata: The Critical Edition of the Sanskrit Text. It took more than 30 years to complete, in 1966, but this multi-volume effort by the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute took out what appeared to be later Brahman interpolations.

• Yuganta — The End of an Epoch: Irawati Karve. Scholar Irawati Karve reads “a story called Jaya, which was sung three thousand years ago, and discovers (herself) in it.” Brutally honest and erudite, it fetched the Sahitya Akademi award.

• The Great Indian Novel: Shashi Tharoor. A political history of India that appropriates the storytelling structure of the epic.

• Mahabharata: Ramesh Menon. A 2004 retelling that’s faithful to the original’s sprawl and makes no concession for any reader in a hurry.