Revisionism, From Silly Point

In times when we are told Job Charnock never visited Calcutta, it is easy to paint Ranji, as Ramachandra Guha does in his hurried foreword, as, well, the “Gujarati Other”. As Guha writes, “The figure who bears comparison with Ranji is his fellow Kathiawari, M.K. Gandhi. What Gandhi saw as the battle for swaraj, Ranji saw as sedition.”

Rodrigues seeks to place Ranji’s capitulation to Empire in a broader theoretical construct. He argues that “the role of sport and team games like cricket must be viewed in the context of a radical change of imperial tactics to hold on to the Empire after the cataclysmic upheavals of the Mutiny of 1857”. British tactics, Rodrigues writes, changed from brute force to a more subliminal “new imperialism”: “Sport, with its moral values, was very much part of this civilising mission and an important part of the cultural armoury of imperialism.”

Cricket taught you to submit to the umpire, uphold arcane laws you didn’t write, much less understood. In short, it was a parable for the imperial order, much like, some have suggested, the Bhagvad Gita was a post-Buddha intervention to preserve the caste system and promote the virtues of fatalism over radical change. To Rodrigues, Ranji completely if unwittingly internalised cricket’s ideological message.

This is a fantastic hypothesis in the literal sense of that f word.

Not much is known about the post-cricket political career of Ranji. This is where Rodrigues scores. Ranji is no longer the charming Black Prince of Fenner’s and Hove. He is a minor despot, an incorrigible factionalist in the Chamber of Princes, a man who worried in the early 1930s that Indian constitutionalism would “inevitably so work as to destroy, at least in its effective form, the very principle of Indian kingship”.

As meticulously researched and simply written popular history, this book is recommended. Its underlying message is not. The facile conclusion — to be fair, Rodrigues never expressly makes it — that Ranji was some sort of “anti-national” figure, whatever that term may have meant in the inter-war years, is downright disturbing.

Ranji, to his detractors, was a clever social climber who used cricket as his ticket into British aristocracy. He did little for India, scoffed at “their” cricket and didn’t deserve to have India’s national championship named after him.

These are, well, silly points. They bring into question the whole issue of who was an Indian and what was India three quarters of a century ago. Ranji was only true to his order — class, if you prefer. In reacting with horror and suspicion to the Congress’s mass mobilisation, he was no different from so many

elements of the old, pre-Gandhi

Indian elite, from Poona Brahmins to Anglicised Bengalis to his

fellow princes.

We live, of course, in an age when it is fashionable to rediscover the past, marry it with current expressions of popular culture and political correctness and tell a sensational tale. Why stop at Ranji? Maybe someday we will also be told Douglas Jardine was an imperialist — did he not, during the Bodyline series, urge Eddie Paynter off a hospital bed by evoking General Roberts’ march to Kandahar? — Len Hutton a misogynist, Hedley Verity a militarist, whatever.

In the great pavilion in the sky, the crusty Jamsaheb must allow himself a smirk.