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Flat pitch
An excellent glance at Indian cricket though a tad academic
V Krishnaswamy
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Twenty–Two
Yards to Freedom
Boria Majumdar
Penguin/Viking
Rs 595 |
LET ME make this clear
at the outset. Twenty-two Yards to Freedom — A Social History
of Indian Cricket, with all its pluses and minuses, is a book whose
copyright is held by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). The
author, Boria Majumdar, is a well-known historian who embarked on the history
of Indian cricket as his D Phil Thesis at Oxford. And then somewhere down
the line, he was probably — I say probably because I am not sure about
it — approached by the BCCI to put down its history in the form of
a book. So Majumdar got his thesis through and also came out with an ‘official’
book at the end of it.
I had long back heard of a writer being commissioned by the Board to put
down its history in a book. But that piece of information had somehow slipped
my mind. And so, when I finally went through the book, waded through extensive
quoting of ‘official’ letters including a nine-page letter from
Jagmohan Dalmiya to the ICC over the 2001 Mike Denness affair, I was very
surprised at how the normally ‘secretive’ Board had allowed
an author access to its files.
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The
book talks about
controversies like the clashes
between personalities like
Amarnath and De Mello,
Gavaskar and Kapil Dev |
However, putting the
book down after almost a week in Nepal — the time it took me to read
it in patches — I chanced upon the early pages, where it said: Copyright:
Board of Control for Cricket in India. The reason for numerous pages of
praise for the otherwise much-maligned Board was now clear.
Cynicism apart, this book is an excellent effort. Though heavy on footnotes,
it does away with the normal scores and statistics, which are now so easily
available on the internet. The book does focus on the intrigue that Indian
cricket is. It talks about all – well, almost all — that has
been controversial about it in the form of the clashes between personalities,
be it Merchant and Nayudu, Amarnath and De Mello or Gavaskar and Kapil.
It also covers the television rights war.
But Twenty-two Yards does leave out details on what constitutes
the Board, which is the one issue that has been the root of all controversies.
The vote bank politics, the various alignments and so on, which everybody
would have been interested in, are not brought out clearly. Also unclear
are the politics of elections and selections, which would have made it really
very interesting. If such details and inside stories are missing in the
book, the reason is obvious.
Maybe, Majumdar, as a historian did not find the need to go into rumours
and whispers and decided to stick to facts as he saw them. Yes, the book
does well to dispel the belief that all cricket history is centred around
Mumbai cricket, with the addition of some chapters on Bengal. After all
with Board strongman Dalmiya hailing from the state, how could that contribution
be overlooked? He also makes it a point to include the southern states.
But as someone interested in sport and its history, I would have been delighted
with more references to the south and also the north, which patronised the
game of cricket a great deal.
The book is interesting, even if the style is a bit academic and not as
engaging as a book on sport may be expected to be. Yet at the end of the
day, Twenty-two Yards would find a place alongside my two favourite
books on cricket, Mihir Bose’s History of Indian Cricket
and Ramachandra Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field. But to
be honest, the Bose and Guha efforts would figure much higher on the scale.
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January
01, 2005
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