GUHA: Historian on weekdays, cricket writer over the weekends

When Aamir Khan turned the story of a fictional cricket match in the 19th century into both a commercial success and a bold cultural statement, it appeared that Ashis Nandy's contention that cricket was an Indian game invented by the English had received the final endorsement. After all, now, Bollywood had even decided to create a mythology around it.

Indian sport's most famous and historically documented anti-colonial statement was the 1911 victory of the barefoot Mohun Bagan football team over the East Yorkshire Regiment. But in the early 21st century football didn't give rise to a Lagaan. Cricket did.

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Ramachandra Guha, writer and historian, throws this pitiful piece of sociological analysis into the dustbin. Well before the Yorkshire Regiment and Lagaan, in 1906 a team of Hindus beat a team of Europeans in a match in Bombay that was written about with great glee in the press, including in the faraway Madras Mail.

Guha recounts this and more with relish in his new book, a social history of Indian cricket. It will drive large holes in popular perceptions about the growth and development of cricket in the Indian imagination. Urban India, Guha believes, was drawn to cricket and deeply linked with it long before Independence. A Corner of a Foreign Field is, he says, the story of "forgotten connections and forgotten cricketers".

A CORNER OF A FOREIGN FIELD: The Indian History of a British Sport By Ramachandra Guha PICADOR Price: Rs 495 Pages: 496

The 44-year-old Bangalore-based writer says, "Indian cricket has always reflected the issues of the society around it-whether it was caste, race and religion in the early years of the 20th century or nationalism and commerce today." That's not the story we've been told. The accepted social history of Indian cricket involves colonial inheritance, princely patronage, quirky tales about Porbander and Vizzy and Lord Harris slowly evolving into the inspired leadership of the Nawab of Pataudi, the great wins in 1971, followed by the era of Sunil Gavaskar, the 1983 World Cup, Kapil Dev, satellite television, Sachin Tendulkar and the high-pitched mayhem we now know and love.

That remained the tale because, says Guha, "historians are not interested in sports and sports writers are not interested in history and politics". Er ... guilty as charged, on both sides.

Guha too considers himself a historian on weekdays and a cricket writer over the weekend, choosing to keep the two occupations divorced from each other. "I always thought cricket and history would be separate. Maybe at the back of my mind I didn't want to contaminate a sport I loved with politics."

Foreign Field then is a masterly crossover both ways. The differences between Indian history and Indian cricket history were, he discovered, not quite irreconcilable. They came together in the form of a man who is one of Guha's two personal favourites: the Dalit cricketer Palwankar Baloo, researched and reintroduced to the wider world by Guha in the 1990s.

This book happened, he says, by "accident" as he continued his research into Baloo's life. Baloo, in fact, is almost a metaphor for the entire book, for the centrality of cricket in Indian cultural life: a cricketer of great skill, Baloo was a giant to his own community, a figure so influential he mediated between Gandhi and Ambedkar in 1932. In 1937, he was the Congress candidate against Ambedkar in an election which he lost by a narrow margin. "It started with Baloo but by the time I'd finished ... I didn't think I'd have so much."

Indians have, he says, "always been crazy about cricket"-their adoration for the marvellous Colonel C.K. Nayudu is proof enough. In Nayudu, they had a "nationalist icon-easily the equal of Tendulkar" in an age before mass media and live television.

Guha's writing on cricketers of old has always been like a good sepia-toned photograph, containing within it both nostalgia and clarity. On the contemporary batch he is understated and generous, qualities hard to find in the quote-and-dagger, push-and-shove of the modern cricket press. He certainly has more sympathy for Sourav Ganguly & Co. "In the 1950s, when India began to win Test matches, Jawaharlal Nehru never entered the picture. Today our cricketers are expected to substitute for all our failures-they must win matches because our economy is bad or whatever. It's an unfair burden."

Losing is a "national humiliation/ shame/ disgrace", India-Pakistan cricket is a crown of thorns and we are forever being told that the sport has a special status because it evokes "national sentiment"; Guha pokes the cricket chauvinists in the eye in Foreign Field, recounting the time when RSS leader M.S. Golwalkar demanded that the game be banned from post-Independence India. Today, Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani smiles and feeds Wasim Akram a few ladoos.

Foreign Field will become-and it's not even a professional risk to say this-a modern classic of Indian cricket writing. There are bound to be comparisons to C.L.R. James' Beyond the Boundary, something that makes the genteel Guha wince. This is not-the Arundhati Roy episode notwithstanding-a man of the screaming headline or the 10-second soundbite. "Boundary is inimitable. All I wanted to do was write a social history of Indian cricket and make it interesting." He is currently working on a history of Independent India. Don't be too surprised if cricketers begin to pop up in it.

There are, he believes, entire libraries waiting to be written on the subject, treasures waiting to be found for the scholar or the cricket writer who ventures beyond the conventional boundaries of their individual subject-regional histories, cricket folklore or even the spread of the game beyond the major metros. Foreign Field should certainly spark off a few other searches. Cultural anthropologist, social historian, sociologist, cricket writer ... whoever turns to Indian cricket will not end up emptyhanded.

Plus, of course, there could even be another Bollywood blockbuster waiting to be made. Based, this time, on a true story.