|  THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF INDIAN CRICKET
By Boria Majumdar
Lustre Press/Roli Books
Price: not listed; Pages: 253
| Boria Majumdar is becoming the McDonald's of Indian writing on cricket, churning out books faster than Shoaib Akhtar gets himself into trouble. This is his third book on cricket in as many years and he has already co-authored a book on Indian football this year. If only the Indian batsmen he writes about with such passion were as prolific. The history of Indian cricket has been covered in such excruciating detail and by so many, including Majumdar himself, that it would surely imply that the cupboard was as bare as Madam Hubbard's. Majumdar, however, is made of sterner stuff. Having written a social history of Indian cricket, another on Indian cricket through the ages, he now gives us The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket. He is nothing if not consistent.
 | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | CHASING NOSTALGIA: Members of the 1946 Indian team in England | | Publishers, however, know when they are on to a good thing. Among contemporary cricket analysts, Majumdar is the publishing world's equivalent of Sachin Tendulkar. A Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate on the social history of Indian cricket from Oxford University, he has the intellectual heft, the depth of analysis and research and the unbridled passion of the committed cricket fan to produce something that is readable and says something different. This book, however, is mostly a nostalgia, a reminder of the days when tradition counted more than the runs you made and the products you endorsed, an age when India's romance with the game was a slow and languid blossoming rather than the frenetic commercial circus it now is.
He divides the evolution of Indian cricket into convenient decades, starting with the 1930s. Since it is largely an illustrated history, he has gone to great lengths to unearth rare photographs, dog-eared, yellowing score sheets and copies of early sports magazines, which he enlivens with anecdotes and history, mostly known but he manages to dig up some obscure details as well. Where the author slips is in the contemporary descriptive portions where the cricket fan gets the better of serious author. Describing the qualities of today's captain, he writes that it requires "a sailor's deep knowledge of meteorology and wind conditions, a farmer's understanding of soul types, an aircraft designer's expertise in aerodynamics...the raw energy of a cheetah on the hunt or the patience of a python." If that was not enough, he adds "the strategic mind of a Rommel with the ruthless innovative powers of a Gary Kasparov and the motivational skills of a Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi." Gandhigiri may be in fashion but this is really over the top, a literary doosra from an author of his stature. Rahul Dravid will surely get an inferiority complex when he reads this, if he doesn't have one already after his team's performance in recent tournaments. Despite the hyperbole, the signature characteristic of an Indian cricket fan, Majumdar does manage to capture India's obsession with the game with great style and substance, preserving his literary wicket, so to speak. But only just. Indian cricket history is a good read when the highs outnumber the lows. Sadly, it has not been that way for quite a while now Index
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KERALA
IN THE MINDS OF THE MAESTROS
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO INDIAN ARCHAEOLOGY
