Spicy, flawed tale of Indian cricket
Print Edition
For two months in spring, the Indian Premier League is watched more than anything else on Indian television. Test cricket is played between nations over five days, without guarantee of a winner. IPL matches last three hours and are played between Indian teams owned by businessmen and movie stars. Results are guaranteed.
There have been unforgettable moments. Five years ago, one player slapped another as they left the field. The slapped player was arrested in May and accused of fixing IPL matches. Also arrested was the son-in-law of the cricket board president, who owns a team, on suspicion of gambling on matches. His accomplice was thought to be a C-list actor, who once won the Indian version of “Big Brother.” Tamasha, the Hindi word for “spectacle,” begins to describe it.
“The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption, and the Spectacular Rise of Modern India” ends before the IPL’s latest depredations came to light. Would the book have examined them? You cannot say to what extent. James Astill touches only on the finest overlap of cricket and corruption that modern India had to offer him — its Black Sox moment — when, in 2000, a former captain and several players were charged with match-fixing and barred from the sport. The league’s previous brushes with corruption are not explored so much as summarily presented. When you consider the subtitle, corruption is not really Astill’s muse. His interests are wider.
“The Great Tamasha” is a series of excursions into a cricket-fixated society. For four years Astill, a descendant of a cricketer who played for England in the 1920s, was stationed in New Delhi as the South Asia bureau chief of The Economist. He devotes much of the book to recounting how Indian cricket went from colonial recreation to national addiction, and while treading this familiar ground, the narrative lacks the propulsion of discovery. The sport’s interactions with race, nationalism, religion and caste, for example, have been treated with greater depth and nuance in Ramachandra Guha’s extraordinary social history “A Corner of a Foreign Field.”
Astill’s grasp of caste does not inspire confidence: Brahmins, he writes, make up less than a fifth of the population, when the figure is more approximate to 5 percent. Cricket obsessives will notice other errors.
Astill’s excursions, however, give the book its spice, its masala. “The Great Tamasha” is a book of breadth rather than depth.
“There is a lot wrong with how Indian cricket is run,” Astill writes. “Yet India is run even worse.”
In the book’s final scene, set in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi during an IPL match, he wanders alleys “so narrow and overbuilt they were almost tunnels” to find a sweatshop of child embroiderers, cricket fans, for whom watching it on TV is a Sunday treat.
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