Life in the middle order

Cricket has become one of the greatest soap operas of our time. A soap opera has three qualities. Firstly, it has a stock of memorable and identifiable characters. Secondly, it creates a corpus of conventional values and vices and then summons melodrama as the mode of resolution. Without a sense of epic battle, a dose of hysteria and a touch of climax, week after durable week, a soap opera as an epic cannot survive.
The World Cup was high excitement but what was more moving and sociologically interesting was the aftermath.

An aftermath is a chorus, a tuning fork that tells you whether the battle has been fought in the right way.
India won and won as a team. The nation state felt it had come of age. It was no longer a collection of talented individuals. Today, no one can say one Pakistani equals to three Indians. We have found our sense of synergy. We are Team India. The nation as a cricket team sounds right. The euphoria is unbelievable. Crowds flow into the streets… strangers greet each other. The sense of tribal ecstasy is complete. The performance continues but at a different level.
Once the nation has been sufficiently affirmed, it is time for family and professional values. The first tribute is to Sachin Tendulkar. Tendulkar is an exemplar. He is a genius at cricket and a complete repository of all the right values. His autobiography is a collection of good conduct certificates. He is the good son, the good father, the loyal husband, friend, mentor prankster — the stuff of moral science books we read as children. His is a middle-class goodness, conventional in its religiosity, predictable in its loyalties, generous in its sense of good works. Tendulkar is a man who can do no wrong, a legend untouched by scandal. He does not climb Everest. He is Everest — as the peak of achievement. As a cricketer, as an Indian, as a person, he is the ultimate Guinness Book of Records.
But the exemplar as exemplar can only survive if the values he upholds and represents are collectively resonated. This, the Valhalla of heroes around him, will quickly do. Yuvraj Singh is no longer prince in waiting. As Man of the Tournament he is quick to salute his guru and his mother. The guru as the peak of renunciation and the mother as the epitome of sacrifice represent our traditional values and sustain them.
Next to them is the teacher as coach, as mentor. The teacher is more secular than the guru, but he represents knowledge to the guru’s wisdom. His is the logic of everydayness, the rules of craft, forging the bundle of skills and tactics every cricketer as warrior needs. Enter Gary Kirsten. As coach he is the real Dronacharya, demanding in his discipline, accessible through his advice. Kirsten knows Tendulkar is his Arjuna and treats him as such. Fortunately, there are no Ekalavyas off the field.
Then there is the chorus of cricket, which comes in three magic circles of validation. First, there is the family, middle-class to the core, thrilled at the son’s achievement, excited that it is a fragment of history. The scene is always the drawing room; the act is usually the sharing of sweets. The family, as the spectator, waits for the hero’s return. The scene could be middle-class India anywhere where an anonymous family becomes a predictable album of middle class values — pride, faith, discipline, love, sacrifice, loyalty, sharing.
The family cannot be complete without the nukkad, the neighbourhood, the ecology of friends that watched the heroes grow. The nukkad is the witness. The nukkad of friends will testify to the making of the hero, his ups and downs. No ecology of Indian cricket can do without the nukkad of storytellers, regaling one about the first six, that special stroke, or the art of bowling brewed in the streets of some small town full of Gambhirs and Sehwags and Khans.
Family and nukkad have something organic about them. The third circle is more virtual, more artificial — this is the circle of commentators, the mercenaries of gossip and expertise paid to dissect every move, retail every blow, the circle of discourse that keeps cricket as a normative framework alive. As experts, as former exemplars and as socialites they enact the tacit rules of cricket, dissect every game, every move as if cricket owes its origin to an anatomy class. They are its genealogists, judges, commentators, scribes, its oral historians, keeping alive stories and values in memory.
Cricket as middle-class nationalism survives because of them. They combine state and market, and nation and individual into that creative dream that sustains us. Cricket as myth would be lifeless without their tireless efforts. They create cricket as a middle-class morality play. They are the sutradhars of middle class values that no management school can match.
Yet, such a picture, moving as it is, hides a more discordant reality. The innocence of cricket as a middle-class reality is anchored between crime and commerce. They provide tension to the value frames of the game. It is not advertising that pathologises the game. Advertising only enacts the dream of middle-class desires and success. A Tendulkar advertising Boost or a Dhoni’s ode to Orient fan does little harm. But cricket as commerce gets obscene when the scale of money loses all sense of proportion. It loses its sense of being middle class. One wishes there were more symbolic forms of reward and a wider sense of distribution where grounds-men and “also-rans” get a share, emphasising that cricket is not a zero-sum game of modern mobility. Between money as commerce and money as betting, cricket smells of pathology. One realises that India won but what one wonders how much the punters took home. This nagging question makes the World Cup a bitter-sweet story, reminds one of the other face of cricket, of a brittleness where values are still fragile. This is the shadow looming over a fairy tale called cricket. Excess destroys the middle that keeps cricket such a sane and lovely game.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist