Pitch it right: IPL & the ethics of cricket

Shiv Visvanathan

RAVI Shastri is one of the more interesting cricketers that India has produced. Along with Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble and Bishen Singh Bedi, he has been able to reflect on cricket as more than a game. In a recent statement, he waxed poetic over the Indian Premier League (IPL), observing it might just be three hours but claimed that the three hours are “scripture compressed”. It is a wonderful comment on how speed accelerates time and intensifies the logic of the game. Speed can add to adrenalin, exaggerate drama enact a fable called cricket in all its nuances. IPL, in this sense, becomes sheer poetry.

Masters of the game

Yet to capture poetics alone is not enough. Speed or a compression of time did save cricket as a game. One has to read CLR James' classic Beyond a Boundary to comprehend this. James not only captured the spirit of cricket in the 1950s and 1960s, he caught the essence of that spirit. Writing about cricket, James notices that cricket had slowed down. The style was subdued even defensive. Even the great masters of the game at that time like Colin Cowdrey, Peter May, Tom Graveney were run-making machines but dull by today standards.

James calls this style of cricket a “welfare state attitude to the game”, a drive to mediocrity emphasising the defensive push, where cricket evoked security rather than play or risk. James contrasts it to the Golden age of cricket, where Trumper and Ranjitsinhji were legends. James adds that many of these cricketers were not just extraordinary players but extraordinary men. For them cricket was a metaphor for a larger more creative attitude to life. 

Expression of the world around

The dullness of this cricket, James adds, could not be redeemed by an additional fourth wicket, as Len Hutton then suggested, but by changing the mentality of the game. Critical to this is the environment of the game. James argued that West Indian cricket could produce the three Ws and Leary Constantine and George Headley only because they were expressions of the West Indian world around them. Cricket has sadly changed in the West Indies today. One cannot capture the creative playfulness and the social sensitivity of the early era of cricketers. In fact, if one wants the passion, the playfulness, the ease of excellence one must watch the Jamaican runners not cricket. Cricket is no longer a West Indian passion. 

Cricket in India is a secular religion and the Indian fan has transformed cricket into one of the great sporting industries. IPL today is a mela, a circus, a religion and an industry. But the logic of the IPL has not responded fully to James' sense of the spirit of cricket, where the game invades the way of life. James captured it when he claimed that his book was an answer to the question: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” IPL as cricket conveyed a sense that cricket captured the spirit of the youthful India. As one watched Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Sehwag, Kumble, one felt they were a sense of hope and creativity.

Bookies, spectators & fixers

But as the prose of cricket sidelined its poetics, the side shows like the bookie, the spectator as fixer started invading the field. As one read the Mudgal committee proceedings, one realised that our heroes had clay feet. Men like Sunil Gavaskar, known for his boldness in the game, turned out to be mere retainers. The silence of cricketing heroes like Tendulkar, Dravid or all the myriad cricketers with retainers in India Cements suddenly captured the moral dullness of the game. Cricket could not enact the implicit normativity of cricket as a gentleman's game when match-fixing and betting had become dominant. The bookie was becoming as central to cricket as the selection committee. 

Critical role

The Justice Mudgal report should be bedside reading for every cricketer possibly along with the Tehelka investigations into cricket. The Mudgal report highlighted the critical role of two actors, Gurunath Meiyappan, epigone of a great film family and son-in-law of Srinivasan of India Cements and India's cricket legend, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, also probably its most successful cricket captain. The two represent what one can call the front stage and back stage of the IPL drama. For me, it is not Srinivasan who is important. As a cricket lover, he created India Cements as a company town for cricketers, providing retainers, employment which gave cricketers a sense of life and security beyond the erratic rhythms of cricket.  

Srinivasan like Dalmia, Sharad Pawar, Lalit Modi showed how cricket could be an annexe to power. The power games they played are a part of the evil we know. But cricket is also a dream, a myth, a fantasy, a fable, a norm and an ideal that has to be sustained for the next generation. Our youth live and breathe cricket. Even today an Umrigar, a Bedi, a Dravid, a Pataudi are part of cricket as one of the great morality plays of the 20th century. The Mudgal report showed that IPL had two Hamlets whose bumbling silence destroyed the spirit of the game.

It is clear that Meiyappan as a “cricket enthusiast” betrayed the game. Spectators and fans are more than observers. They are perpetual commentators, the artful ethnographers of each game. They sustain the normativity of cricket, show that its ethics goes beyond table manners. Meiyappan was the fan who contaminated his religion but what one needs to ask is what does one make of Dhoni's silence? Did Dhoni rig the rules of the game or was Dhoni a passive but responsive spectator to the muck being enacted around him? 

One has to ask whether cricketers feel close to the likes of Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Shakeel? Was Dhoni immaculately innocent? One has to ask this question because the silence of Dhoni adds shades of grey to the game. Was the Mr Cool of cricket immaculately cool in other situations. I am asking this because Dhoni like Dravid is a larger-than-life creature.

Selflessness of the game

Dravid embodies the ethics and the selflessness of the game, the confidence and the lack of egotism that cricket demands in sustaining ideals, Dravid became an ideal type, emblematic of a professional, disciplined and ethical yet a deeply competitive cricketer. His batting like his self-discipline had a durability that many of the fireflies of IPL lacked. His Bradmen lecture captures the tapestry of cricket and the dangers to the game. Yet even Dravid weakens the spirit of cricket when he asks cricketers to submit themselves to polygraphics. He sees it as a quick avenue to innocence but in that moment one wonders what happens to the spirit of cricket as an ethical game. 

Exemplary leadership

Dhoni, in a similar way embodies a style of leadership. His leadership in the World Cricket series was exemplary and India sailed effortlessly to the semi-finals. Dhoni is back as flavour of the week and month. Had his cricket answered his critics?

I am afraid not because ethics haunts cricket. For me it is not the Mudgal committee that Dhoni has to convince. He has to pass what I call the CLR James test of cricket as a game of athletic and ethical creativity, Ranjhitsinhji, Frank Worell or Learie Constantine. If Dhoni is to be an exemplar, he has to exemplify a life of cricket which goes beyond a cricketing life. In this age of liberalisation, ethics is a part of creativity. India desperately needs exemplars.  

In one sense Kejriwal and Dhoni are two exemplars of the liberalisation era. In Kejriwal's AAP, party failed thanks mainly to its backstage negotiations. To deal with the Congress is the equivalent of match fixing in cricket.

Ethics is cool

James acknowledged that cricket is entertainment. Yet it has acquired a code where physical and moral values are relevant. He remarks that “the cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played a representative role which was charged with social significance”. Dhoni is such a larger-than-life representative.  His life has to extend beyond cricket and thus his cricket has to be nobler than ever. This IPL, he must show that shadows of the last season do not haunt him. Mr Cool has to show that ethics is as cool as cricket and that as an art form neither allows for compromise. If coolness is a another word for grace, he has to be transparent about his code, assure us as captain that the ecology of cricket is not invaded by a black economy of crime and corrupt leisure. He represents the aspiring class, the new ethics of liberalisation. Cricket might be a market game but if the market invades sportsmanship something of the spirit and essence of the game will be lost. Dhoni has to guarantee that sense of Camelot. 

He has to be magnanimous to his critics, grateful to his fans but ruthless with himself. The only trophy he knows has to win is the spirit of cricket trophy where creativity of the game combines with ethics and aesthetics of life to create the spirit of cricket. As James would say vintage cricket presupposes vintage ethics. One cannot be a Bradman in one and an autistic in the other. Anything less would be unacceptable.

The writer calls himself a social sciences nomad