A heady mix: Cricket, slogans and nationalism

Rohit Mahajan

Tribune News Service

Kolkata, November 20

Just the other day, MS Dhoni said he still cherishes the memory of the chants of Vande Mataram coming from the crowd at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai in 2011, when he took the team to victory in the World Cup final. Dhoni is a no-nonsense, unsentimental sort of guy. He’s keenly interested in military hardware and strategising but doesn’t wear nationalism on his sleeve. But clearly, even for such a man, it’s impossible to remain unaffected by the collective nationalistic emotion of a full stadium.

Over the last three days here, every now and then, there were chants of Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata Ki Jai from sections of the crowd. These chants were not celebratory, they were stray and exhortative because India were lagging behind and trying to play catch-up with Sri Lanka.

We asked a couple of chanters of Vande Mataram if they knew the full poem, part of the novel Anandamath, written by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. Surprisingly, they seemed to know — at least several lines. “I’ve read the novel, and I know the poem,” said Biswadeep Haldar, a university student. Vande Mataram, he said, also gained greater significance for Bengalis because none other than the most revered son of Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore, sang it during an Indian National Congress session some 120 years ago. 

But is Haldar aware that Tagore was a great critic of ‘nationalism’ and would probably have been very unimpressed with chants of Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata Ki Jai at a sporting contest?  “Oh, it’s not really nationalism,” he said sheepishly of his chanting. “Here these are just slogans to shout.”

Sound crowd

Virat Kohli cupped his ear, urging the crowd to make a proper loud noise which he could hear. They responded. Their shouts were lusty and raised quite a din, but Kohli would have wanted more noise. A proper Eden Gardens crowd of the old could have woken up Job Charnock — called the founder of Kolkata before the Calcutta High Court stripped him of this title in 2003 — whose mausoleum is just a stone’s throw away from the ground. 

Kohli was trying to rouse the crowd as the Sri Lankans grimly fought to save the match. The captain likes to get the crowd involved, to add to the pressure on the batsmen. He’s been doing this at most of the Indian grounds, and everywhere he gets the decibels going bonkers. The Eden crowd tried its best today, but sadly, it seems that this ground’s past vocal glory is never going to return. “Well, I think it would be very noisy if Pakistan were playing India here,” said an elderly, lone spectator who first watched a match here in 1956.