The following essay tries to touch upon the varied aspects of sporting ethos of Colonial Bengal. South Asian sports history will be enriched to a great extent if these microcosmic aspects get some attention within the broader fields of social and intellectual history.
PART II
SANKARI PRASAD BABU: THE PIONEER OF CRICKET JOURNALISM IN BENGALI
BY
SOUVIK NAHA
Sankari Prasad Basu is better known for
his books on the history of religion and religious institutions in colonial
Bengal. But before he achieved fame as an authority on Sri Ramakrishna, Swami
Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita, he used to be the finest
writer on cricket in Bengali. Basu can be described in the same vein as John
Arlott evaluated Neville Cardus– as ‘the first writer to evoke cricket; to
create a mythology out of the folk hero players; essentially to put the
feelings of ordinary cricket watchers into words’.[1] Basu
joined Shibpur Dinabandhu College as a lecturer in Bengali literature in 1953 and soon started coaching the college cricket team.[2]
His next workplace was the University of Calcutta, where he taught
‘Radhatattva, Krishnatattva, Sakhitattva’ to graduate students at the same time
as writing on ‘Bradman, Larwood, Hall, Ramakant Desai, Subhas Gupte’ in the AnandabazarPatrika, the leading Bengali
daily of the time.[3]
Primarily
he wrote reflexive reports on experience of spectators during Test matches in
Kolkata.The reports were later anthologised into books which additionally
contained personality sketches, fictional accounts and often translation of
stories from world cricket too. He published a total of seven books between
1960 and 1975. As a matter of fact, the first six came out within eight years. while the last one was published not in a book format but as an addenda to complete the
two-volume omnibus of his cricket writings. Incidentally, Neville Cardus died
in the same year. He has written a single small piece ever since, a pithy
critique of commercialization in cricket, which was published in Desh, a subsidiary fortnightly
literature magazine owned by the Anandabazar
group in the special issue commemorating the 1996 World Cup. Recollecting the
experience of reading him for the first time, Prasenjit Bandyopadhyay wrote:
Bengalis did
appreciate cricket as the entertainment of civilised, educated people. But
numerous cricket-loving kids like me, who could not visit the cricket ground at
will, had to satisfy the craving by listening to radio commentary. There was no
television. We received live news of cricket matches through Ajayda, Kamalda’s commentary the same way as the blind Dhritarashtra of the Mahabharata was updated of the
Kurukshetra war by Sanjay. This was not enough. We earnestly waited for the
morning newspaper, and finished reading the sports page breathlessly as soon as
it arrived… But this was not a mere journalist! The style of writing too was
beyond what regular journalists were capable of. This was a new direction. This
was the first time we realized that cricket could be literature.[4]
Basu was very much aware of cricket’s
literary tradition. In the introduction to Romoniyo
Cricket, he wrote that ‘the best innings played in the long and glorious
history of cricket has not come off the bat, but off a pen’. This indeed evokes
the poem by E.V. Lucas, ‘More mighty than the bat, the pen’.[5]
He was
influenced by the likes of Neville Cardus, Andrew Lang, Edmund Blunden,
referred to their writings in his pieces and often translated their phrases
directly; within or without quotation marks. He wanted to organize and make his readers realize cricket as an aesthetic exercise.[6]
Quite often he reminded his readers that ‘cricket is not a game, it symbolizes
respectable behaviour.’[7] He
realized that cricket literature had to engage with the society in order to be
representative of the sport and life in general, since he believed that:
Cricket is a great game because of the
literature written on it. Literature develops out of life. If cricket has
indeed inspired the greatest corpus of sport literature, it is only because
cricket resonates with vivacity like no other sport… Had life been a sport, it
would be cricket.[8]
Basu created several sketches which are
significant not because of the element of wit, but due to the inlaid social
history. For instance, the person who gifted him a ticket to watch the Test
match against Australia in 1960 had apparently warned Basu that no one should
know about this ticket; else he could be murdered for possessing what the rest
of the city craved fanatically.[9] This was
indeed a commentary against the increasing crime rate in the city, committed
mostly by the vast number of moderately educated but unemployed youth. Then, as
the captains went out for the toss, the gallery apparently promised votive to
the god in exchange for the outcome being decided in India’s favor.[10] He
returns to the theme of Indian fatalism many times over. The shortage in urban
space caused by unregulated influx and settlement of refugees was imaginatively
cast in the altercation among seven spectators over seating space. One of them
considered it physically impossible, but the others maintained that the problem
could be solved spiritually, by willingness to share.[11]
Implied in the story was an ad-hoc solution to the problem of habitation in the
city– by shared empathy. When Ramakant Desai hit Ken Mackay on the chest, the
gallery erupted in jubilation, in which Basu read a rejection of India’s
pacifist policy in world politics.[12]
It was a reference to the contemporary rebellious fervour against inefficient
administrative institutions. The contemporary conflict of values made recurring
appearances throughout his writings in the form of discussions over good versus bad, amateurism versus professionalism, style versus efficiency in matters of
cricket-playing.
Another aspect of Basu’s writings was the ascription of the debates on the style of play to a broader cultural and economic context much like Cardus who had lamented in the wake of the Second World War that ‘it was an age of some disillusionment and cynicism; the romantic gesture was distrusted. “Safety First” was the persistent warning. We saw at once on the cricket field the effect of a dismal philosophy and a debilitated state of national health. Beautiful and brave stroke-play gave way to a sort of trench warfare, conducted behind the sandbag of broad pads.’[13] On a similar note, Basu questioned defensive approaches of teams which paralyzed the game and jeopardized its aesthetic properties.
He closely watched and commented on spectators in his columns. He recognized that a Test match was an event around which a collective history was formed by public participation, though he was uncertain if the spectators themselves were aware of their agency in making history.[14] At another place, he mentioned that the act of watching together make spectators' characters in the history.[15] The famous statement by Cardus that the playing style of a national team revealed the national character was, however, contradicted in Basu’s writings. Bengalis were characterized in the colonial discourses on popular anthropology as weak and cunning. Since spin bowlers were supposed to personify such traits, Bengal should have produced them in bulk. Instead, any Bengali bowler of reputation was a medium fast bowler. Basu remarks that since spin bowling could be compared to an amalgamation of lyric and short story and Bengali authors had excelled in both these literary genres, it was surprising that Bengalis never mastered slow bowling.[16] Montu Banerjee was described as not possessing much speed but was crafty and accurate, which Basu found to be an embodiment of national if not; provincial habit.
Basu’s sudden shift to writing on religion at the height of fame appears all too abrupt, though not unusual if we consider that he taught medieval literature at the university, whose spiritual theme was hardly harmonious with his world of cricket. His readers interpreted this shift variously. Prasenjit Bandyopadhyay felt that he withdrew from cricket as the cricketers became slave to money and less inclined to play their hearts out, thereby making the sport’s traditions; a mockery. He also surmised that Basu suspected that modern readers lacked the intellectual depth to understand cricket.[17]
According to Nurul Anwar, his retirement was a protest against the eclipse of cricket by cheap forms of pleasure and its later engulfment by the rising tide of commercialism.[18] However, in an interview, Basu revealed that though he was obsessed with cricket in the early 1960s, to the extent that nothing else appealed to him for a while, after publishing several books he felt the need to move on. It took a lot of mental conviction for him to abandon his first love. But his personality as a serious professor and the hard core research on religion that he had just begun had clashed with his other self that indulged in humor writing. So he was compelled to prioritize what he did for a living.[19] He stopped writing on cricket now that academic works consumed too much of his time. But his reputation as a scholar of religion has not outweighed his popularity as a cricket writer.
The discourses circulated by Basu were at best derivative, but expressed with remarkable finesse in a highly accessible language. Notes by his readers testify to the extent of his success. Shankar, a famous Bengali author, who himself has written on Swami Vivekananda, considers the humorous pieces on cricket to be the best among Basu’s creations. Not deprecating Basu’s academic works as less impressive, he contends that while the works on Vivekananda could be compared to offerings of a devoted student to the goddess of learning, the cricket writings rendered prosaic realities as absolute delight, and were hence considerably more significant to the society.[20] Evidently, through his writings, Basu established the cricket lover as a Homo Aestheticus, who approached cricket not as dispensable luxury, but something absolutely essential for survival.[21] He envisaged cricket as a holistic expression of life. That his project was evidently a success can be seen from Jyotirmoy Ghosh’s eulogy:
You were the first author to realize, and
practice, the truth that sport and life, in essence, embody one another. You
taught us that one ought to play ‘cricket’ in the fields of education and
culture – meaning that instead of surrendering to a principled, disciplined,
honest, but tedious pedagogy, one ought to embrace those qualities with a
buoyant attitude. In short, the message implicit in your cricket literature and
philosophy, as I understand, is an appeal to regard sentience as one with sport
as it is with human life.[22]
Footnotes:
Souvik Naha is a doctoral student at ETH Zurich and Reviews Editor for the journal Soccer & Society. His thesis explores the intersections of cricket and public discourses of leisure in independent India. His research has been published in various journals and edited volumes.
[1] Christopher Brookes, His
Own Man: The Life of Neville Cardus,
London: Methuen, 1985, p. 6.
[2]SushantoChattapadhyay,
‘Shraddhashpadeshu’, p. 67.
[3] Rabindranath
Bandopadhyay, ‘Amar Mastermoshai’, p. 40.
[4]PrasenjitBandyopadhyay,
‘Sankari Prasad ThekeSankarida’, p.
96.
[5] E.V. Lucas, Cricket All His Life: The Cricket Writings
of E.V. Lucas,London: Pavilion Library, 1989, p. 219.
[6]Ramaniya Cricket, p. 119.
[7]Ramaniya Cricket, p. 138.
[8]Ramaniya Cricket, pp.
125-126.
[9]Eden-e ShiterDupur, p. 69.
[10]Eden-e ShiterDupur, p. 72.
[11]Eden-e ShiterDupur, p. 73.
[12]Eden-e ShiterDupur, p. 96.
[13] Neville Cardus, English
Cricket, 81.
[14]Eden-e ShiterDupur, p. 80.
[15]Not Out, p. 172.
[16]Eden-e ShiterDupur, p. 27.
[17]PrasenjitBandyopadhyay,
‘Sankari Prasad ThekeSankarida’, p.
99.
[18]Nurul
Anwar, ‘Sankari Prasad Basu’r Cricket Sahitya’, pp. 258-59.
[19]SujataRaha,
‘Sakkhatkar’, pp. 182-83.
[20]Shankar,
‘Sankarida’, p. 6.
[21]Ellen
Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus, New
York: Free Press, 1992.
[22]Jyotirmoy
Ghosh, ‘TarunEk Not Out Obhijatri’, p. 31.
Author's Bio- Note:
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