History, memoir, tour trivia

The first is the lot written by cricketers themselves, putting down cherry and willow and taking up the pen, or more likely, the dictaphone. These tend mostly to be autobiographies, and are mostly ghosted. Their literary merit is often minimal—rare is the cricketer who, like Navjot Sidhu, prefers a book to a beer, and look what he’s done to the language—but at their best, they successfully evoke the hothouse atmosphere and complex dynamics of a team sport played over five days as only those with personal experience can. Think of Steve Waugh’s massive, but very readable autobiography, Out of My Comfort Zone, published last year, or Mike Brearley’s Phoenix from the Ashes, the England captain’s riveting account of the great Ashes series of 1981. Sunil Gavaskar’s Sunny Days—which he wrote himself, painstakingly, in longhand—still remains perhaps the best Indian example of this kind of cricket book. Kapil Dev, on the other hand, is a ghostwriter’s dream, having produced, at judicious intervals and with different publishers, three autobiographies. A new one may be in the shops even as you read this.

The second set of cricket books is that written by professional cricket writers. These are the widest in range—histories, biographies, tour books—and also the greatest in number: In England, cricket publishing is a small industry. But again, the number of truly good books by Indian cricket writers is depressingly few. The first one I can remember reading is Harsha Bhogle’s biography of Mohammad Azharuddin, now a fallen hero, but a magician in his prime. A recent book which went straight to the top of the class is Pundits From Pakistan, Rahul Bhattacharya’s fizzing account of India’s landmark tour of Pakistan in 2004.

The third set, often distinct in style, tone and emphasis from the second, is that written by men of letters who also happen to love cricket and have kept an eye upon it all their working lives. The West Indian intellectual C.L.R. James’ classic, Beyond The Boundary (1963), mixing politics, history and sociology with cricket, is universally reckoned one of the best cricket books ever written. P.G. Wodehouse wrote some superbly funny cricket (and golf) stories, and Alan Ross, long-time editor of London magazine, wrote a fine biography of Ranji. In this one area, Indian cricket writing, too, has been well-served. Three books stand out.

The poet, Dom Moraes (1938-2006), was also a writer of thrilling prose and during his lifetime, he wrote books on subjects as disparate as Indira Gandhi, Madhya Pradesh and, memorably, Sunil Gavaskar. Merely a few words from the preface of Sunil Gavaskar (Macmillan, 1987)—in which Moraes summons up a picture of Gavaskar’s “rolling walk, the floppy white hat, the elephant hair bracelet and the golden necklet" and recalls his drive off the front foot, “body in balance, the long blade drilling the ball to left and right of cover or straight in course as a moonrocket to the boundary"—are evidence enough that Moraes could do for cricketing prose what Gavaskar did for batsmanship.

Moraes walks along the lanes of Chikalwadi in Dadar, where Gavaskar played in his boyhood, and speaks not only to his subject, but also his family and friends. The result is a rounded portrait of not just Gavaskar the cricketer, a master technician who could also explode in attack, but also Gavaskar the man, “a curious mixture of tolerance and touchiness".

“No cricket one has watched or read about can ultimately be as memorable as the cricket one has played oneself, no matter at what level." This is the assertion—which anyone who has ever played competitive cricket of any kind knows to be true—made by Sujit Mukherjee (1930-2003) in his Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer (Ravi Dayal, 1996).

Mukherjee, a professor of English and a publisher, played intermittently for Bihar in the Ranji Trophy during the 1950s. In his luminous account, told in graceful and understated prose, Patna becomes the unlikely centre of the cricketing universe, and the joys and travails of the school, college and club cricket scene—travelling long distances in third-class train compartments, sharing out precious Gunn & Moore cricket bats—take on a warming significance. Reading it, I was taken back to the 28 not out I once made in Class 7 during a run-chase on a hot afternoon to win the match for my side—but we’ll leave that story for another day.

And most enjoyable of all, standing tall in the Playing XI of the best cricket books ever written, is historian Ramachandra Guha’s States of Indian Cricket (Permanent Black, 2005). This brings together in updated form two books Guha wrote in the early 1990s: Wickets in the East, which makes up imaginary all-time elevens of the great Indian state sides, retailing superb anecdotes passed down over the decades, and Spin and Other Turns, a set of dazzling essays about the cricketers—Gavaskar, Gundappa Viswanath, Kapil Dev, Bishan Bedi—responsible for Indian cricket’s coming-of-age in the 1970s.

Like the Australian Gideon Haigh, Guha is, in many ways, the ideal cricket writer. In these books, there is an enthusiast’s penchant for reminiscence, generating some dramatic opening lines (“In 1966 I made what turned out to be an incredibly shrewd decision for an eight-year-old"); a historian’s feel for provocative generalization (“Cricket chauvinism runs across two axes, those of nation and generation"); a scholar’s love of ordered argument leavened by trivia (the home of the Maharashtra stalwart D.B. Deodhar “lay on a lane named after himself—surely a unique honour for a cricketer"; the young Bishan Bedi possessed at one time “a collection of 10,000 marbles, won from all the other little boys in Amritsar"); and a great cricket writer’s eye for points of style and technique, as in the masterly discussion of the art of Bedi and Gavaskar.

Guha has produced another great cricket book, the magisterial A Corner of a Foreign Field, but States of Indian Cricket is arguably the more entertaining work. Search out these books and read them one a week, and you’ll have made it all the way to the World Cup.

Three titles that cut through the clutter of cricket books

Pundits From Pakistan

Rahul Bhattacharya (Picador, 2005)

That Bhattacharya is the best cricket writer of his generation was confirmed by this, a heady and delightful account of India’s tour of Pakistan in 2004. The reader will find here finely detailed accounts of the games—Virender Sehwag’s triple-hundred at Multan has never been better described—braided in with plenty of colloquial talk with old-time stars and moments of skittering comedy.

Not to be missed.

Azhar

Harsha Bhogle (Penguin/Viking, 1994)

“There can be few things more beautiful in life than Mohammad Azharuddin in flight," wrote Azhar’s fellow Hyderabadi, Harsha Bhogle, at the beginning of this book, written some years before the subject’s fall from grace for match-fixing. No trace of that ignominious story can be found here, but Azhar’s quicksilver feet and wizard touch—no one has ever made a simple dab for a single look so attractive—are memorialized in this

Excellent biography.

Swami and Friends

R.K. Narayan (Hamish Hamilton, 1935)

R.K. Narayan’s first novel remains as fresh as ever. It tells of the capers of a group of schoolboys from sleepy Malgudi (this fictional town was to become his standard setting), seeking to emulate the great MCC with a cricket club of their own. ‘Swami and Friends’emits excitement about cricket, tinged with a slight contemporary unease with colonial pastimes—the doubting Swami, we are told, was “familiar with Hobbs, Bradman and Duleep", but he had “not thought of cricket as something that he himself had to play."

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