Caste clashes had hugely cropped up after the Mandal Commission Report. Inequality had risen alarmingly and there was joblessness all around. Insurgency in Kashmir was at its peak. The social tensions were accompanied by political instability and during 1989-1998 the country had seven different prime ministers. "It was in this atmosphere of hate, suspicion, and fear and violence that Sachin Tendulkar scored his first hundreds in international cricket. The skill and versatility of his batsmanship made millions of Indians temporarily forget their everyday insecurities and come together to cheer their new hero", Guha writes.
The author further points out that in terms of skill and social impact there have been only three other cricketers in the history of the game who can be compared with Tendulkar - Dr W. G. Grace, Donald Bradman and Garfield Sobers. Guha then quotes C.L.R. James who had slammed British historian G.M. Trevelyan for not taking into account the role of W.G. Grace while writing his best-selling book on six centuries of English social history from Chaucer to Queen Victoria: "A famous Liberal historian (G.M. Trevelyan) can write the social history of England, and two famous socialists (Raymond Postgate and G.D.H. Cole) can write the history of the common people of England, and between them never once mention the man who was the best-known Englishman of his time. I can no longer accept the system of values which could not find in these books a place for W.G. Grace".
Guha's portrayal of the cricketers he idolized and admired (Gundappa Vishwanath, Erapalli Prasanna, Bishan Bedi, Kirmani, Ken Barrington, Garfield Sobers, Alan Knott,
Clive Lloyd, Shane Warne, Wasim Akram et al) have been done in a sublime manner. These portrayals have also been interspersed with certain delightful anecdotes, quite enhancing their appeal. The author has further described in detail the way he was made a member of the Committee of Administrators by the Supreme Court in 2017 to run the BCCI for an interim period, the way he unsuccessfully tried pushing his agenda for reforms in Indian cricket, and the way he was forced to call it quits hardly four months into the job of the 'accidental administrator'.
Ramchandra Guha has authored four excellent books and edited an outstanding anthology on cricket. The Commonwealth of Cricket, his latest, is the spontaneous outpouring of the heart's content of a cricket crazy writer - from boyhood to his present avatar of a historian and anti-establishment public intellectual. The book, therefore, is less scholarly than Guha's previous books on cricket. It's an absolutely riveting read, nonetheless.
The reviewer is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading.