'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?'. In cricket's literature, this paraphrase of Rudyard Kipling is perhaps the most famous challenge posed by the Trinidad historian C.L.R. James in his 'Beyond a Boundary' (1963), often considered the best book on cricket ever written. James uses this challenge as the basis for describing cricket in the historical and social context and the way it shaped his understanding of the issues of class and race. Gideon Haigh, the Australian cricket writer and one of the finest scholars of the game, sees decided parallels in Ramchandra Guha's writing on cricket with the great Trinidadian's: "For the most part, cricket writing remains firmly in the cliché factory, a wholly owned subsidiary of the sporting-industrial complex. Only occasionally is one reminded of C.L.R. James' injunction - such as while reading almost anything by Ramchandra Guha".
Guha's latest book on cricket quite vindicates the sentiments of Gideon Haigh. It's primarily the author's coming-of-the-age story in his beloved game of cricket. Guha's lifelong love affair with 'the most subtle and sophisticated game known to mankind' began in the Himalayan foothills of Dehradun where he was born and raised. His cricket loving father was a scientist at the local Forest Research Institute and Guha learnt the basics of the game watching and playing cricket in the beautiful sporting fields of Dehradun, more particularly at the cricket grounds of the Survey of India and the Indian Military Academy. The author further honed his cricketing skills (though a handy off-spinner, he batted mostly as tail-ender and fielded pathetically!) at Doon School, Dehradun's most famous institution.
Guha's bonding with the game reached its climax when he joined St Stephen's College in 1974. The college's cricket ground was situated at Mori Gate, about a mile and half away from its campus in north Delhi. He became a regular there, practiced and became friends with senior college cricketers like Arun Lal and Kirti Azad, and went on to play for the St Stephen's team - especially in their regulation finals with arch-rivals Hindu College. The author's five years stay in St Stephen's expanded his knowledge of cricket, and of cricket literature. It was here that Guha first heard of cricket's finest writers like Ray Robinson, Jack Fingleton, E.W. Swanton and Sujit Mukherjee and read their seminal works in the college library which boasted of a fine collection of books on cricket.
Ram Guha's wistful account of growing up in cricket and his idolizing of the Ranji and Test cricketers of the early 1970s would remind the reader of the delectable book by Sujit Mukherjee titled Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer (1996). Mukherjee briefly played for Bihar in Ranji Trophy in the 1960s and later worked as professor of English literature in Patna University. He wrote several critically acclaimed books on cricket but his charming autobiographical account of his growing up as a cricket obsessed boy - at St Xavier's High School, Science College and across many other grounds, back-gardens and by-lanes in Patna - seems to have inspired his acolyte Ramchandra Guha to pen his own cricket memories.
The palpable imprint of C.L.R. James's writing, however, becomes apparent when Guha describes the impact of Sachin Tendulkar's cricket on Indian society. Tendulkar played his initial years in Test cricket amidst rising social and political conflict in the country.
The reviewer is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading.
To be continued ...