Cricket win stirs Indian
renaissance By Sreeram Chaulia
A quarter of the way through India's
initially nervy run chase against Sri Lanka in the
final of the cricket World Cup on Saturday at
Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium, television cameras
zoomed in on a puzzling sight. Indian captain
Mahendra Singh Dhoni was sitting in the players'
pavilion, flashing a smile. To be smiling at such
a tense moment, when it looked like his team was
falling apart with two senior star batsmen
dismissed, seemed absurd.
Was the captain
smiling with resignation that the hopes of a
billion Indians of winning the game's biggest
prize for a second time - would be dashed? Was it
bravado? Was it belief in his abilities to craft a
comeback?
The answer came as Dhoni walked
out into the center of the
cricketing world's attention.
From the moment he took the batting crease,
despite the formidable Sri Lankan score his team
had to reach, his body language said it all.
His superlative, tournament-winning knock
of 91 runs was audacious, power-packed and devoid
of doubt and anxiety. After smashing a hapless Sri
Lankan bowling attack all over the park and
delivering the final coup de grace - a massive six
to win - the poker-faced Dhoni hardly reacted even
as every village, town and city in India was
erupting in a frenzy of fireworks and
celebrations. Emotions did overrun the Indian
team and their diehard fans in the ensuing hours,
but what stood out was the calm, collected,
methodical and courageous leader who had fought
against the odds with a sense of mission. Indians
of all class, religion and caste saw a loss being
converted into a win through the
easier-said-than-achieved mantra: "do not give
up." The psychological boost is going to linger,
as will dramatic memories from the final.
The self-confidence that Dhoni and his
teammates have shown in a gruelling 41-day World
Cup tournament featuring 14 countries is, in many
ways, a reflection of the "India rising" story.
The belief that India deserves recognition as an
important global player has grown apace alongside
its gross domestic product rate over the past
decade. Despite being a post-colonial society
plagued with the typical ills of bad governance,
institutional failures and iniquities, if there
was a barometer of India's optimism it has lately
been recording a steady uptick.
This
"feel-good" sentiment despite daily frustrations
has not been limited to the privileged elite, but
has percolated deeper and driven a generally
observable quest for self-improvement and material
gain. Travels into India's poorest villages and
most unhygienic urban slums show a strange
resilience and collective will to not just survive
but to rise out of misery and script a more
hopeful future.
While the match was
watched by an estimated 1.2 billion people across
the world, it was the masses of India who took to
the streets as the national team snatched victory
from defeat's jaws. The slumdogs felt that they
had arrived.
It is facile to dismiss the
nationalistic pride of World Cup revellers across
the length and breadth of India as a
media-manufactured false consciousness or as an
opiate that diverts the toiling masses from
real-life miseries. The alternative perspective is
to view milestones in popular sport as a cathartic
force that ushers in feelings of renaissance and
deepens the grittiness of an upwardly mobile
society at a specific historical juncture in the
linear schema of modernization.
American
economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron argued
in 1962 that countries emerging from "economic
backwardness" needed ideologies that favored
change to push older vested interest groups out of
their saddles and build new clusters of power. In
his simplified but fascinating correlation, the
more "virulent" the ideology favoring
socio-economic and political transformation, the
faster the rate at which a "backward" society
could catch up with advanced economies.
The changed, egalitarian social
composition of the present Indian cricket team in
recent years (Dhoni leads a team of superstars who
have lower middle-class origins) is a microcosm of
the shattering of the aristocratic hold on what
used to be a quintessential colonial-style sport.
The infectiousness of the success of the
team on the field is rubbing off across the
landscape of struggle in every pathway of life in
India. Historian Boria Majumdar has shown in his
classic, Twenty Two Yards to Freedom, how
cricket has been a means to cross class barriers
and to anticipate a democratization of Indian
polity. These trends have now picked up an
unstoppable momentum after India's second World
Cup triumph in 28 years.
Caribbean-Marxist
intellectual CLR James argued in 1963 that cricket
in the West Indies was a bitter legacy of British
colonial implantation but also an instrument of
resistance against it. The centrality of cricket
in social transformation and racial justice in
Trinidad and Tobago was captured in James' book,
Beyond a Boundary, which demonstrated that
defeatism or pessimism that spread cancerously in
societies pummeled by exploitation for centuries
can be washed away through upward fortunes of the
nation's cricket team.
The achievements of
India's current cricket teams in longer and
shorter formats are stupendous - the World Cup's
one-day matches comprise 50 overs - each over is
six balls bowled by one bowler - while Test
matches last days. But their external impact on
the Indian psyche will be earth-shaking. Spain
needed the soccer World Cup victory last year very
badly to boost national morale after its economy
sank into a painful meltdown.
India was in
far less desperate straits compared to Spain on
the eve of its cricket team's miraculous and
defiant date with history on Saturday. But the
drive to win and to expand the realm of
possibility has redoubled as a result of this
victory.
Eleven steely men in blue outfits
have produced everlasting memories that will
fast-forward change and lift India's spirit as it
lurches towards its place under the sun.
Sreeram Chaulia is Vice Dean of
the Jindal School of International Affairs in
Sonipat, India, and the author of the forthcoming
book, International Organizations and Civilian
Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in
Conflict Zones (IB Tauris).
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