It’s been a long time since I’ve had such an enjoyable evening listening to speakers. The Sanmar Group was celebrating the Golden Jubilee of its association with the Jolly Rovers Cricket Club, quite possibly the longest such connection in the country, and it did it in style with social historian and cricket buff Ramachandra Guha as one speaker and Kapil Dev, the former Indian captain, as the other. Guha, as usual, was loud, enthusiastic, passionate, dramatic and full of anecdotes to illustrate his ‘Five Forms of Partisanship’ when it came to his love for cricket. Kapil was an almost perfect counter-point, measured in his English, calm of manner, rustic in his humour, often at his own expense, anecdotal in his approach and clearly able to think on his feet. While expressing his views on Guha’s five forms of partisanship, he brought the house down and made the evening.
Loyalty to Club, Friends’ Cricket Club in Bangalore, Guha’s first love; loyalty to a State, Karnataka rather than the Tamil Nadu of his forebears; Test cricket to a partial exclusion of the one-day game and a total exclusion of T20; greater admiration for bowlers than batsmen; and a stronger preference for cricketers of his generation than those of later generations were the five forms of partisanship Guha expounded on.
Kapil had much to say in his English that today does not sound anything like that of non-English speaking persons, which made up a large part of the young cricketing crowd that evening. He recalled the Selectors wondering whether a non-English speaking person should be a chosen to lead India (he was the first to do so). He remembered slowly picking up English but having problems with an Aussie cricketer’s enquiry whether he had “arrived todie” (“To play not to die”, he had responded) and a West Indian reporter asking “Wasuppeninmon”, only to discover he was being asked “What’s happening, man?” And to Guha’s statement that he was always smiling on the field, even when he ran in yards to catch Vivian Richards and virtually at that point win India the World Cup, Kapil candidly recalled that far from smiling, he was mentally focussed only on the ball; for his perpetual smile he could thank his buckteeth!
And, he gently pointed out that teams needed both bowlers and batsmen and neither was more important than the other. As for T-20, every form of cricket has different skills and you need to admire those skills in a player and judge the game by those skills; they were just different skills.
As a listener, there were two questions I would have liked to have asked. When Guha said that Karnataka more often than not beat Tamil Nadu, had he forgotten that first Ranji Trophy match when Madras beat Mysore in just one day, the first day of a three-day match? And again, could he truly claim he was happier watching Prasanna and Chandrasekhar than Viswanath and Dravid?
What’s happening in Tranquebar?
Referring to my piece on Tranquebar in this column on July 17, Poul Petersen writes from Tranquebar that he and four other Danes in 2002 started the Danish Tranquebar Association “to do something to our former Danish Trade Station on the Coromandel Coast … an important part of our history”. Petersen goes on to write, and I quote verbatim, lest I misinterpret anything, the relevant portions:
“In February we opened the former governors Bungalow for the public with the fine historical exhibition from the Danish national museum… daily during two month we received visitors in the house and we talked to people and also to representatives from touristy ministry and department of archaeology. One day a man from tourist ministry came and after inspecting the building he asked me. “and what are you going to use the building for ?? “ funny, he asked me as a foreigner .. and suddenly it stroke me…. The Indians has never taken ownership to the building… We got permission from The Tamil government to start renovation and after that the Tamil government fulfilled the project.
“Now, 14 years after the Tamil Government has finished renovation project number 2 and they plan to make it a fine historical museum — a museum both people from Tamil Nadu, guests from all India and guests from abroad can be proud of… Suddenly it stroke me ‘now the Indians have taken ownership to that building’, they have taken ownership to the Fort Dansborg and that is the point… it takes time to take ownership to a building.. this has never happened to the Governors bungalow.. It has been fine restored 6 years ago, but what are we going to use it for? The Danes had some plans, the tourist ministry had some plans, the dep. Of archaeology had some plans….. but no one had taken ownership to the building. No one felt the important of running this building and give it a purpose. So,,, the learning process in this must be. First we have to say to our self ‘what are we going to use the building for?’ and then we can restore. Restoring a building without having a purpose is crazy.
“The Danish Tranquebar association has now leased the former Danish commanders house with the aims to restore the building.. not only to restore the building, but from the beginning during the restoration work inside the building make it to a Danish/Indian cultural center. A Center for history and education… a cultural center we can be proud of, both Danes and Indians…. in January 2017 we start to move our two activities into the building namely the Royal Danish Library and Tranquebar Maritime Museum… from the beginning we hope that the locals, the inhabitants of Tharangambadi will be proud of this center and after a short time to take ownership to the ‘Danish/Indian Cultural Center in Tranquebar’ — Poul Petersen, President of the Danish Tranquebar Association.”
All this is very confusing to me. About 10 years ago, Tamil Nadu’s Tourism Department, INTACH Tamil Nadu (when there was no other INTACH chapter in the State) and the Danish Museum drew up plans to restore the Governor’s Bungalow and make it an Indo-Danish Study Centre and Museum. Restoration was done, but whatever happened to the plans for utilisation? Petersen’s letter, if I understand it right, tells a rather different story. Perhaps, Tamil Nadu Tourism and INTACH Tamil Nadu will clear the air and tell us how an Association, which had never figured in the tripartite discussions, suddenly organised an exhibition at the Governor’s Bungalow. With whose permission?
Meanwhile, judging by Petersen’s letters to me (three so far), he does not seem to consider the German contribution to Tranquebar as part of Danish history, despite the fact that the Halle missionaries were sent out by the King of Denmark.
A slip of the keys
A typist’s devil last week dropped the word ‘Vice’ and made Radhakrishnan President before his time. He was Vice President at the time my picture of last week was taken.
