We shall know more what men want and what they live by when we begin from what they do.
— C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary
Paeans have been written about India’s Test win at the Gabba, Brisbane, and will continue to be written. Encomiums are also pouring in about the “New India” in cricket, an extension of the “New India” that has apparently been already crafted in the political-economic sphere.
In modern sport, sporting performance and national identity are inextricably intertwined. There is, therefore, a tendency to miss the many moments that escape this reduction of a great sporting moment to a mere accoutrement of a narrow nationalism, miss the moments that show us possibilities of human solidarity that go beyond ethnic and national borders.
We saw this happen after Gabba, when we missed the rapturous celebration of India’s win in Pakistan, where the cricket laity, television anchors as well as luminaries of the game like Wasim Akram, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Shoaib Akhtar and Shahid Afridi cheered India’s win.
Indo-Pak relations are at a dangerous nadir. It has been 13 years since a bilateral Test series took place between the two countries. Yet, that did not prevent a Pakistan television journalist from declaring that “today I have become a maniacal fan of Indian cricket,” or Pakistani fans from indulging in national self-flagellation and mocking the thought of even comparing Pakistan to India in cricket, or Pakistanis from mobilising larger identities like that of an Asian team beating Australia. Significantly, contrary to the emphatic assertion of a new [aggressive] India, it was actually the virtues of an “old India” that saw the win at Gabba resonating beyond its borders.
Not only is modern sport fused with nationalism, the nationalism is often expressed in ugly, jingoistic ways. Sports scholarship has shown professional sport relies on military rhetoric and stands in for military confrontations between nations. It is indeed “war minus the shooting” as George Orwell once said. This was unfortunately on display when the Indian men’s cricket team wore military caps after the Pulwama terrorist attack, the first time such a display was made on a sporting field. Then there is an active conflation of the figure of the soldier and the sportsperson through acts like an M.S. Dhoni serving in the Territorial Army and even missing international matches for it.
Following 9/11, there was an orgy of jingoistic displays in American sporting arenas, demonstrating the effects of what some writers termed “American military-industrialisation-sports-entertainment complex.” Similarly, football fandom in England has seen racism and xenophobia and a harking back to victories in World War II when it took on opponents like Germany.
Active conflation
Thus, unsurprisingly, a Virender Sehwag, with millions of followers on social media, chose to celebrate the Gabba win with the words: “This is the new India. Ghar mein ghuskar maarta hain .” It referred to the militaristic rhetoric used after the Balakot strikes, gloating about how the army had “entered the enemy home to kill”. When India beat Pakistan in the 2019 World Cup, the home minister termed it “another strike on Pakistan.” In 1978, the Pakistani captain described the Test series win against India in religious terms, as a “victory of Muslims all over the world over the Hindus.”
This atmosphere of militarised hyper-nationalism submerges not just alternative imaginations of sport but also actual histories which have shown different possibilities. Thus, the 1999 Chepauk ovation for a Pakistan team against whom India narrowly lost; the grand welcome the Indian team received in Pakistan in 2004; or the fact that India’s Rohan Bopanna and Pakistan’s Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi played together to reach the US Open doubles final in 2010 — all remain footnotes to an unread history.
This manufactured amnesia caused surprised Indian reactions to the Pakistani ecstasy over India’s recent win. Said one: “I cannot believe people in Pakistan are so supportive of us.” Another wondered: “When there is so much love and respect between both the countries, why do we have so many animosities?”
Endearing facelessness
The Australian Test series showed that extraordinary sporting feats can be achieved without necessarily adopting boorish or intimidatory tactics or psychological warfare on the field, the mantras of commercialised, hyper-nationalistic sporting spectacles. It also showed that great leaders do not have to thump their chests to lead. Ajinkya Rahane’s refusal to cut a celebration cake in the shape of a kangaroo only reinforced the point.
As Pakistani cricket writer Osman Samiuddin brilliantly notes, it was the “facelessness” of Rahane’s team that was endearing, in contrast to the team seen through the prism of the larger-than-life image of a Virat Kohli: “A bristling presence, bathing each situation in its own tensile force until it breaks and gives way, most times in some burst of genius but also sometimes in moments of crude chauvinism and confrontation.”
Sport can become a vehicle for solidarity and tolerance or hatred and intolerance. But a Nelson Mandela using sport to unite a divided country; an American athlete holding an Iranian flag in Tehran; or North and South Korea fielding a joint sports team have been rare moments. In fact, that icon of supposedly global, cosmopolitan and capitalist values, the IPL, has banned Pakistani players.
Trinidadian scholar and activist C.L.R. James argues in his seminal work on cricket, Beyond a Boundary , that cricket can only be understood if we go outside it and make sense of its myriad interconnections with politics, culture and society. The Pakistani celebration of the great Indian win at Gabba shows that beneath state borders and state-enforced embargoes on sporting engagements, there simmer other imaginations and futures of solidarity.
The writer is with Dalhousie University and tweets @nmannathukkaren.
