Prashant Kidambi (2019). Cricket Country: The Untold History of the First all India Team, Penguin Viking, pp. 453.
The last two years have been exceptional for the historical cricket literature genre in the Indian sub-continent. Two excellent histories on the Indian women’s cricket came by in quick succession (Free Hit by Supriya Das & The Fire Burns Blue by Karunya Keshav & Sidhanta Patnaik), both exhaustive and celebratory, followed by this story of the first all India cricket team by historian and Leicester University associate professor Prashant Kidambi. This tome is written in the great tradition of cricket prose in the subcontinent, the pre-eminent of which is Ramachandra Guha’s A corner of a foreign field. What the claim means is that the historian’s meticulous research into archival materials is matched by the story teller’s felicity of expression, to bring out Indian cricket’s birth in the hotbed of its political history.
Historian as Story-teller
Kidambi brings his historian’s arsenal to aid the digging and unearthing of the hidden people and incidents that make up this compelling story. Cricket’s idyllic and expansive Victorian mores undergo a fiery transformation when supplanted on the subcontinental shores. Layered by religion, caste, class, and political ideology, cricket becomes a ‘game of thrones’ between the British, Indian pundits, and the plebeians. Kidambi lays out, with an archeologist’s precision, the barebones of the politics, economics, and sociology of the sport that presciently reverberates to the present day.
The most poignant parts of this historical sketch are the extensive and empathetic portrayals of some of the least known pioneers such as the Dalit brothers Palwankar and Shivram Baloo, whose stupendous achievements in the face of adversity is as epic as their exploits in the field. Kidambi also unwaveringly captures the ebbs and flow of history beyond the boundary, to narrate how some waves passed cricket by, whereas some others changed the course of its future.
If you are like me, partial
to cricket in its long format and its prose in the equally long form, this book
is for your collection, to be read, re-read and bequeathed to heirs, like you
would a Neville Cardus, CLR James, or Ramachandra Guha. If you have no idea why
cricket prose should be gushed over, try this book. Like a good beverage, you may
grow a taste for it. Cricket (like literature and monogamous marriage) should
be battled with a gentle life-long commitment. Unlike the short ebullient high of
the more thrilling avenues of adventure, this one works on your system slowly, and
wins you over completely. If at all, you are destined to have an unfortunate affliction,
why not be the gentle moon-faced cricket aficionado?
