IPL is the game of an India, or a section of India, that wants ‘globalisation’ and all its gains, without shedding either ‘nationalism’ of a puerile variety or even provincialism of the pettiest kind

JS Raman

There was a time when evenings witnessed repetition of the same routine in every Indian middle-class home. The family would settle down to watch its favourite soap on television or the weekend feature films or any of those programmes on the forthcoming elections.

Came April 18, and this changed. And the change has substantive implications other than those for family life. The same audience continues to assemble before the same idiot box around the same time, but to watch Twenty20 cricket. It does so from that historic date, when the first tourney of the Indian Premier League (IPL) launched by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) began, and will do so until the finals on a hot June 1.

Analysts have all noted the all-family appeal of this shortest form of the game, as opposed to the main attraction of the Tests and the 50-over format for male adults. Live commentaries and cameras, too, point to picnicking families in the fully packed stadia.

Pundits, discussing the changing cricket demography, put it down to women’s preference for matches they can watch after domestic chores and children’s for ones not too mathematically challenging.

The discussion, however, deserves to be carried to another dimension altogether. Considering that the family is the fundamental unit of society and the nation, the phenomenon has a collective meaning and message as well. What is the social and national significance of the IPL spectacle that sports specialists neglect to see?

If the show is a bigger attraction than cinema, it is not only because the result of any of these extra-short games is more unpredictable than the end of a Bollywood formula film. If it engages wider attention than an election, it is not only because the IPL can put up a glitzier extravaganza than any of the political parties. Its glamour and glory lie in the fact that, above all, it is the game of a “new India”.

IPL is the game of an India, or a section of India, that wants “globalisation” and all its gains, without shedding either “nationalism” of a puerile variety or even provincialism of the pettiest kind.

When the players were auctioned and teams built, it might have seemed that provincialism was consigned to the past. None of the teams, named after different Indian cities, had more than the least number of local players possible. The Chennai Super Kings has tribal Jharkhand’s Mahendra Singh Dhoni for its captain, and he is promoting it in advertisements where he is in traditional Southern attire. Delhi’s Ishant Sharma, Tamil-speaking Murali Karthik and Mumbai’s Ajit Agarkar are part of the Kolkata Knight Riders, owned by Shah Rukh Khan, whose role in the latest Bollywood version of ‘Devadas’ does not exactly make him a deemed Bengali. And so on and so forth.

This, however, has not banished inter-state borders from the tournament. Loyalties to the linguistic states are to the fore, in fact, in almost every match. The crowd in Kolkata’s Eden Garden was not strictly non-partisan while rooting for Sarurav Ganguly-led Knight Riders in a match ruined by a minefield pitch.

A woe-begone crowd in Southern Hyderabad refused a well-deserved ovation to Virendra Sehwag, otherwise always an Indian hero, as he fired a fast 50 and finished off the chances of the Deccan Chargers under a dismally unlucky VVS Laxman.
Even less has the import of foreign talent lent the tournament anything like an international character. The purchase of Aussie players, in particular, is seen as only a nationally satisfying sequel to the tensions of the recent Indian tour of Australia.

What the media and the mainstream audience has enjoyed more than any match is the series of apologetic statements from Matthew Hayden (of the Chennai Super Kings), who called Harbhajan Singh an “obnoxious weed” some time ago and can now hardly wait to make up with the off-spinner.

Social scientist Ashis Nandy has talked about Twenty20 changing the character of the game of colonial vintage that had withstood the tide of time. The game that does not extend beyond an evening, in fact, is an instance of the Empire striking back, certainly in its IPL edition.

What it promotes, especially for its middle-class spectators, is the national pride of a would-be “superpower”. Far more thrilling for it than the flurry of sixes witnessed has been the team owners’ acquisition of overseas players, comparable only to Lakshmi Mittal’s takeover of the Luxembourg-based Arcelor or the Tatas’ of the coveted Corus.

The same thrill extends to the entertainment part of the tournament as well. Did not the cheerleaders of the Washington Redskins add a similar dimension to the event as they broke into wild rapture at the fall of every wicket and every boundary, whether well-hit or streaky? The girls, too, are part of a reverse “globalisation”.

Purists, of course, ask: what happens to Indian cricket amid all this hype? The question merits an answer. When the same spectators watch a brilliant buy-sell achievement of their billionaires, do they ask: what does it do to the common Indian’s economy?

Carnivals are not supposed to reflect any country’s reality. They are only meant to compensate for what the reality conspicuously lacks.