( An overview of the symposium and details of a topic discussed)

Arunabha Sengupta

Held in the Thomas Lord’s Suite of the Lord’s Cricket Ground on 26 July 2023, the Symposium ‘No Foreign Field: MCC and the Empire of Cricket’ was quite landmark in its concept. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that it was the boldest and most progressive ever organised by the august body, quite indicative of the steps taken in the positive direction in recent times. The willingness to look at its own past is most commendable to say the least.

The exhibition with the same title, on display at the MCC Museum at Lord’s, is also very thoughtfully and efficiently put together and will be there for the next three years. I would heartily recommend all members to visit it if they have not already done so.

Let me start with kudos to the organisers, mainly to Neil Robinson, Emma John and Prashant Kidambi, who were the main curators and thereby the heart and soul behind the event. It was a privilege to attend, and also an honour to be one of the speakers. The line-up was a splendid one and the topics of the panel discussions well chosen – leading to fascinating exchanges, with plenty of audience interaction from a full house. The inimitable Gideon Haigh echoed my thoughts when, after the event, he emailed his views: ‘Fantastic effort from all concerned, a tribute to MCC, and the quality of the speakers.’

While my piece here intends to deal with just some of the points I made – the other speakers deserve the right to be the first to underline their own words while the echoes still reverberate – it may be a good moment to reproduce a revealing statement made by Neil Robinson. The curators, Emma, Neil and Prashant, set the tone for the day by giving an overview of the symposium and also the exhibition, and during that session Neil revealed:

‘[The exhibition was partly an outcome of] the awareness that we could not possibly tell the stories about the history of cricket from a purely MCC perspective. And this realisation came along mainly based on an awareness that we have had for over a number of years now that our audience is not simply an audience of English cricket followers or MCC members, but a global audience. More than a decade previously we looked at the statistics of people coming to the Lord’s tours and discovered that over a third of them were actually from the Indian subcontinent. They were coming here and getting a view of the Ashes and Anglo-Australian cricket and we weren’t communicating a broader history of the game. We weren’t telling them that the Home of Cricket was the Home of their cricket and culture as well. We decided we needed to address this.’

This realisation, in my opinion, is a major step towards inclusion and thereby stepping out of the exclusive isolation that unfortunately the MCC and many other cricketing clubs, societies, associations and the like have been quite justifiably identified with for generations, even as the rest of the world – including the world of cricket – has changed beyond recognition.

An overview of the sessions

The panel discussions, as already mentioned, were stimulating and on varied topics. Prashant, after his session with Neil and Emma, took over as moderator as Peter Oborne, Souvik Naha and yours truly took the stage to discuss Politics, Empire and MCC.

This was followed by lunch in the Harris Garden, a sumptuous spread if in a somewhat curious venue – given that we were casting a not really favourable eye on the past Imperial connections of cricket.

Post-lunch sessions started splendidly with Gideon Haigh, Richard Parry and David Woodhouse eruditely holding forth on Sporting Tours and the Empire of Cricket, bringing out the Australian, South African and West Indian perspectives respectively.

After this Mihir Bose, Raf Nicholson and Duncan Stone took the stage to reflect on exclusions that we have seen in cricket as a global sport in the discussion titled Levelling the field: race, gender and class in cricket. All of them made excellent points, the only regret is that the said points were made in superb silos, whereas somewhat capable moderation could have turned this into a fascinating discussion.

Neil took the stage again for the final session, this time with Robert Winder and Tehmina Goskar to discuss Museums, public history and culture wars. This was perhaps the least cricket-linked of all the discussions but was a wonderfully revealing window into the meaning of museum curation and the challenges faced by the noble profession. The points raised about the role of the museum in presenting divisive topics, with the intention of revealing rather than judging the past, were eye-opening indeed, as was the concept of museums where people can tell their own stories.

Discussion Topic: Future of cricket history

As already mentioned, the purpose of this piece is to discuss some of the points that I was privileged to make in the symposium.

In the lively session Politics, Empire and MCC we started with discussion on the fractious topic of ‘the Spirit of Cricket’, and then each of us spoke about MCC and how its role has changed over the years. Both these topics perhaps deserve a separate article apiece, given the amount of stir and interaction they caused, and perhaps we will see these in future journal issues. However, something that I think makes immense sense to be shared here is the final topic that was discussed.

It was a complex one. To use the words of Prashant Kidambi: ‘One thing about looking at the past is wondering how we can do things differently, and as historians we wonder how we can write the histories of the past differently.’ He asked me to open the discussions, and I proceeded to do so, albeit under a bit of pressure from the clock.

In the remainder of the section, I will sketch a graph as I did in the session. I will do that bit by bit and share what I said as I drew.

In between I will add one or two lines in <…> tags denoting things that I would have liked to add but could not do so because of the aforementioned paucity of time. At the very end, I will add a few more lines which I did not have time to say during the session but which are important to state here.

[Please note that when I say the first quadrant, second quadrant etc, I refer to the order in which I drew them on the graph and not the way we generally refer to quadrants in coordinate geometry, trigonometry, calculus and other branches of mathematics.]

Neil had very kindly arranged for a flip chart which I had insisted upon, and I drew a graph as I talked:

The narrative of cricket remains Anglo-centric, or Anglo-Australian centric. This overwhelming skew has been the inertia of cricket writing … and even in the modern day things have not changed much. A look at the MCC library will underline this.

The most important cricketing event of the summer in England was, if you ask me and as the name implies, the World Test Championship final played at The Oval. But if you look at the magazines piled on the tables of the MCC Library, the covers talk of the Ashes and County Cricket with the WTC final relegated to a footnote. It is not a global view. Cricket has changed into a global game – but from the point of view of cricket writing it remains very parochial.

Graph of the distribution of Cricket writing (the quadrants)

So, if we fill the first quadrant of the graph, Anglo-Australian writers writing about Anglo-Australian cricket, it is overflowing. Even as I speak half a dozen biographies of former Yorkshire cricketers or minor-county ‘greats’ are being written. There are 11 books on the 1953 Ashes series alone.

Graph 1.1 (first quadrant)

The next quadrant I will look at is Non-Anglo-Australian Cricket Writers writing on Non-Anglo-Australian cricket. This is indeed there to an extent, but not as much as one would wish or expect.

For example, Jack Crawford, the Surrey and England cricketer who played 12 Tests between 1906 and 1908, had two biographies published on him simultaneously. <And don’t get me started on the number of Major Smythe-Smythes who played 6 minor county matches in 1931 being honoured with biographies that are supposedly ‘important additions to cricket literature’.>

However, Dilip Vengsarkar, a man who scored three Test hundreds on this very ground and has a room named after him in the premises does not have a biography yet. In spite of nearly 7,000 Test runs.

Graph 1.2 ( after second quadrant)

The third quadrant: Non-Anglo-Australian cricket and society written by Anglo-Australian writers – there are plenty of works that go into this area. In this room itself we have some excellent writers like Gideon Haigh, Peter Oborne and Nicholas Brookes <the last mentioned had turned up in the audience>, all of whom have done that.

Graph 1.3 (after third quadrant)

However, the perspective that is lacking in the traditional view of cricket writing is Anglo-Australian cricket as viewed by the lens of non-Anglo-Australian cricket writers. This view is just not there.

Graph 1.4 (after fourth quadrant)

The traditions of cricket writing perhaps make us wonder why non Anglo-Australian cricket writers should at all write about Anglo-Australian cricket.

But now, let us look at the different cricket writers and the languages of the corresponding geographies they write about. <It is, of course, my contention that when good books are written about cricket, they go beyond the game and touch upon the society and culture. Without knowledge of the language(s) associated with that society and culture, it is – to say the least – a difficult proposition to go anywhere beyond the superficial surface >

For Anglo-Australian cricket the language spoken is English and all the Anglo-Australian writers know that language. So, they do know the language of the cricket and culture they are writing about. Let us denote that by L(Yes) The same is true for Non Anglo-Australian writers writing about cricket in their regions and countries.

This is actually also true for non-Anglo-Australian writers and Anglo-Australian cricket. They do know the language of Anglo-Australian cricket and culture. All of them know English. L(Yes) again. It is actually strange that we do not see books in this quadrant.

Now what about non-Anglo-Australian cricket? Specifically cricket in the subcontinent? The languages we are talking about here include, but are not limited to, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Sinhalese and many others (including Afrikaans in South Africa). Not too many Anglo-Australian authors writing about non-Anglo-Australian cricket know or learn the necessary languages. <The very good ones – Peter, Gideon, Nicholas – can perhaps do without knowing them. But not everyone can. For Anglo-Australian reviewers reviewing these books, language is a second-degree obfuscating factor.>

So, we can put L(NO)

Graph 1.5 (the complete graph after adding the language components)

So, as the graph (1.5) indicates, there is knowledge and capability among non-Anglo-Australian cricket writers to write about Anglo-Australian cricket and culture. But the literature is just not there.

However, the capability of the Anglo-Australian cricket writers to write about non-Anglo-Australian cricket and culture is questionable because they don’t know the language. The nuances are very difficult to understand without a knowledge of the local languages. <We are not talking accents or dialects or even the same language family here. We are talking starkly different languages, often with different scripts.>

The graph tells you us unequivocally where the glaring gap in the writing of cricket history lies. This is the gap that I would expect to be filled as we go forward. This imbalance needs to be taken care of.

As I drew the final lines on the graph, the flipchart and its frame collapsed and fell with a crash. Quick as a flash though Neil was, he could not quite grab the catch. As he set it up again, amidst the laughter a quip rang through: ‘Probably that is the establishment collapsing’.

Things that I did not say (due to lack of time) but would like to add here:

In the 1980s, Salman Rushdie coined a phrase: “The Empire Writes Back”. Borrowed from Star Wars, this was about the former colonies of the Empire developing postcolonial literary voices to counter the erstwhile narrative written from a purely colonial (in most cases Anglo-centric) lens. However, in cricket, the post-colonial voice remains very subdued.

Of course, there were three Indian writers in my panel itself. It is not that cricket books are not written in the subcontinent or the West Indies.

But crossing borders (and talking about the cricket and society of countries that the writer does not belong to) still remains the periphery of Anglo-Australian writers.

Anglo-Australian writers are lauded if they write about India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, or the West Indies. It often carries the same sort of wonder as a Lawrence of Arabia of yore … or a Richard Attenborough in search of Gandhi. In this matter we are stuck in the James Mill days. The language issue is most often blatantly overlooked.

A writer hailing from the subcontinent, however, faces a lot of resistance when he crosses boundaries and writes about the Anglo-Australian world. It is not uncommon to find forays into British politics and society – even when discussing decolonisation – branded ‘lectures of debatable importance’ … something that a Peter Oborne or a Gideon Haigh will never hear in the subcontinent. This direction of writing cricket history is largely unexplored and prone to be subjected to scepticism.

Haven’t these points already been made, wonder some ‘gatekeepers’ of cricket literature. Why don’t writers stick to the comfortable templatised fascination for the angelic white figures on the verdant green, promises of days in the sun, and check the primary-source box by interviewing nonagenarian former cricketers with failing memories?

I have called this the inertia cricket writing – aided and abetted by the inertia of a sanitised version of history taught in erstwhile curriculums. This creates the majorly Anglo-Australian lens.

This is the reason for the relentless Ashes-focus in cricket history, the reason why popular published and circulated lists of ‘greatest Test matches’ always consist majorly of England or Australia as one of the sides if not the Tests they played against each other. This is why the deeds of Ben Stokes at Headingley have already reached legendary proportions through relentless retelling, while Kusal Perera’s Durban 153 has already been relegated to ‘Kusal who?’ This is why 200-plus page books on cricket poems and songs contain two and a half hard-to-find pages on calypsos amidst a surfeit on good and not-so-good Anglo-Australian ditties. This is why in books, ostensibly about serious cricketing and political issues centred in distant parts of the world, we can turn with some relief to three pages on the breakup of The Beatles.

This skew is overwhelming, lopsided and distorts the story of cricket. The final graph makes it clear where the balance needs to be redressed.

To come back to Salman Rushdie, in The Satanic Verses the stammering Whisky Sisodia declares: ‘The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means.’

Unless the said balance is restored, the fate of cricket history will continue to be similar in this rapidly changing world.