Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (37 page)

Most Indian male stars cry unashamedly on screen; they cry most often when their mothers have had opportunity to express disappointment with them. Our movies, almost since Phalke’s day, have shared the ethos of Elizabethan plays. There is a little bit of everything. They are clear about moral values: Even if the hero is a lovable crook, he goes to jail, cleans up his act, earns his redemption, touches his mother’s feet, and looks forward to a blameless future. Bollywood’s most successful films are patriarchal in the extreme. Women are rarely shown having careers outside the home. “In my entire career,” says actor Sharmila Tagore, whose career spanned several decades, “I played a working woman twice: as a singer in one film and a doctor in another. That was because I was the heroine. A working woman was always a danger to society because she was a danger to marriage.”

Bollywood taught ordinary Indians what the rich wore and how they dressed. North India is filled with houses that look like they belong on the sets of a Bollywood movie: the sweeping staircase that leads from a
barnlike first floor to bedrooms on the second floor; the huge chandelier and grand driveway, even if there isn’t really space inside for the former or outside for the latter. Bollywood took us abroad when foreign travel was an impossible dream for the Indian middle class. Bollywood offered romance in Paris, honeymoons in Switzerland, love affairs in Tokyo.

But popular culture remains popular only as long as it tells the stories its viewers need. There is reason to fear Bollywood may not remain the all-inclusive, all-singing, all-dancing party catered for the masses and still able to bring divas onto the floor. New films are shorter—more urban and urbane. The songs the hero and heroine once sang to each other are now part of the background score.

Some blame the nonresident Indian market, estimated to take in three times the revenue of the domestic market—not because overseas Indians buy more tickets but because they pay higher prices in dollars, pounds, and euros. Others blame the fact that the new generation of filmmakers, who speak English on the set and then go home to watch foreign films on DVD, wants to do things its own way.

As Bollywood grows slicker, the audience seems to be losing purchase. The elegant expressiveness of Urdu-inflected Hindi—in which love was declared—is losing ground to the crispness of English. The melodrama is often edited out.

The old line between performer and audience, once drawn in blood, is now drawn on class lines. On one side is the India that travels abroad, wears designer clothes, and trades real estate tips about Knightsbridge and Manhattan. On the other is the India that still watches cinema under the stars and in tents and cowsheds. If Bollywood loses touch with this other India, neither state subsidy nor nostalgia can revive it.

Or is the real threat something new? Every year, I ask students in the media class I teach how they like to relax. For twenty years, the majority said that they go to Bollywood movies. In the last two years, however, that has changed. Now it’s Facebook (which allows you to generate content, not just consume it) and Twitter (which allows you to have your own followers, not just be a fan). Young Indians have taken a huge leap over books and movies to mobile phones.

But as we like to say in India, a dead elephant will still get you a hundred thousand rupees. Bollywood has a history of being able to pull itself out of ugly quagmires. It survived the ignoble 1980s and the onslaught of television and one-day cricket matches. The bound script, which was unknown to Bollywood since dialogue was often written on the set, is now the starting point of many movies. Responsible money is moving in. And at the end of the day, there isn’t a bigger fame game in India.

Harsha Bhogle

Harsha Bhogle is an Indian cricket commentator and journalist.

Cricket was first played on Indian soil in 1721 by British sailors near Cambay, a port city in what is now the state of Gujarat. In his
Compendious History of the Indian Wars
, published in 1737, Lt. Clement Downing of the British East India Company records that while anchored off Cambay, company officials and the fleet’s crew “every day diverted ourfelves with playing at Cricket, and other Exercifes”—to the great amusement of local “
Culeys.
”

Indians remained spectators of the “gentlemen’s game” for another century as Britain absorbed the subcontinent into its empire and whites-only cricket clubs sprang up in Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, Poona, and Madras. The first Indians to take up the game were Parsis, wealthy and well-educated descendants of Zoroastrian exiles from Persia. In Bombay, Parsi sons took interest in the British pastime in the 1830s. In 1848, a group of leading families bankrolled the establishment of Bombay’s Oriental Cricket Club. The city’s Hindu elites formed a rival cricket club, the Hindu Gymkhana, in 1866. Muslims opened their cricket club in 1886. Thus, in India, religion and cricket have been mixed up from the beginning.

Cynics say the Parsis took up the game out of snobbery and a desire to ingratiate themselves with their colonial overlords. Hindus, no doubt, played to show they were just as good as the Parsis. And of course Muslims couldn’t stand to be outdone by the Hindus. Still, there’s no denying that there was something about the game itself. Some say cricket appealed
to Indians because its leisurely pace—in classic test cricket, games can drag on for four or five days and often end in a draw—matched the tempo of Indian life. Others credit the game’s complexity, myriad rituals, and arcane vocabulary. But maybe it was simpler than that: Cricket’s great charm is that the only things you really need to play it are a plank of wood, some sort of ball, and time.

Whatever the reason for its appeal, by 1890, when Lord George R. C. Harris—himself a former captain of the British cricket team and prominent member of London’s storied Marylebone Cricket Club—arrived in Bombay to take up his duties as governor, the city was crawling with cricket clubs. Each weekend the
maidan
near the ramparts of the demolished Bombay fort roared to the cheers of crowds gathered to watch the matches. So great was the clamor from Bombay residents for space to practice and play that Harris reluctantly agreed to cede large chunks of seafront real estate for gymkhanas for each of Bombay’s three main religious communities.

Race and religion continued to shape Indian cricket for the next half century. The first match between Indians and the British took place in 1877, when the Zoroastrian Cricket Club played the Bombay Gymkhana in a two-day test. The Parsis lost, but twelve years later they were strong enough to defeat a British cricket team sent to tour the subcontinent. Harris instituted an annual Presidency Match between Europeans and Parsis. Soon Hindus, too, had a yearly cricket challenge with the Europeans. When the Hindu team vanquished the British in an epic test at the Bombay Gymkhana in 1906, their victory was celebrated throughout the subcontinent. In 1907, European, Parsi, and Hindu cricket teams were organized into a combined Triangular Tournament, which quickly emerged as the subcontinent’s premier sporting event. A Muslim team was added in 1911 to make the contest a Quadrangular.

Among Hindu cricketers, merit clashed with caste. Palwankar Baloo, a left-handed slow bowler some have hailed as the first great Indian cricketer, was a Chamaar belonging to an “untouchable” caste near the bottom of the Hindu social hierarchy. He learned to bowl as a groundskeeper at the Parsi gymkhana in Poona and later was poached by that city’s European
cricket club, whose members helped him hone his bowling skills. As word of his skill spread, soon Palwankar was bowling regularly to European cricketers. He moved to Bombay and was quickly recruited to play for the Hindu Gymkhana. He and his younger brother Shivram played a key role in the Hindu team’s 1906 victory over Europeans of the Bombay Gymkhana. But for years, Hindu teammates who welcomed the Palwankar brothers’ talents on the pitch refused their company beyond it, declining to dine with them and even insisting that during breaks in matches the brothers take tea outside the cricket pavilion using disposable earthen mugs.

Gradually, the old prejudices gave way. In 1923, the youngest Palwankar brother, Vithal, a formidable batsman, was officially appointed captain of the Hindu team for the annual Quadrangle. The first Pan-India teams were dispatched to play informal matches in England. In 1926, India was invited to join the Imperial Cricket Council, and in 1932 an all-Indian team captained by CK Nayudu, a commoner, made its debut against England in an officially recognized Test match.

Cricket, by then, had begun to spread across the subcontinent, with clubs for Indians multiplying in Madras, Mysore, Lucknow, and Lahore. The game attracted the interest of many of India’s maharajas, and Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, a dashing royal from Nawanagar, played briefly for Cambridge University and the English national team.

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, a rising generation of nationalist politicians—among them many prominent Hindus—condemned the habit of organizing cricket clubs on religious lines. Many decried the Bombay Quadrangular on the grounds that it fanned communal rivalries at a time when Indians of all faiths should band together in opposition to British rule. In 1934, the maharaja of Patiala inaugurated a regional contest to rival the Bombay tournament. Teams were organized by province, not religion. The Ranji Trophy, named for Ranjitsinhji, gained steadily in popularity and helped carry knowledge of cricket to small towns and villages. In 1940, Mahatma Gandhi himself condemned the Bombay tournament, forcing the Hindu Gymkhana to temporarily withdraw. After independence and the wrenching partition of Pakistan, events pitting
Hindus against Muslims fell out of favor, and in 1946, the tournament was banned.

But India’s love affair with cricket itself would only grow more passionate. In the wake of independence, Indian cricket has evolved from being a vehicle for competition among different religions into a kind of national religion all its own. More than any other institution, save perhaps the army, cricket has become India’s great social leveler.

People of all faiths, including Sikhs and Christians, have played for India’s national teams. There have been many Muslim captains, such as Tiger Pataudi and Mohammad Azharuddin. Today Virender Sehwag, a Jat from Delhi, is loved in Kolkata, while Mahendra Singh Dhoni, a native of Ranchi, has been embraced with great passion by residents of Chennai, and Sachin Tendulkar is revered throughout the nation in a way that knows no geographical or cultural boundaries.

Our teams have included players from small towns as well as big cities. India’s 2007 world championship team, for example, drew its captain from Ranchi, its best player from Chandigarh, and key bowlers came from Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Vadodara, and Jalandhar. Television and the Internet have accelerated the sport’s openness, allowing even small-town boys access to video of matches and expert commentary explaining the nuances of the game. And boys from rural India enjoy some critical advantages over their urban cousins: open space, ample free time, and a hunger to succeed.

Over the years, cricket has come to unite our diverse nation in ways that no other endeavor can. Indians of all faiths cheered in the 1950s, when the national cricket team won its first series in Test cricket against Pakistan, then again in the 1960s, when India beat New Zealand, the West Indians, and England all on their home pitches. Our first truly global victory came in 1983, when India’s team, led by Kapil Dev, swept the Cricket World Cup in England. That victory was unexpected partly
because England, the host, had changed the rules of play, moving from pure test cricket to a 60-over format designed to wind up a match in a single day. India had resisted the faster format, but after 1983, we embraced it. When India and Pakistan cohosted the next World Cup in 1987, it was shortened farther to 50 overs.

Economic reform brought further change to Indian cricket. After 1991, India’s protected economy was open to multinationals, with big marketing budgets and a great hunger for the kind of advertising vehicle that could help them reach hundreds of millions of young consumers. Prior to reforms, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had had to pay the state broadcaster to telecast cricket matches. Suddenly, privatized networks were willing to shell out hundreds of millions for broadcast rights. As the money poured in, Indian cricket metamorphosed from a simple game with a ball and stick into very serious business.

But the blockbuster change was still to come. The innovation that has done the most to secure cricket’s hold on the hearts and minds of millions of young Indian fans wasn’t an Indian idea at all. England pioneered the use of 20-over format, allowing completion of a single match in under three hours. In fact, when the International Cricket Club voted to adopt the T20 format for the 2007 World Cup in Johannesburg, India was the only country to vote against the change.

Then came India’s dramatic victory over Pakistan in the first T20 World Cup. The nation was transfixed. Immediately it dawned on India’s cricket promoters that in an era of instant gratification and tiny attention spans, T20 was the perfect answer. This wasn’t your father’s cricket; it was every bit as exciting as soccer. What other sport could fill stadiums eight times in seven weeks?

The new format catalyzed the formation of the Indian Premier League (IPL), whose founder and first commissioner lost no time in bringing in big-time corporate investors, Bollywood glitz, and American sports-marketing savvy. Lalit Modi’s genius was recognizing that
what Indian cricket needed was a league of competing city teams—much like professional basketball, football, and baseball in the United States. It wasn’t enough for cricket to be “organized,” it had to be
promoted
—complete with fireworks, celebrity owners, and scantily clad cheerleaders.

The result was a monsoon of money.

Today the BCCI commands $1.6 billion over ten years for broadcast rights for the IPL. City-based IPL franchises—a notion that had been unheard of in cricket—now sell for hundreds of millions. And all that cash means bigger salaries for players. Overnight, an Indian cricket player who might have earned a maximum of $30,000 for the year if his team won the domestic league and captured the Ranji Trophy, could earn anywhere from $200,000 to more than $1 million for participating in an IPL tournament that wrapped up in just six weeks. For that kind of money, promoters could attract talent not just from India but from anywhere in the world. By IPL’s second year, two English players, Andrew Flintoff, playing for Chennai, and Kevin Pietersen, playing for Bangalore, were earning $250,000 per week—more than some of Europe’s biggest soccer stars. Cricket teams in Australia, which has also embraced the T20 format, must abide by a $1 million annual spending cap. In India, the cap is $12.5 million—so Australia’s Glenn Maxwell was more than happy to turn up to play for Mumbai’s IPL franchise, where he alone raked in $1 million, more money than all the players on his Australian franchise combined.