Sparkling old wine in new bottle, but far from perfect
Reviewed by Rohit Mahajan

The Great Tamasha Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India
by James Astill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Pages: 290 Rs 399

james Astill has written an entertaining book. It lacks in originality, most of it is old wine in a new bottle, but Astill, a fine storyteller, makes up for it with his skills as a writer and interviewer. However, his research could have been more rigorous.

He originally set out to write a book on the Indian Premier League; but then he decided that it would be a "travesty" to write "so narrow a book".

The paucity of material on the IPL may have been a factor, too, the chapters or writing on the IPL are just a fraction of the 290-odd pages of the book. The book, thus, becomes a portrait of Indian cricket as a whole. Astill tries to investigate how a colonial sport became a religion of Indian masses, across the whole of the nation. He delves into the themes that underlie cricket — and indeed, Indian consciousness: Religion, caste, race, nationalism, Pakistan.

The book sparkles when Astill, who spent four years in India as the correspondent of The Economist, describes his encounters with individuals connected with Indian cricket. He ranges far and wide in their search — he meets Lalit Modi and Sharad Pawar and actors Nargis Fakhri and Aamir Khan; he plays cricket with Pintu, an impoverished biffer of the ball, in Patna; he lives in the Dharavi slum in Mumbai and gets to know the lives of its inhabitants.

Astill's enterprise and energy, and his love for cricket, are palpable through the book. As The Economist's correspondent, he's got the access to the Mallyas and the Jam Sahabs and the Lalit Modis; as an assiduous and curious reporter, he gets the access to the homes of those living in slums and shanties.

His heart is in the right place, too, which is evident in the account of his Indian encounters. He's always with the underdog; the elite, the cream of the society, come across as insincere, unreliable. Astill has a healthy cynicism about them. The elite often appear as caricatures — and it's of their own doing. Astill merely records their words, with which they damn themselves.
Thus we have the actor Ranbir Kapoor telling him that he practised speaking Hindi with the maid because everyone else around him spoke English; we have Preity Zinta telling him that, as a great concession to her IPL team, she travels with them economy class, which she says she'd never done before;
BCCI official Niranjan Shah boasts about being a first-class cricketer, though his record as a player is pedestrian, even pathetic. When Shah Rukh Khan dives to the feet of Rajasthan's governor, Astill knows the gesture is hollow.

The BCCI officials, many of them politicians, reveal themselves as sanctimonious and dishonest. Conversely, the powerless and the poor are decent people — like Arvind Pujara (father of Cheteshwar), who dips into his retirement fund to buy cricket balls to run his free coaching enterprise.

Along the way, Astill makes some basic and surprising errors. He writes that Brahmins "account for less than a fifth of India's population". The actual figure is around 5 per cent. He documents the poisonous effects of caste-based discrimination, yet he believes that in middle-class India, "caste is mainly important in the marriage market". He cites data from a marriage website to support the notion that "inter-caste marriages are becoming more common". Could Astill be unaware that inter-caste marriages, especially when they are arranged marriages, are likely to be only among people from the upper castes? And that marriages between people from upper and lower castes very often result in gruesome murders?

There are also a few other glaring inaccuracies of data or dates.

Astill seems to mock certain people (the ones he seems to dislike) by reporting verbatim their lack of grammar. As if it's part of the villainy of Sharad Pawar or Niranjan Shah that they can't form a grammatically correct sentence by using "a" and "the" perfectly. This device, surely not used unconsciously by Astill, is very surprising from a man of his obvious intelligence and empathy.

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