Caught India bowled Bharat

Caught India bowled Bharat
Shekhar Gupta

It might sound like a cheap pun but it is too tempting to be ignored. The day after the famous victory at Chennai, who else could have provided all of India a break from the shame and scandal of our politics but the first Indian spinner in a long time who can actually turn the ball?

At a mere 20 years, Harbhajan Singh has now emerged as our first genuine off-break match-winner since Erapalli Prasanna.

The British press has been prompt to draw these comparisons. Is he more like Prasanna, or Venkataraghavan? How does he compare with Saqlain Mushtaq and Muthiah Muralitharan, two other offies who, coincidentally, have been the match winners for our neighbours? With the Australians coming in for an away Ashes series this year, there is plenty of discussion on how and why offies are becoming match-winners as well as on the desperate need for England to learn to out-sledge the Australians, or kiss the Ashes goodbye. Shane Warne, suddenly, is seen as less of a menace and with Nasser Hussain's team smothering Murali to win in Sri Lanka, there are also renewed claims of English facility with playing and bowling spin. No surprises then that The Times on Friday morning ran a story from London, accompanying Peter Roebuck's match report from Chennai that India's new spinning sensation, Harbhajan Singh, had finally passed the Titmus test. Harbhajan, faulted for his action on his debut at age 17, was sent by theICC to Fred Titmus for two weeks of repair-work. Titmus, arguably one of the best offies outside of the subcontinent, however told The Times he had never found too much wrong with ``the boy'' anyway.

THERE is also some instant sociological analysis underlining the rise of the non-traditional, sometimes non-English speaking, Indian cricketing hero. Singh, like many of the Pakistani stars, does not speak too much English and Ganguly has been noted to good-naturedly pull his leg at post-match press conferences by asking the media with a straight face, to ask Singh questions only in English. The British media finds that funny, but such is the obsession with the sociology of cricket that answers to India's remarkable turnaround, somehow, must be found in that kind of class/kind analysis.

Harbhajan is seen as the fighting new Indian, non-English speaking, definitely non-Brahmin (in a team usually boasting 8 of them) and not from Mumbai or Bangalore, the nurseries of Indian cricket, but from a small town in Punjab from where most immigrants to Britain come. So you know where that never-say-die spirit of the Southhall Sikh comes from.

But do not dismiss pop-sociology out of hand when talking cricket. It is not as if this is suddenly a new team of tough, small town `Jai Kisan' type Indians who look the Aussies in the eye and are immune to sledging because they don't understand English anyway. The other men instrumental in this miraculous turnaround also represent the other traditional cricketing India. Rahul Dravid, an MBA under his belt, and V.V.S. Laxman who (we needed Peter Roebuck to tell us this) is the son of a doctor couple and scored 98 per cent in science in his CBSE Class XII exams. And how would you pigeonhole Sachin Tendulkar, as a Class X dropout, or one more sophisticated representative of the Bombay tradition?

If you look at the history of Indian cricket, its golden eras all coincide with, probably coincidentally, the English-speaking talent from metros coming together with rough-and-ready salt of the earth, small town fighters. Kapil, at 20, wasn't much better at speaking to the media than Harbhajan. But he, with Madan Lal, Karsan Ghavri and later Yashpal Sharma, brought a new spirit to a line-up that, beginning with Sunil Gavaskar and ending with Dilip Doshi (who now holds the Indian franchise for Mont Blanc) could compare with any other for talent and sophistication. This was ourGolden Era that brought the 1983 World Cup, the 1985 Benson and Hedges World Championship in limited overs cricket, besides several series victories. You always heard stories of the Kapil-Gavaskar, Bombay-North rivalries and some of them were true. But it was the first time in our cricketing history that those who came from the traditional talent zones embraced these rough-and-ready Indians.

KAPIL now is very different from the way he was when he won the World Cup in 1983. He packs a formidable golf handicap, is as westernised as any Indian cricketer you have seen and even holds forth authoritatively on the social geography of Indian cricket, and its chronic, incurable disease, the zonal selection system. ``You can balance it if you understand the basics,'' he once told me. The West, he said, is all talent and no hard work. The South is some talent and some hard work. The North, is no talent and all slogging. And the East, no talent, no hard work, but all appreciation. So once you get it right in terms of your talent and training, go and perform at Calcutta.

Now, juxtapose this analysis with what happened to our cricket in the post-Kapil/Gavaskar era. We produced great new talent, but mostly from Bombay (Tendulkar, Manjrekar and Agarkar) and Bangalore. In fact, Karnataka, at one point, came to dominate our cricket, even overshadowing Bombay, with Srinath, Prasad, Kumble and Joshi making up the entire attack and Rahul Dravid, our most consistent batsman. Our team of the nineties, actually, was a very talented one that won very little, in fact almost nothing, overseas. Ganguly emerged from the East, his talent defying Kapil's suspicions and came, along with Sachin, to lead a team with enormous ability but lacking in guts and the heart, so essential to winning anything of consequence in the tough new world of cricket.

Alan Donald was the first to see this. After he bowled the heart out of this, the so-called best batting line-up in the world, at Port Elizabeth in December 1992, he said the Indians were nice guys. But they were not very good at fighting. ``They don't want to handle pace. They hit a few shots and then get out,'' he said. This team lost twice in Australia, South Africa, West Indies, and England and at home to both Pakistan and South Africa. They lost even the old label of tigers at home. They were not prepared for close finishes, cracked up in crunch matches and were so easily overawed by the rivals' aggressive body language. There was no other reason for them to lose to Pakistan at Chennai and Calcutta (1999) and to South Africa at Mumbai and Bangalore last year. Is some of that changing now? And, if so, why?

Think of the people who make the difference now, besides Harbhajan Singh. Zaheer Khan, Laxman, Yuvraj Singh, Reetinder Sodhi, and a new generation of aggressive, small-town Indians, somehow display better nerves in crunch situations, than those who probably think too much of the consequences of failure rather than lean on their talent and instinct. Imran Khan has said many times that one reason India has such a poor record against Pakistan is that its players are so afraid of losing, they simply cannot measure up to the tension of a clash with Pakistan.

Probably now, the Harbhajan Singhs and the Zaheer Khans will change some of that. Probably also Laxman and Dravid, new, improved, after he was shaken and stirred by derisory talk of his timidity. It is interesting to note that in the four innings that Indian batting pulverised Australia, Tendulkar scored only 163 (of an aggregate of 1489) and Ganguly, a mere 70.

Unwittingly, therefore, we may have discovered a winning formula rooted partly in pop-sociology and partly in Kapil's brilliant zonal doctrine of cricketing ability. You bring together the sophistication of metropolitan India with the talent and spirit of Bharat and you can be world-beaters. Now we know it works in cricket. Why should it not work elsewhere too?

Harbhajan is seen as non-English speaking, definitely non-Brahmin, not from Mumbai or Bangalore but from a small town in Punjab, home to the Sikh expat's never-say-die spirit.

This new breed of small-town players shows better nerves in a crunch situation than those who think too much of the consequences of failure rather than their talent and instinct.