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Cricket

Argumentatum ad-hominem? Guilty as charged

By: Anantha :+: Under: Cricket, Culture, Equality, Media Watch, Opinion, Sports, caste
On: ⋅ January 6, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

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If you are desi, you will know that the Indian cricket team is currently touring Australia. And things have not been going well for India. Australia have been their usual efficient selves while the Indians, hampered by a mind freeze by their own board that pooh poohed the lack of preparatory games before the test matches and some horrific umpiring, have since crashed to successive twin defeats at Melbourne and Sydney. While all the chatter on and off the field was animated, the actual play by the Indian team has been anything at that. The interactions between the teams during the two games have been anything but amicable with a lot of bad blood, with the poor umpiring playing no small part in keeping tempers high.

The media circus off the field has been working feverishly too. While the lack of a media manager has continued to bite the Indian team’s posterior (with comments, clarifications and denials flying left right and centre), the partisan Aussie media have done their job too.

The latest inflammatory media contribution has been this. In an analysis that runs slipshod over cold hard facts and contradicts itself in more than one place, Andrew Stevenson attempts to analyze the caste divide in the Indian cricket team. Honestly, the attempt falls flat on its face right from the first word of the byline to the article.

Caste could play a role in who represents India, writes Andrew Stevenson.

While most exploratory articles ask a question and attempt to find an answer, Stevenson assumes one answer (let’s move past the word “could” in that byline) and attempts to bolster the uninformed assumption in every way that he thinks he can. In this article, Andrew quotes such luminaries such as Vinod Kambli, Ravi Shastri, Sunil Gavaskar and presents viewpoints from knowledgable talking heads such Harsha Bhogle, Cricinfo editor Siddhartha Vaidyanathan. Also quoted is Outlook columnist S. Anand, whose claim to fame, IMHO, is to add an anti-dalit angle to any current issue, even if it is non existent.

Stevenson starts by first repeating a lesser known trivia factoid about Sunil Gavaskar’s time as a new born infant and proceeds to wonder if Gavaskar could have played for India if he had ended up in a fisherman’s household.

Gavaskar, from a proud, wealthy Brahmin family, the highest caste in the Hindu social order, had an uncle, Madhav Mantri, who played for India. It’s one of the great imponderables, a classic recasting of the nature-nurture divide to speculate whether Gavaskar, raised by a fisherwoman, could have played the game.

It is an interesting start to a piece that had every potential of being a intelligent analysis, but soon the analysis degenerates into a mis-mash of biased opinions, some friendly word twisting and quote generation. One can imagine the smirk in Andrew’s face when he sees Harsha Bhogle’s astounded face when he asks Harsha about the effect of caste on Indian cricket.

But toss the question into still water and you might not hear a splash. Harsha Bhogle, the erudite Indian commentator heard on ABC radio and ESPN, was astounded to be asked about the role of caste in Indian cricket.

“I don’t think that anyone in the Indian team would even be aware that X is from one caste and Z from another,” he said, adding he had no idea what proportion of India’s population were Brahmin. “I did not not even know that, it hasn’t crossed my mind at all.”

Andrew proceeds to quote Kambli on the reasons behind his alleged booing whenever he played at the Wankhede.

The man rated India’s best fieldsman, Eknath Solkar, is not a Brahmin, nor is Vinod Kambli, a precociously talented batsmen from a “lower” caste, who burst on the scene with Tendulkar when the pair made a world record partnership of 664 as schoolboys. He played the last of his 17 Tests in 1995, despite an average of 54.20 and a highest score of 227.

Despite his talents, Kambli was always booed and mocked at his home ground, Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. Observers believed it was because of the dark colour of his skin. Not so, says Kambli. “I think it’s because of my caste.”

Given that Kambli played exactly two test matches at the Wankhede (scoring a double century in one of them) and because no one has really watched first class cricket in India since the 70s, I have my doubts about this quote. Actually the one cricketer that Indian fans always loved to boo was one Ravi Jeshwanth Shastri, a “higher caste Brahmin”.

Then, in comes S. Anand offering his take.

Not all agree. Siriyavan Anand, a Dalit (the caste formerly called untouchables), has written provocatively and critically of the Brahmin domination, suggesting it was easy to “infer that cricket is a game that best suits Brahmanical tastes and bodies, and that there has been a preponderance of Brahman cricket players at the national level”.

Yes, while it is VERY easy to make an assumption that upper caste brahmins have long had a stranglehold on Indian cricket, this assumption has not been verified in a unbiased manner.

Lets face it. Anand is no Guha. His propensity to include a “anti Brahmin” slant (or a pro dalit slant) in most of his arguments are well known. He once responded to a criticism of his slanted critique of the movie Lagaan with a feeling of “deep discomfort with debating with someone who announces his brahmin identity in his very name Deshpande“. So along those same lines, can I assume that, with a name like “Siriyavan” (Tamil phrase meaning “smaller one” or “small person”), Anand suffers from a chronic inferiority complex? Jokes apart, I am not sure Anand is capable of offering a unbiased opinion because in his mind, the case has already been made.

Ramachandra Guha, Mihir Bose and other historians have long established that while the upper caste Indians had the first mover advantage (after Europeans) when it came to cricket, these people were responsible for popularizing the game. Cricket might have been an elitist game (I am not sure if this is true anymore), but the case that cricket polarized the country has never been made. In fact, all recorded literature points to the opposite.

The four Palwankar brothers (Baloo, Vithal, Shivram and Ganpat) who despite their “lower class” were actively pursued by the “Hindus” to play for their team in the Quadrangular tournaments in the 1910s and the ’20s. While Baloo, the eldest was passed over for the captaincy of the Hindus a number of times, his rise as an social activist and the work done by him as a supporter and friend of Ambedkar (they had a rift later) perhaps paved the way for social progress of the Dalits. Vithal, his brother even captained the Hindus for a couple of years.

While it is true that Dalits in pre-independence India were persecuted, post independence and certainly now in the early 2000s, IMHO, such a claim is arguable now. And that is where Stevenson falls into the pit that plagues every New World journalist’s path while they attempt to analyze the daily life in the Old World.

The determined will attempt to get counterpoints for every single opinion, but the lazy resort to every sinlge beaten to death cliche, to bolster thin material. As freelance journalist, blogger and good friend, Samanth Subramanian says it -

(This) refusal by journalists to look beyond the immediate and the superficial comes at the cost of accuracy, nuance, and depth.

Stevenson is guilty of this same crime. By listing the castes of each member in current squad and not looking at how each member got to the team, Stevenson gives in to the superficial and the urge to make the most obvious assumption. In doing so, as the cliche goes, he makes an ass of himself. His defenders could argue that the format does not get along well with the subject, but in making that defense, they just prove my point.

Honestly, while this blogger cannot seriously hope to make a water tight case against Stevenson’s assumptions (I am not a team insider or a professional cricketer), the topic of caste and social equality is serious enough to warrant a detailed analysis and through fact checking. Sadly neither seems to be a feature of Stevenson’s opinion piece.

And I’ll leave Samanth to say the last word, for I can’t sum it up any better.

The truth, of course, is that in India, and in every other large nation in the world, there can be found many shades of gray between the black of one statement and the white of its exact opposite. The grays aren’t hard to find, but spotting them might involve the terrific discomfort of occasionally taking off those designer sunglasses and squinting, for a while, into the sun.

Amen!

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