The Fictions of (English) Cricket: From Nation to Diaspora

Abstract

This paper examines the fictional representations of cricket and argues that they contribute to a definition of the game. It examines the fictions of cricket, showing that they construct the game into a most distinct English fiction. Literary treatment of cricket must further be read in the context of the transformations of the game in the nineteenth century, with the rise of athleticism as an ideology, and its role in the training of the colonial administration. The argument then concentrates on the decolonzsation, and perhaps the ‘defictionalization’, of cricket through the writings of C. L. R. James and Ashis Nandy. Finally, it turns to recent fictional perceptions of cricket, in particular to Romesh Gunesekera's The Match as well as Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, and argues that they emphasize the diasporic nature of the game.

Les romans de cricket (anglais) : de la Nation à la Diaspora

Cet article examine les représentations fictionnelles du cricket et pose que celles-ci contribuent à définir le jeu. Il interroge les romans de cricket, montrant qu'ils construisent le jeu dans la fiction typiquement britannique. Le traitement littéraire du cricket doit encore être lu dans un contexte de transformations du jeu au XIXe siècle, avec l'essor de l'athlétisme comme idéologie et son rôle dans l'entraînement de l'administration coloniale. La discussion se concentre alors sur la décolonisation, et peut-être sur la « défictionnalisation » du cricket à travers les écrits de C.L.R. James et Ashis Nandy. Pour finir, l'article revient sur les perceptions fictionnelles récentes du cricket, en particulier sur The Match de Romesh Gunesekera ainsi que sur Netherland de Joseph O'Neill et soutient que ceux-ci insistent sur la nature diasporique du jeu.

Las ficciones del críquet (inglés): de la nación a la diáspora

Este artículo examina las representaciones del críquet en la ficción y sostiene que han contribuido a la definición del juego. Examina las ficciones sobre el críquet, poniendo de manifiesto que construyen el juego como una ficción específicamente inglesa. Además, el tratamiento literario del críquet se debe interpretar en el contexto de las transformaciones del juego durante el siglo XIX, con el surgimiento del atleticismo como ideología y su papel en el adiestramiento de la administración colonial. El análisis se centra a continuación en la descolonización, y quizás en la “desficcionalización”, del críquet a través de los escritos de C.L.R. James y Ashis Nandy. Finalmente, se estudian las recientes percepciones ficcionales del críquet, en particular en la obra de Romesh Gunesekera The Match, así como en la de Joseph O'Neill, Netherland, y se sostiene que estas obras destacan la naturaleza diaspórica del juego.

Die Fiktionen des (englischen) Krickets: Von der Nation zur Diaspora

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die fiktionalen Darstellungen von Kricket und argumentiert, dass sie zu einer Definition des Spiels beitragen. Die Fiktionen des Krickets werden begutachtet, wobei gezeigt wird, dass sie das Spiel in einer höchst ausgeprägten englischen Fiktion konstruieren. Literarische Abhandlungen über das Kricketspiel müssen weiterhin gelesen werden im Kontext vom Wandel des Spiels im 19. Jahrhundert, mit dem Aufkommen der Athletik als eine Ideologie und ihrer Rolle in der Ausbildung der kolonialen Administration. Die Argumentation konzentriert sich anschließend auf die Entkolonialisierung und möglicherweise „Entfiktionalisierung” des Krickets anhand der Werke von C.L.R. James und Ashis Nandy. Abschließend wird sich neuen fiktionalen Auffassungen des Krickets zugewandt, speziell Romesh Gunesekeras The Match und Joseoph O'Neills Netherland und argumentiert, dass sie die Natur des Spiels in der Diaspora betonen.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Professor Mangan and Dr Scholar for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. A shorter version of this paper will be published in Rita Christian and Judith Misrahi-Barak, eds. ‘India and the Indian Diasporic Imagination', Les Carnets du Cerpac 9 (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, forthcoming 2011).

Notes

[1] Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 156.

[2] Bhagat, The Three Mistakes of My Life, 30.

[3] On the power of India in cricket, see for instance Ali, ‘Diary’, 36; and Majumbar, ‘Epilogue’.

[4] Holt, ‘Cricket and Englishness’, 48. Holt links in particular the development of the amateur ideal with the growth of the sport in public schools in the late Victorian years; see p. 53.

[5]‘English writers have bemoaned the great days of yore – and nevermore – linking the irretrievable past to a lost England of sterling character in a golden summer’, Allitt, ‘English Cricket and Literature’, 430.

[6] Bateman, ‘More Mighty than the Bat, the Pen…’.

[7] Rather than concentrate on all the literature about cricket, this paper examines more specifically novels that use cricket as a structuring narrative principle, or that, at any rate, contain a significant episode devoted to cricket. It does not purport to be exhaustive. Further references to cricket in English literature may be found for instance in Allitt, ‘English Cricket and Literature’, and in Bateman, ‘More Mighty than the Bat, the Pen…’.

[8] Love, Cricket. An Heroic Poem Illustrated with the Critical Observations of Scriblerus Maximus: 2, ll. 13–14. References are to this edition.

[9] On the poetry of empire in the eighteenth century, see Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire.

[10] Mangan, ‘“Muscular, Militaristic and Manly”’, 37.

[11] Wordsworth, ‘Composed in the Valley'.

[12] Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 100. References are to this edition.

[13] Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, 350. References are to this edition.

[14] Freeman, Steady and Strong, 356–57.

[15] Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School. See for instance p. 18: ‘C. J. Vaughan became headmaster of Harrow in 1845, G. E. L. Cotton, of Marlborough in 1852, Edward Thring, of Uppingham in 1853, Henry Walford, of Lancing in 1859 and Hely Jutchinson Almond, of Loretto in 1862. It was such headmasters as these rather than Thomas Arnold who took the then novel step of encouraging pupils and staff to consider games as part of the formal curriculum, and so began a trend which was to become a notable feature of the public school system as a whole by the last quarter of the century’.

[16] Ibid., 56.

[17] Ibid., 70.

[18]‘The games system not only assured control over the children of the middle classes within the schools, in due course it was believed, it also assisted those children in their attempts to control in turn the native “children” of the Empire’, Mangan, ‘“Muscular, Militaristic and Manly”’, 36.

[19] Newbolt, ‘Vitaï Lampada'.

[20] See Tozer, ‘A Sacred Trinity’, 10–26.

[21] See Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism, 133–35.

[22]We may wish to remember that Wodehouse, a keen cricket player, was part of the writers' team known as the ‘Allahakbarries’, which boasted A. Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells and J. M. Barrie, and which used to play against teams of publishers or journalists.

[23] Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith, 54. References are to this edition.

[24] Quoted by Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, 131.

[25] Sitwell, Before the Bombardment, 232.

[26] Macdonell's England, their England, 101.

[27] Trollope, The Fixed Period, 78.

[28] The Englishness of the game appears as well of course in non-fictional contexts. Neville Cardus's writings on cricket do uphold such a thesis: ‘None except the people of England or of the English-speaking countries has excelled at cricket. Other nations not obsessed by sport are able to hold their own with us at tennis, golf, football, but cricket is incomprehensible to them, a possession or mystery of a clan, a tribal rite. So it is, or something of the kind; for cricket is an institution and only a game incidentally – as the Poet Laureate might easily be a poet. Like the British Constitution, cricket was not made: it has “grown”’. Cardus, English Cricket, 7.

[29] Guha, The Picador Book of Cricket, xv.

[30] Cardus, Cardus on Cricket, 138–39.

[31] James, Beyond a Boundary, 30. References are to this edition.

[32] Smith has offered to extend James's insights in the terms of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in ‘“Beyond a Boundary” (of a “Field of Cultural Production”)’, 102: ‘What is crucially important to James is the achieved formal autonomy of the cricketing field and the acceptance within (or, rather, on) that field, of a specific principle of behaviour, meaning and success. It is this that allowed the cricket pitch to serve as a social space on which were expressed those political energies that were, according to its own constitutive “doxa,” foresworn by participants at the boundary edge’.

[33] See Lazarus, ‘Cricket and National Culture in the Writings of C. L. R. James’, 342–55.

[34] Ashis Nandy, The Tao of Cricket, 1.

[35]It must be noted that Nandy does not defend a strictly postcolonial view of cricket in India but on the contrary suggests that cricket can be seen as a reflection of the efforts by the peripheries and the underside of British society as well as by the Indians to reaffirm, through cricket, ‘values in opposition to the colonial worldview’. Nandy, The Tao of Cricket, 6.

[36] Ibid., 21.

[37] Ibid., 122.

[38] Ali, ‘Diary’, 36.

[39]Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 98. See also p. 110: ‘the key forces that have eroded the Victorian moral and didactic framework of cricket are the indigenization of patronage, both in the sense of finding indigenous patrons whose styles can accommodate the form and finding audiences who can be drawn into the spectacle; state support through massive media subsidies, and commercial interest, either in the standard contemporary possibilities for commoditization forms or in the slightly more unusual form of company patronage for players. It is only this strong alliance of forces that in the Indian case has permitted the gradual unyoking of cricket from its Victorian value framework and its animation by new forces associated with merchandising and spectacle’.

[40] Anuja Chauhan, The Zoya Factor.

[41] It is estimated that his Five Points Something sold over 500,000 copies in India.

[42] All cricket fans know that India won the second test match against Australia after having been forced to follow on.

[43] Romesh Gunesekera, The Match, 43. References are to this edition.

[44] Joseph O'Neill, Netherland, 8. References are to this edition.

[45] The complexity of Gunesekera's or O'Neill's approach of the colonial dimension contrasts with that of Hanif Kureishi for instance: ‘I learn from Omar that it was in Poona that the family started their own cricket team, Colonel Kureishi's XI, with other Hindu, Parsi, Christian and Jewish boys joining them occasionally. For Omar, cricket is political; it is where the British can be beaten at their own game’. Kureishi, My Ear at his Heart, 33.

[46] Sunny notes that his father had found a home in fantasy, having lived all his life somewhere else (p. 178).