「书评」伟大的演出：板球，腐败和现代印度的喧嚣崛起（Jason Burke）

                
                
The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India
by James Astill
Early in this engaging, perceptive and rigorous book, James Astill, a former correspondent for the Economist in Delhi, describes how cricket evolved as the quintessentially English game, its batsmen, bowlers and fielders a ludic representation of a rigid social hierarchy. Popular and elite at the same time, it was a rare forum for gentry and commoners to interact, and thus a source of social cohesion. Brought to India first by sailors and soldiers, played by the administrators of the Raj, it was then adopted by elite Indians because of its very Englishness. Over the following decades this game, at least in India, was transformed into something else, as representative of contemporary India as the original game had been of 18th- or 19th-century England.
This of course is the story of everything imported to India. Nothing survives immersion in this huge, complex country unchanged. Indeed, it all – Italian cuisine, the English language, democracy – ends up virtually unrecognisable.
The Great Tamasha is the story of how cricket became Indianised. But it is a book that is about much more than sport. Recounting the recenthistory of the game allows the author to tell the reader what has happened in India in recent decades and to describe the country today.
So the politics of caste, another social hierarchy reinforced under British rule, in cricket leads into a broader discussion of caste in India today. The failure of the now hugely rich Indian cricket authorities to invest in grassroots cricket is, Astill explains, perfectly natural given the uneven distribution of wealth more broadly in the country. Cricket politics is a microcosm of the venal, brutal, cynical fight for power at state or national level. A chapter on Pakistan allows some of the subcontinent's most enduring geopolitical conundrums to be unravelled, the poor position of Muslims in India examined and the author to recount how he ended up facing Shoaib Akhtar, the colourful Pakistani fast bowler known as "the Rawalpindi express".
This narrative is helped along by lively interviews with strong characters. Astill has met many of those who matter in the sport – intimidating agriculture ministers who double as cricketing power-brokers, tycoons such as the flamboyant Vijay Mallya, famous former cricketers, Bollywood stars.
Not all are particularly agreeable. There is Lalit Modi, the livewire impresario who put together the glitzy, brash and immensely popular Indian Premier League before being forced into exile in London. He can be "extremely rude, even by the standards of rich Indians", Astill tells us.
Ashish Nandy, a verbose if widely respected social scientist who crops up intermittently through the book and who spoke brilliantly of how "cricket is an Indian game, accidentally discovered by the British", is gently and justifiably mocked. So too are the angry young men on a "fast unto death", a south Asian form of protest which these days generally involves missing lunch and not much more.
But many of those who find space in this crowded narrative, rather as they find space in scruffy provincial towns to bowl tennis balls wrapped in tape at batsmen equipped with bits of wood, are those whose voices are heard rather less often in modern India.
Astill spent a week living in both slums in Mumbai and a rural village in the dirt-poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which few writers have the time, or the desire, to do. And it is the stories of the aspirant stars in the shantytowns of the big cities and of men who coach them with such dedication that are genuinely moving.
Other marginal figures too are sympathetically treated. There is Vinod Kambli, who was once the batting partner of a youthful Sachin Tendulkar and seen by some as even more talented than the prodigious "little master", and there are the tawdry eastern European cheerleaders who are accurately and sympathetically described, as they cavort semi-naked before a crowd of tens of thousands of semi-inebriated Indian men, as "pathetic and vulnerable".
Much of the latter half of the book focuses on the Indian Premier League and it ends with a prophecy, too, of how the new Indian version of cricket – brash, fast, colourful, noisy, lucrative – will have a huge influence on the way the sport is played globally. This is not just of interest to sports followers but to strategists. For, as Astill suggests, the way the newly powerful, newly rich Indian sports administrators have ruthlessly pursued their interests on a world stage almost certainly prefigures the manner in which the leaders of a newly powerful, newly rich India may do. India is in so many ways an inspiring example to the world, Astill writes, but can also be an awkward partner: self-absorbed, often corrupt and overly anxious to be no one's fool.
The Great Tamasha tells a fascinating story well. Anyone interested in India, or cricket, and most certainly both, will enjoy it very much.