The Empire Whines Back

  Peter Roebuck is sometimes lauded as the Neville Cardus of our times, but it is a highly misplaced accolade. His well publicized columns on the ongoing spat over the India Australia series are high on pieties and low on insight. He has been furiously backpedalling to escape domestic blowback from that shrieking denouncement after Sydney, and the latest column is further proof of a descent into schizophrenic wailing.

The aura of a literary meastro that surrounds Roebuck properly belongs to Mukul Kesavan, perhaps the most gifted cricket writer around. His latest blog entry is the best articulation I have read of the South Asian disaffection with cricket’s international establishment. Kesavan is spot on in so many ways that to list them all would be tedious, but the following quote captures one of the most important issues underlying this brouhaha:

[There is] a growing South Asian unease with the successful Australian attempt to claim the moral high ground in world cricket. Australians don’t like it but the country’s cricketers are widely seen as potty-mouthed bullies who manage to get away with murder partly because they sledge strategically and partly because the Australian definition of ‘hard but fair’—filth on the field and a beer off it—seemed to have been swallowed whole by the umpires and match referees who supervise international cricket… They remain convinced that umpires are (un)willing to sanction manly truculence (obscenity, lewdness and intimidation) but not shrill petulance (jack-in-box appeals, visible disappointment) because the former affects players while the latter is directed at umpires. This sense of being hard done by is reinforced by the pattern of bad decisions suffered by touring teams in Australia, Kumar Sangakkara’s appalling decision being perhaps the worst in recent times.

An Australian paper recently dug up tallies of misconduct verdicts slapped on various teams in the last several years, and the fact that India and Pakistan came out on top was flaunted as a big gotcha moment. This is revealing, but not in the way they intended. Those same numbers are viewed by the subcontinentals as reflection of a systemic bias against them, just as American blacks see their disproportionate rates of search, arrest and conviction as proof not of black criminality but of police prejudice.

In all these cases, there is an underlying reality which may agree with one side’s point of view or the other’s (and is more frequently somewhere in between), but it takes delicate analysis to uncover that. The more pertinent point is that people who display a lack of empathy in these matters, an unawareness of the fact that there are competing perspectives through which the “evidence” can be viewed, who are tone deaf to other people’s historical baggage and cultural expectations, are the bulk of modern chauvinists, not stupid hotheads who can’t stay off taboo words. The fact that some major Australian dailies don’t get it even after the Mike Denness and Darrell Hair controversies says a lot.

For a long time, cricket was ruled by MCC’s snooty classism and velvet etiquette. Thanks in large part to their on-field dominance, it has been supplanted to an extent by a very Australian ethos, which combines locker room swagger with a capricious officiousness. Those who think umpires and match referees consciously favor white skinned players are simpletons. The heart of the matter isn’t so much the uneven enforcement of rules, but the officialdom’s (often implicit) formulation of the rules themselves in a manner that enshrines cultural bias. South Asians grow up playing the game with an animated, flailing rowdiness, while young Australians are more accustomed to carrying themselves with a confident strut and snappy insults.

If white match referees and ICC officials cannot see beyond their culturally specific sensitivities, sorting out ethical essence from arbitrary norms, then they have no business sitting on their high horse. Gavaskar (his being a one-note pony notwithstanding) was right in questioning Mike Procter’s neutrality. Procter was quick to vent his apartheid guilt on the use of racial epithets, forgetting that there is the scope for a no less insidious symbolism in his actions – the hanging of a native based on white man’s say-so. That makes him more than incompetent.

Those who say that the BCCI wielded its power irresponsibly are absolutely right. Even if Bhajji lynched and burned Symonds right in front of the cameras, the desi brigade would have shown the same reflexive jingoism and staunch denial. But sometimes two wrongs can make some sort of a right if they raise the possibility of mutual destruction or at least comeuppance. It is wonderful that the cavalier racism of many Indians, that gleeful denigration of the kallus and the ganwars, has been brought under international spotlight. It is also worth a beer or two that the entrenched sense of entitlement of cricket’s traditional powers, their smug cultural assumptions, is having its nose rubbed in a pile of dirty money – that commodity on whose might colonies were once created and empires are still being built.

I am sorry that this matter didn’t come to its proper fruition in an Indian walkout. The Bhajji acquittal has precipitated an enormous whine fest in the Australian cricketing establishment and a scampering for the moral high ground momentarily left vacant by the Indians. The most annoying thing about Ponting is not his gamesmanship or foul mouth, but his incurious and unshakable sanctimony (Kesavan’s comparison with George Bush is very apt). If anyone remembers the opening act of this soap opera – Symonds grumbling about the over-the-top reception to India’s 20-20 stars – you’ll notice a psychological theme has come full circle: financial envy. Many Australian cricketers see it as a great injustice that they win all the games while pampered Indian players roll in the money and adulation.

The sooner these petulant schoolboys are ceremoniously kicked off that gravy train of the IPL, the better.