The great game

“IT IS in the matter of patience”, wrote Lord Harris, an early England cricket captain and later ruler of the British empire’s favourite game, “that I think the Indian will never be equal to the Englishman.” It was interesting to recall this last month as India’s batsmen were trouncing England’s at Lord’s, the north London home of cricket. And that was not all that would have horrified Harris who, as a 19th-century governor of Bombay (now Mumbai), was widely credited with introducing cricket to India.

Nothing illustrates the turnabout in British-Indian relations more starkly than India’s financial and political takeover of what was once an English summer game. When India’s best cricketers played their first Test match—cricket’s gold-seal, five-day format—at Lord’s in 1932, around the time Harris delivered his racist verdict, they came as hapless colonial subjects. At home they were the idols of an unlikely national religion. In England, where it took them four decades to win, India’s cricketers were timorous, poorly paid and uncompetitive. Yet in the 1990s India’s growth rate picked up, sparking a sports-media explosion which has transformed the world’s second-most-popular game; over 80% of cricket’s revenues are now said to be generated in India.

The Indian team that visited England this summer—to play a five-Test series which ended this week—included some of the world’s richest sportsmen. Its captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, earned $30m last year; hardly any English player made a million. And money buys influence. Holding court at Lord’s was a ponderous Tamilian, N. Srinivasan, wearing jam-jar glasses and a smear of vermilion to denote his high Hindu caste. The boss of India’s and the world’s governing bodies for cricket, he is the most powerful cricket administrator since Harris. He also owns one of India’s best cricket teams, the Chennai Super Kings, in the world’s fastest-growing sports contest, the Indian Premier League.

For David Cameron, a cricket fan, there are lessons here. The Conservative prime minister has made improving British-Indian ties one of his priorities. Cricket, the international arena most disrupted by India’s rise, suggests how he might attempt that.

The first lesson is that he is right to try. Countries that share a colonial legacy, including language and culture, should trade together far more prodigiously than Britain and India do. Cricket symbolises their bond; no other countries have so defined themselves by it. For eminent Victorians, cricket displayed their national virtues. It was “English, you know quite English,” wrote Harris. That is why their aspiring Indian subjects—with little help from Harris—embraced it. And a trace of that anglophilia endures among India’s elites. It was suggested by Mr Srinivasan’s emotional response after his team, the world champions of lower-brow one-day cricket, won at Lord’s (though they lost the series).

Yet most Indian cricket fans have perhaps never heard of that venerable English ground. Their enthusiasm is almost for a different game, the glitzy, shorter formats at which India excels. Cricket represents for them a different national story: India as a “cricket-crazy nation”, a youthful, patriotic place, bursting with hope and a desire to consume. This is the India that has got Mr Cameron excited for its economic potential; it will take more than appealing to a common history, in which young Indians are uninterested, to win its love. Taking England’s winsome cricket captain, Alastair Cook, on the prime minister’s next trip to Delhi might help.

A more sobering lesson for Mr Cameron concerns the nature of Indian power, which has bruised cricket. India’s growing influence has, in large part, been traumatic and divisive to a game which is unusually based on international competition. The collaborative culture that formerly governed that, albeit tinged with Anglo-Australian self-interest and suzerainty, has broken down. What India wants in cricket, concerning the international programme and sales of media rights, or even the rules of the game and its administration, it increasingly gets.

That was clear earlier this year, when India demanded more of the international revenues its team is mainly responsible for generating. This was not unreasonable; but the threatening way it negotiated, the craven way England and Australia accommodated it, and the resulting impoverishment of Pakistan, New Zealand and other poorer cricket nations were contemptible. What was once an English game, then an international one mapping the former British empire, is India’s to command. And this is a worrying prospect for cricket, given the match-fixing, infighting and administrative chaos that are other aspects of the game in India. The fact that Mr Srinivasan, even as he negotiated cricket’s new architecture, was suspended from the Indian cricket board while being investigated over corruption allegations, seemed indicative of this.

Play hard, play fair

That suggests two final truths for Mr Cameron. First, to expect no favours; India’s power brokers are ruthless and obdurate in cricket and otherwise. Indeed cricket, because of its wealth and popularity, is another facet of Indian politics. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and finance minister, Arun Jaitley, are among a clutch of Indian politicians leading state cricket associations—which makes the chaos in Indian cricket all the more dismal.

The second lesson is not to do as England’s cricket board did and bow to Indian bullying. In world trade and climate negotiations, where India has been unhelpful, and in its recent high-handed treatment of foreign investors, its bad behaviour should be condemned and resisted. Respecting India as a rising power is not the same as pandering to its elite’s worst compulsions.

If Mr Cameron, whose diplomacy tends to veer between finger-wagging and love-bombing, cannot see the difference, Indians can. And in a fading corner of their cultural memory, haunted by self-righteous but upstanding Victorians such as Harris, is perhaps a small feeling that the creators of cricket should hold India to a higher standard. Mr Cameron should honour that.