ST John was the poet among the disciples of Jesus. The first verse of his Gospel is deservedly famous. But I am haunted by the magic of his second and third verses describing creation: “…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters… Then God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.” That light was from the eternal fire of knowledge, and knowledge is lost without vocabulary.
It is a fundamental duty of a diary to descend from the sublime to the familiar, but do so on the downward ladder of association. Should ‘Bazball’, a term concocted by the authors of the latest chapter of English cricket, enter the dictionary of knowledge or is it no more than a fad dreamt up by a half-clever ad agency? Evidence from the India-England series suggests that the hype was a flurry, and you cannot inflict the culture of a limited game upon the strategies necessary for the unique five-day format.
Cricket is the only sport in history with the courage to spread its genius across five days of thought, labour and creativity. Its variations are welcome. But the oil of change cannot mix with the water of the original.
Institutionalised change
The variations came when Anglo-Australian cricketers began to weaken from old age in the 1970s. The West Indies, armed with the aggression of usurpers, were the first to challenge the establishment on the field by stretching the violence inherent in the format to the tensile elasticity of the rules. The change had to be institutionalised to survive; hence One-Day cricket and then its moveable spawn. The old sits beside the new, with different degrees of comfort, with space for all in the multi-generation family. What will not survive is hybrid crossfertilisation.
George Bernard Shaw, English literature’s indefatigable gadfox rather than gadfly, thought the English had invented cricket to give them some sense of eternity since they had no idea of spirituality. Worth a thought, even if Shaw was an Irishman who understood the genetic commitment of the English to the many forms of colonialism. Indians love cricket for their own reason. It brings out the hidden child inside. Football is another story. It brings out the disguised teenager.
Indo-Anglia history
A letter in the English weekly Spectator provides some fine details about the authentic, as opposed to merely political, history of Indo-Anglia. In 1924, Edward Palmer, a retired officer of the Indian Army, set up a Mughal pavilion at the Wembley Empire Exhibition. The reason was personal. Palmer’s greatgreat-grandfather, a General in the East India Company Army of Indian sepoys and British officers, had married Begum Fyze Baksh, a Mughal princess.
Palmer’s curry was a hit. Encouraged, he opened Veeraswamy on Swallow Street in the heart of London; this restaurant became popular and remains iconic. Among its patrons was a cousin of King George V, Prince Axel of Denmark. The prince so enjoyed his dinner that he sent a case of Danish beer, Carlsberg Pilsner, as a gift. That began the fashion for a beer with Indian curry, and launched the rise of Carlsberg as a multinational.
