Not cricket

[Narendra Modi, right, with Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese before the 4th Test between India and Australia in March  © Prakash Singh/Bloomberg. Presumably the chaps in blue ties are from the Indian equivalent of the US secret service]

A couple of days ago, I was sorry to read in the Financial Times about the state of first class cricket in India at reference 1. Not that there is anything wrong with the cricket, which seems to be in very rude health.

Rather, it seems that the ruling Hindu nationalists see the game as a fine opportunity to promote their sectarian, majoritarian creed: India is for the Hindus! Hindi is for India! And to promote their leader, the increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister Modi. Never mind the 20% of the population - that is to say 300m people - mainly Moslems - who do something else. Not to mention the Parsis, the first of the Indian peoples to really take to cricket in the 19th century.

This included not allowing Pakistani fans to come over to Ahmedabad, not far across the border, for a recent match with India and subjecting the Pakistani team to a good deal of unpleasant barracking by the crowd. To be fair, it is not so long ago that English football fans went in for the same sort of thing - but at least it was not actively encouraged by the government of the day. 

I wonder how much of Modi's intolerance and worse is born of his long service in Gujarat, a state right on the border with Pakistan, a state with a long and complicated history, including hundreds of years under Moslem rule. Think Cyprus, another place ruled for a long time by a Muslim minority. 

I wonder whether Modi, a keen promoter of Hindi, is actually a native speaker of Gujarati, given that he was born there. Wikipedia no help on this occasion, while Bard says that 'Narendra Modi's mother tongue is Gujarati. He was born in Vadnagar, Gujarat, India, and his parents were Gujarati speakers. Modi is fluent in Gujarati and Hindi, and he can also speak English. He is a strong advocate for the use of Gujarati and other Indian languages in education'. Which last seems a bit wide of the mark. Bing sits on the fence, declining to answer. Something else to be checked in an idle moment.

Noting, in the meantime, that the language politics of India are complicated. Very roughly speaking, around half the population speak Hindi. Then of the rest, Bengali leads with something under a tenth. The north is mainly Indo-European, that is to say along with English and French, while southern four are Elamo-Dravidian, entirely different. And the awkward truth remains that around half the population can manage in English. It is going to take a good while for a single, national language to become established, in the way that English is in the UK or French is in France. See reference 4.

At least today, I took in a second version of the cricket story at reference 2, a story which did not read anything like as badly as that at reference 1. But it did talk of the 'bloody British partition of 1947' which grated a bit. OK so our record in India was patchy to say the least, not helped by the line taken by the likes of Winston Churchill, but by 1947 Atlee and Mountbatten just did the best they could. I dare say we would have done better had we got out in the 1930's - although who knows where that would have left the Indians when the Japanese came over the eastern hills in 1940.

PS 1: at reference 1, I think it is suggested that a good headline over the snap above might have been 'Narendra Modi visits the Narendra Modi Stadium to accept a portrait of Narendra Modi'. But all the Indian editors thought that discretion was the better part of valour. Maybe Prime Minister Modi is not known for his sense of humour.

PS 2: while maybe the photographer, Prakash Singh, is.

References

Reference 1: More than a game: Modi and India’s cricket supremacy: As the World Cup enters its concluding stages, historian Ramachandra Guha explores how the prime minister is shaping a sport in his image - Ramachandra Guha, Financial Times - 2023.

Reference 2:  A Billion Eyes on One of Sports’ Fieriest Rivalries: India vs. Pakistan: The teams’ face-off in the men’s cricket World Cup, which India won handily, was shadowed, as always, by the stormy history between the two countries - Mujib Mashal, New York Times - 2023.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarat. Read all about it.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India. The source of the map above.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=reich. Various posts touching on or about the work of David Reich. Whose book - 'Who we are and how we got here' - has quite a lot to say about the divide between north and south India.