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James Astill's The Great Tamasha is a lively, enjoyable read. Its primary focus is the rise of the Indian Premier League (IPL) and how its success reflects the rise of new India. But on the way to the IPL, Astill takes on a quick historical journey through the birth and growth of Indian cricket itself, not just its T20 "enfant terrible".
The Great Tamasha defines itself as a book about "Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India". Two key words emerge in the title and description of the book - "turbulent" and "tamasha": both strong yet pertinent in the context of what we have seen in Indian cricket in the past few years.
How does the writer deal with the subject? Astill has lived in India for four years, as South Asia Bureau chief for The Economist. He is an accomplished journalist and a sense of curiosity and scepticism - so essential to the trade - are intrinsic to his line of inquiry of the whys and wherefores right through the book. The fact that he is an "outsider" and therefore unblemished by biases lends the journalistic drill a balance not usually found.
But he is also patently a cricket romantic, and this is never far removed from his investigation or his analyses. Cricket is a game he loves. That India - with all its passion and contradictions - is now the hub of the game fills him with awe and apprehension. He uses the rise of India as a cricketing power as a metaphor to understand the (still under construction) rise of India as an economic superpower. The book is not a comprehensive treatise of either, but lays out the premises strongly enough to make the association valid.
Astill's introduction to India's passion for cricket - a source of amazement to anybody who comes here - is early and complete. Close to where he lives in Delhi, as he describes in the introduction, the children of the staff of the people around him play cricket next to a public park. With hardly any equipment and no learned know-how, they play with enthusiasm, passion and skill. These are the children you see across India, playing the country's favourite game.
The T20 revolution that sweeps the country, however, is the basis of Astill's wonderment and this book. Tamasha is the key word Astill - and many people to whom he has spoken - uses to describe Twenty20 cricket: full of drama and show. Underlying that is the assumption that this form of limited overs cricket has little substance. There can be no argument there. Test cricket is indeed the pinnacle of the sport.
But while a viewer can get carried away or bemused by the dancing and music and stars and cheers that accompany IPL matches, it should not be forgotten that Twenty20 is not an Indian invention. Like the other forms of cricket, it was born on England's hallowed greens. This is a cliched criticism of Indian cricket that has long been repeated.
The story of cricket in India, however, begins with princes and Parsis, not paupers and Astill recounts its origins in a very readable summary of events. Through this, some questions recur: what is it about cricket that made it so popular in India? Everyone asks this and everyone has his or her own theories. The most quoted is Ashis Nandy's classic about cricket being an Indian game accidentally invented by the English.
The other answers Astill got are not as well-known but not unknown either: the fact that cricket does not require an athletic build which Indians do not have, that intelligence is more important than physicality and so on. All of these are half-truths at best and pop psychology at worst.
The IPL though is another story and it takes a tangential path from the growth of cricket in India. When Astill met him, Nandy the sociologist was less than enthusiastic about the IPL. Tiger Pataudi was not enthralled either (though he did serve on the governing council when the league started before breaking away and getting into litigation with the BCCI over money due to him) by this game that would conquer the hearts and minds of millions of Indians and fill the pockets of its controllers with even more millions.
Astill's story of the IPL is not one that is entirely unknown - how it grew and how it fell. But his book is fascinating because it is an outsider's view of India and its favourite game. Clearly, Astill is an outsider who has worked very hard to gain the insider's perspective. He travelled across the country and met a diverse range of players, cricket enthusiasts and administrators: Sharad Pawar, Madhav Mantri, Ranjitsinhji's great-nephew Shatrusalyasinhji, Amrit Mathur of the Delhi Daredevils, Niranjan Shah, Cheteshwar Pujara's father Arvind, Irfan Pathan, Kapil Dev and Vinod Kambli.
The star character of the book is the flawed genius of Lalit Modi, who fleshed out the idea of IPL and managed to make it a blockbuster until he fell from grace and fled the country. Astill presents us with a portrait of Modi as confident, arrogant, brash, hard-working, ambitious and strangely likeable. More than anything else, this picture of Modi and the early success of the IPL showcases modern India's turbulent rise as well as emphasises its dangers.
Astill also watched a lot of cricket and the cricket-player and -lover's voice is evident through his writing. He wrestles with the dilemma of whether IPL is cricket or not, and relies on both Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist - two Australian greats of vastly contrasting tempers - to tell him that it is: in a way!
The book ends in the slums of Dharavi, where children play cricket, passion and talent in their strokes and deliveries. This is a picture of India we have seen a billion times and might seem a trifle contrived. But it does not take away from the marvel of Indian cricket nor the readability of The Great Tamasha.
The reviewer is a senior journalist
THE GREAT TAMASHA
Author: James Astill
Publisher: Wisden Sports Writing, Bloomsbury India
Pages: 290
Price: Rs 399
