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A tribute to the finest writers on the game of cricket and an acknowledgement that the great days of cricket literature are behind us. There was a time when major English writers – P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alec Waugh – took time off to write about cricket, whereas the cricket book market today is dominated by ghosted autobiographies and statistical compendiums. The Picador Book of Cricket celebrates the best writing on the game and includes many pieces that have been out of print, or difficult to get hold of, for years. Including Neville Cardus, C. L. R. James, John Arlott, V. S. Naipaul, and C. B. Fry, this anthology is a must for any cricket follower or anyone interested in sports writing elevated to high art.
Contributed articles.
A Corner of a Foreign Field seamlessly interweaves biography with history, the lives of famous or forgotten cricketers with wider processes of social change. C. K. Nayudu and Sachin Tendulkar naturally figure in this book but so, too, in unexpected ways, do B. R. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, and M. A. Jinnah. The Indian careers of those great British cricketers, Lord Harris and D. R. Jardine, provide a window into the operations of Empire. The remarkable life of India’s first great slow bowler, Palwankar Baloo, provides an arresting new perspective on the struggle against caste discrimination. Later chapters explore the competition between Hindu and Muslim cricketers in colonial India and the destructive passions now provoked when India plays Pakistan. For this new edition, Ramachandra Guha has added a fresh introduction as well as a long new chapter, bringing the story up to date to cover, among other things, the advent of the Indian Premier League and the Indian team’s victory in the World Cup of 2011, these linked to social and economic transformations in contemporary India. A pioneering work, essential for anyone interested in either of those vast themes, cricket and India, A Corner of a Foreign Field is also a beautifully written meditation on the ramifications of sport in society at large.
Anyone But England is a timely and entertaining exploration of the bonds which the English cricket to the English nation as both face apparently inexorable decline. Mike Marqusee, an American who has lived in England for twenty years, turns the amused gaze of an outsider on to the idiosyncrasies of the English at play, delving into the interminable wrangles over coloured clothing, covered pitches and commercial sponsorship. Yet Marqusee also displays the knowledgeability and passion of a dedicated cricket follower who has watched matches on four continents. His elegant and concise accounts of the origins of the game, its romance with the British Empire, and its traumatic adjustment to the modern market lift the lid on the paradoxes and hypocrisies that have made cricket what it is: democratic and elitist, national and international, ancient and modern. In a revealing scrutiny of the long saga of South Africa's exclusion from world cricket, Marqusee charts England's collusion with apartheid. Spectacularly failing the Tebbit test on every point, his eye-opening account of Pakistan's controversial 'ball-tampering' tour of England will provoke intense debate amongst cricket fans about the role of both the media and racism in the modern game. From the phoney war over the omission of Gower from the England side to England's women cricketers receiving the World Cup outside the Lord's pavilion from which they are banned, Anyone But England goes where no cricket book has gone before. In so doing it sheds new light not only on cricket but also on what it means to be part of a nation for whom the game is well and truly up.
From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger and Amnesty, a “ferociously brilliant” (Slate) novel about two brothers coming of age in a Mumbai slum, raised by their crazy, obsessive father to be cricket champions. *A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES * AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * A NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK Manjunath Kumar is fourteen and living in a slum in Mumbai. He knows he is good at cricket—if not as good as his older brother, Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented sibling, and is fascinated by curious scientific facts and the world of CSI. But there are many things, about himself and about the world, that he doesn’t know. Sometimes it even seems as though everyone has a clear idea of who Manju should be, except Manju himself. When Manju meets Radha’s great rival, a mysterious Muslim boy privileged and confident in all the ways Manju is not, everything in Manju’s world begins to change, and he is faced by decisions that will challenge his sense of self and of the world around him. Filled with unforgettable characters from across India’s social strata—the old scout everyone calls Tommy Sir; Anand Mehta, the big-dreaming investor; Sofia, a wealthy, beautiful girl and the boys’ biggest fan—Selection Day “brings a family, a city, and an entire country to scabrous and antic life” (Chicago Tribune).
In his important contribution to the growing field of sports literature, Anthony Bateman traces the relationship between literary representations of cricket and Anglo-British national identity from 1850 to the mid 1980s. Examining newspaper accounts, instructional books, fiction, poetry, and the work of editors, anthologists, and historians, Bateman elaborates the ways in which a long tradition of literary discourse produced cricket's cultural status and meaning. His critique of writing about cricket leads to the rediscovery of little-known texts and the reinterpretation of well-known works by authors as diverse as Neville Cardus, James Joyce, the Great War poets, and C.L.R. James. Beginning with mid-eighteenth century accounts of cricket that provide essential background, Bateman examines the literary evolution of cricket writing against the backdrop of key historical moments such as the Great War, the 1926 General Strike, and the rise of Communism. Several case studies show that cricket simultaneously asserted English ideals and created anxiety about imperialism, while cricket's distinctively colonial aesthetic is highlighted through Bateman's examination of the discourse surrounding colonial cricket tours and cricketers like Prince Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji of India and Sir Learie Constantine of Trinidad. Featuring an extensive bibliography, Bateman's book shows that, while the discourse surrounding cricket was key to its status as a symbol of nation and empire, the embodied practice of the sport served to destabilise its established cultural meaning in the colonial and postcolonial contexts.
Whispers, and then some progressively loud murmurs! Match fixing and illegal betting had begun to pervade the cricketing world. In 2000, when the much respected South African skipper, Hansie Cronje, was found guilty of match fixing soon after a trail of stars fell after the another. Prominent cricketers from India, South Africa, Kenya, England, Sri Lanka, West Indies, Pakistan, came out as fixers over the next decade. Life bans were handed out like sixes on no balls! The scandal really hit home in 2013, when spot-fixing allegations in the Indian Premier League resulted in the ouster of Indian and Rajasthan Royals bowler Sreesanth, along with two other players. This incident threw open the murky underworld connection – quite literally – in Indian cricket. For the first time, journalist Chandramohan Puppala traces cricket's biggest corruption back to the kingpin Dawood Ibrahim himself. Based on transcripts of police-recorded conversations and unpublished information about the players at the key of the storm, including some of India's biggest names, No Ball is a revealing account of the rot at the heart of Indian cricket.
In 2004 the Indian cricket team headed to Pakistan to play a historic series. Accompanying them was young cricket reporter Rahul Bhattacharya. The mood was tense, with political provocations and security fears. But as the archrivals met on the field, a rare spirit of bonhomie spread throughout the tour. And in streets and homes in Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, Multan, the author had many warm human encounters that made the tour unforgettable. This book vividly brings alive the magic of cricket, even as it chronicles an emotional and hopeful time, witnessed by a young Indian discovering Pakistan.
Chaudhuri's extravagant and discerning collection unfurls the full diversity of Indian writing from the 1850s to the present in English, and in elegant new translations from Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. Among the 38 authors represented are contemporary superstars such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Pankaj Mishra.