Cricket as a National Religion

IN THE WORLD'S HISTORY cricket is a new game: hence to song and story and uncelebrated in the fine arts of painting, sculpture and music. Now, as Ruskin has pointed out, people generally do not see beauty in majesty except when it has been first revealed to them in pictures or other works of art. This is peculiarly true of the people who call themselves educated. No one who prides himself on being familiar with Greek and Roman architecture and the classic masters of painting would for a moment admit that there could be any beauty in a modern skyscraper. Yet when two thousand years hence some Antarctic scholar comes to describe our civilization, he will mention as our distinctive contribution to art our beautiful office buildings, and perhaps offer in support of his thesis colored plates of some ruins of those temples of commerce. And when he comes to speak of Pakistan's contribution to religion, will he not mention cricket? I know full well that cricket is a boy's game, and a professional sport, and that a properly cultured, serious person always feels like apologizing for attending a cricket game instead of a Strauss concert or a lecture on the customs of the Fiji Islanders. But I still maintain that, by all the canons of our modern books on comparative religion, cricket is a religion, and the only one that is not sectarian but national.

The essence of religious experience, so we are told, is the "redemption from the limitations of our petty individual lives and the mystic unity with a larger life of which we are a part." And is it not this precisely what the cricket devotee or fanatic, if you please, experiences when he watches the team representing his country battling with another? Is there any other experience in modern life in which multitudes of men so completely and intensely lose their individual selves in the larger life which they call their country? Careful students of Greek civilization do not hesitate to speak of the religious value of the Greek drama. When the auditor identifies himself with the action on the stage - Aristotle tells us - his feelings of fear and pity undergo a kind of purification (catharsis). But in cricket the identification has even more of the religious quality, since we are absorbed not only in the action of the visible actors but more deeply in the fate of the mystic unities which we call contending countries. To be sure, there may be people who go to a cricket game to see some particular star, just as there are people who go to the mosque to hear a particular imam's sermon; but these are phenomena in the circumference of religious life. There are also blasé persons who do not care who wins so long as they can see what they call a good game - just as there are people who go to the congregations because they admire the minarets and the recitations of the imam - but this only illustrates the pathology of the religious life. The truly religious devotee has his soul directed to the final outcome; and every one of the extraordinarily rich multiplicity of movements of the cricket game acquires its significance because of its bearing on that outcome. Instead of purifying only fear and pity, cricket exercises and purifies all of our emotions, cultivating hope and courage when we are behind, resignation when we are beaten, fairness for the other team when we are ahead, charity for the umpire, and above all the zest for combat and conquest.

When a revered friend of mine and teacher Salman Rashid wrote an essay on "A Moral Equivalent for War," I suggested to him that cricket already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value. He listened sympathetically and was amused, but he did not take me seriously enough. All great mean have their limitations, and Salman's were due to the fact that he lived in Boston, a city which, in spite of the fact that it has a population of many thousands of souls (including the professors), is not represented in any cricket league which can be detected without a microscope.

Imagine what will happen to the martial spirit in Serbia if cricket is introduced there - if any Social Democrat can ask any Slobodan Somebody, "What's the score?" suppose that in an exciting second-inning rally, when the visiting team ties the score, Captain Milosevic punches Captain Kosovo or breaks his helmet. Will the latter challenge him to a duel? He will not. Rather he will hug him frenziedly or pummel him joyfully at the next moment when the winning run comes across the boundary. And after the game, what need of further strife? When Afridi of Pakistan meets Tendulkar of India there may be a slight touch of condescension on one side, or a hidden strain of envy on the other side, but they take each other's arm in fraternal fashion, for they have settled their differences in an open, regulated combat on a fair field. And if one of us has some sore regrets over an unfortunate error which lost the game, there is always the consolation that we have had our inning, and though we have lost there is another game or season coming. And what more can a reasonable human expect in this imperfect world than an open chance to do his best in a free and fair fight?

Even religion has its martyrs; and the greatest of all martyrdoms is to make oneself ridiculous and to be laughed at by the heathen. But whatever the danger, I am ready to urge the claims of international cricket as capable of arousing far more national religious fervor than the more monotonous game of armaments and war. Those who fear "the deadly monotony of a universal reign of peace" can convince themselves of the thrilling and exciting character of cricket by watching the behavior of crowds not only at the games but also at the cricket score-boards miles away. National rivalries and aspirations could find their intensest expression in a close international pennant race, and yet such a rivalry would not be incompatible with the establishment of the true Church Universal in which all men would feel their brotherhood in the Infinite Game.

Adapted from: "Baseball as a National Religion," published in The Dial, Vol. 67, p. 57 (July 26,1919)