My Satanic Verses: Sachin as Gibreel

“In his secret heart, he crept silently up on London, letter by letter.... _Ellowen deeowen London_.” That was Salman Rushdie writing of the boy Salahuddin Chamchawala in Bombay.

These past few weeks I have been waking up at five in the morning to watch the World Cup matches. On these mornings, London creeps up on me on the backs of another mantra. It is the mantra of cricket.

Slip, cover, gully. These words make music in my mind. Phrases like “a maiden over” conjure sunlit afternoons and diligent, adolescent attention. I forget for a moment that cricket came to the Indian subcontinent with the British.

In that moment, history is reversed. Watching the World Cup on pay-per view, I am witness to an immigrant act: these cricket matches are about India and Indianness coming to the heart of England.

In Rushdie’s _Satanic Verses_, Gibreel spreads his arms and enumerates the advatages of turning London into a tropical city. They include the institution of a national siesta, higher quality popular music, a new mass markets for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays, better cricketers....

Rushdie also adds “No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love.” But I cannot attend to these last few details here, because that would not be cricket. For now, we must return to the commentary.

In the London of my reawakened imagination, it is Sachin Tendulkar who takes on the image of Rushdie’s Archangel Gibreel.

There are routine clichés that sportswriters offer in homage to Tendulkar (“the silken touch and harnessed power that has become his trademark”). And I find myself naively eager to read in them flamboyant declarations of postcolonial independence.

What kind of corniness have I been lucky to be blessed with! I’m wholly taken by the newspaper headline “Mother sends son to battle for nation.” In the story that follows about Tendulkar’s 140 not out against Kenya, immediately after his return from India where he went to attend his father’s funeral, I’m even prepared to discern determinate female agency in the dominantly male, indeed masculinist, arena of Indian cricket....

Such narratives of redemption! Such narrations to rescue the nation! Tendulkar’s mother becomes our own mother, and the mother of all mothers, Bharat Mata. Sachin himself is our Arjuna on the battlefield.
Who shall be Krishna? Well, the sportswriter, and we, Sachin’s brothers.

If you happen to be a woman, you get to sink your fantasies in the mother, of course. If you are a Muslim, well, find a role for yourself from among the characters in the _Mahabharata_. None of them happen to be Muslims, it’s true, but at least you have a million characters to choose from. That is why the genre favored by the nation is an epic: it is designed to digest all diferences.

But, are there no other stories? Isn’t the England where Sachin performs his magical acts haunted by the specters of other pasts?

In his short-story “Warren Hastings Ka Saand” (The Bull of Warren Hastings), the contemporary Hindi writer Uday Prakash takes us back into another England. Warren Hastings, you will recall, was the Governor General of the East India Company. He drew attention as much for his patronage of Oriental studies as for his trial in England where he was charged with having led the imperial enterprise astray.

In his story, Prakash presents as his characters the cows and the single bull taken by Hastings to his estate in Berkshire. Here, the animals are represented as sentient, suffering beings who understand the languages of the humans: “Tears flowed continually from the cow’s eyes. The industrial capitalist society of England had not seen such tears. The cow did not eat any fodder, it refused to drink any water. If we are to use a political vocabulary, then in the history of India, the first satyagrah against England took place in England in the town of Berkshire ....”

At the story’s end, on the very day that the trial of Warren Hastings draws to a close, the bull mentioned in the story’s title revolts and wreaks havoc at the Berkshire estate. It is executed by an armed corps of the imperial army.

In a fine twist, we discover that the fat in the bull’s body is surreptitiously sold by a servant to the Davenport Leather Factory. From the factory the fat reaches an armory, and several decades later, on 27 March 1857, during the first revolt of independence, it is the fat of this bull present in the rifle cartridges of the sepoys that incited one of them, Mangal Pandey, to shoot the British adjutant. The first war of Indian independence had begun.

Good enough. But, again, our stories lead to a nation’s fantasy. In this story it is not cricket but cattle that are yoked to the cause of the nationalist narration. But , it is disappointing for me to find even the bull -- like the sportswriters’ Sachin -- presented as such a patriotic citizen. India’s sacred cows!

Let me explain my disappointment. I have nothing against khadi-clad truths per se. I only refuse to be dewy-eyed about nationalisms that while claiming to speak for all only speak for a few.

To the ecstatic British-Indian fans at the English cricket grounds, gyrating their hips to the rhythm of bhangra beats when Tendulkar hits a boundary, I want to address a simple question. The same question can be asked, for that matter, of the Pakistani fans cheering a Moin Khan sixer too.

Did your hearts heave with such emotion when the Indian and Pakistani working-class women in the West Midlands factory went on strike and, in the words of John Hutnyk and Virinder Kalra, reflected the solidarity of “trade-union activists, anti-racist organizations and other left-wing organizations”?

Does the warmth that’s supposed to bind us all in the face of the display of cricketing prowess by our beloved cricketers ever lend its strength to other voices, like the voices of those striking factory women who adapted a classical Punjabi love song “Kehnde ne naina” (My eyes are saying) as an anthem for the strike? Let me end by repeating the words of that song which gathers such powerful resonances in the diaspora (this song was recorded by Kalra at a demo):


We proclaim

We are here to stay

You who have ruined our lives,

What more can you want?

I am tired of bowing down

The time has come to rise up and stand tall

From today, I vow to have no fear

In life only unity brings victory


Without struggle

There’s no fulfilment

By fighting for our rights

We find peace of mind

What more can I say?