Friday 11 May 2012

THE ELEVEN BRAHMINS & ELEVEN MILLION FOOLS


“Cricket is a Game where eleven Brahmins & Upper Castes (~15%) play and eleven million Bahujan fools (85%) watch and eleven hundred fools in the upper caste media comment and analyse this stupid Game”

Cricket, brahmanism, bodies
Who really plays cricket in India? I am not a historian of the game, but it does not require much disciplinary training to infer that cricket is a game that best suits brahmanical tastes and bodies, and that there has been a preponderance of brahman cricket players at the national level. Bored princes and Parsis bent on mimicking the white sahibs might have been the first to take to the game in the Subcontinent, and we eventually had the Bombay Pentagular (communal cricket as it was called till 1946, where teams called Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsis, Europeans and Rest played each other), but post-1947 it has been a game mono-polised by brahmans and brahmanical castes. Little wonder Ashis Nandy, chronicler of modern Hinduism who dedicated one of his books to VD Savarkar, thinks cricket is a game naturally suited to Hinduism. Some commentators see cricket as truly vedantic. As Nandy has it, it is less Victorian/British and more Indian/Hindu. Maybe we need to take this considered view seriously. Compared to other modern team sports such as hockey or football, cricket hardly involves much physical activity. A cricketer can stay put in one place for a long time. Even a fast bowler expends energy in short spells and cools off at the boundary. Besides, fast bowlers are not what India is known for, except for Kapil Dev, a meat-eating jat. We do not need too much statistical backing to assert that Indian cricketers have excellent personal records at the expense of the team.
~extract from Anand's article 


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