An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Cricket is, of course, the only sport in the world that breaks for tea (and for many amateurs, tea is the highlight of the experience). I have often thought that cricket is really, in the sociologist Ashis Nandy’s phrase, an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British. Everything about the sport seems suited to the Indian national character: its rich complexity, the infinite possibilities and variations possible with each delivery, the dozen different ways of getting out, are all rather like Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are laid down but the performer then improvises gloriously, unshackled by anything so mundane as a written score. The glorious uncertainties of the game echo ancient Indian thought: Indian fatalists instinctively understand that it is precisely when you are seeing the ball well and timing your fours off the sweet of the bat that the unplayable shooter can come along and bowl you. It is almost, as has also been observed, a pastime in which the Bhagavad Gita is performed in the guise of a Victorian English morality play. A country where a majority of the population still consults astrologers and believes in the capricious influence of the planets can well appreciate a sport in which an ill-timed cloudburst, a badly-prepared pitch, a lost toss of a coin or the sun in the eyes of a fielder can transform the outcome of a game. Even the possibility that five tense, exciting, hotly-contested and occasionally meandering days of cricket can...