The Great Tamasha Quotes

“Within a year or two of Partition – despite all the massacres that had attended it – Hindu–Muslim relations appeared, almost miraculously, to have returned to normal in India. This was highlighted by Pakistan’s maiden Test tour of India, in 1952. It was by far the most prominent interaction between the two countries since their bloody separation. It was also less than five years since their inaugural war, over the former princely state of Kashmir, which was divided in the process. Yet the visiting Pakistanis were feted by India’s government in Delhi (where they also visited the shrine in Nizamuddin) and by rapturous crowds.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“Such class-based oddities gave English cricket a somewhat paradoxical reputation. It was at once popular and elite. It was exclusive yet, as a rare forum for gentry and commoners to interact, a source of social cohesion. Hence the historian G.M. Trevelyan’s famous claim that the French aristocrats would have spared themselves the guillotine if they had only played cricket with their serfs.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“Salim looked surprised. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘The upper levels do the match-fixing and we have no involvement. Also not all teams are manageable. But we know which team will win. Pakistan is the best team for match-fixing.’ ‘We hate Pakistanis!’ Salim’s accomplice chipped in. He looked and sounded very angry. ‘Why?’ ‘Because they say we are not good Muslims. It’s like you are Christian and some Christian country-wallah says you are not good.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“A more interesting question was asked by a small boy, who had been brought along by his elder sister: ‘You’re a Muslim,’ he said to the fast bowler Irfan Pathan, ‘so why aren’t you playing for Pakistan?”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“Besides batting, Inzy mainly liked eating and sleeping. Like most Pakistani cricketers, he was pious and uncomfortable speaking English and his batting was largely uncoached. On occasion his manners let him down. As when, fielding on the boundary in a hilariously misnamed ‘Friendship Cup’ game against India in Toronto, an Indian heckler had insulted him, calling him ‘mota aloo’, or fat potato. Inzy then called for a bat and leapt into the crowd with it to try to brain the heckler.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“And as they started laying about the bowling, the crowd started shouting appreciation for them too: ‘Sachin Zindabad!’ and ‘Sehwag Zindabad!’ And suddenly thousands were shouting ‘India Zindabad!’ A group of youths were tearing around the boundary line holding the Indian tricolour and green flag of Pakistan knotted together. ‘India Zindabad! Pakistan Zindabad!’ the crowd thundered. Had I not heard it, I would not have believed it was possible. In mad, murderous Karachi, the crowd was working itself into raptures over these Indians who, despite everything they knew about the city, had trusted to come to it to play cricket.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“In February 2002 three Kashmiri militants, under arrest in Delhi, confessed that they had been hatching a plan to kidnap Tendulkar and India’s then-captain, Sourav Ganguly.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“Yet Azhar also had it tough. When India played Pakistan, the pressure on him to perform was enormous. Indian Muslims needed his runs for inspiration; Hindu nationalists needed them to be convinced of his loyalty. When Azhar once scored a match-winning century, Thackeray declared him a ‘nationalist Muslim’, a phrase that was doubly insidious.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“As India’s last wicket fell, the Chennai crowd rose to applaud the victorious Pakistanis. It was a reminder that some Indian fans could still appreciate a good game, whatever the result. Barely believing what they were witnessing, the Pakistani cricketers went on a slow victory lap of the stadium. Audibly moved, the Indian television commentator Harsha Bhogle intoned, ‘If you ever wanted to see a victory for sport, here it is in your television screens, in your drawing rooms.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“It is the duty of Muslims to prove they are not Pakistani,’ declared Shiv Sena’s leader, Bal Thackeray, ahead of a big match. ‘I want them with tears in their eyes every time India loses to Pakistan.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“Pakistanis love cricket as fervently as Indians – maybe even more. Geoff Lawson, the former Australia fast bowler and Pakistan national team coach, told me he thought Pakistanis cared more about cricket ‘because there’s not a whole lot else for them to do. It’s either cricket or the mosque’.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“The best explanation for India’s shortage of fast bowlers is not religious or physiological: India has 30 million Punjabis of its own and an awful lot of tall people. It is cultural. India’s biggest cricketing heroes have been batsmen, from Nayudu to Gavaskar and Tendulkar. Some see in this a continuation of the old British snobbery favouring gentleman-batsmen over working-class bowlers.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“According to Zaheer Khan, one of India’s few successful recent fast bowlers, ‘Indian bodies are not designed to bowl fast.’ This is a popular theory. When, in the 1990s, the south Indian Javagal Srinath – one of India’s few genuine pacers – proved to be an exception to it, the reaction was wryly self-deprecating. Srinath was hailed in India as ‘the world’s fastest vegetarian’.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“The uplifting 1952 Test series was won by India 2-1. The next two series, in 1954 and 1960, were held against a backdrop of rising tensions over Kashmir, and this was sadly reflected in the cricket. Terrified of losing, both teams played very defensively, producing ten consecutive and extremely boring draws.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“Sunil Gavaskar and the Pakistani batsman Zaheer Abbas roomed together in Australia during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, while playing together for a Rest of the World side. They were said to have ‘shared the tension by consoling each other’.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“Yet Baig never scored another fifty for India. Early in 1961 he was dropped after scoring just 34 runs in five innings, during three home Tests against Pakistan. It was subsequently revealed that he had received hate mail accusing him of deliberately underperforming against his fellow Muslims. ‘I was flabbergasted,’ Baig recalled. ‘I mean, it hadn’t even occurred to one that anyone could connect my poor form to my being a Muslim.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“The problem is greatest at youth level. In 2007 one of the DDCA selectors was alleged to be demanding sex from mothers in return for picking their sons for his age-group side. On learning that this was a sure-fire route to getting his son picked for Delhi, one ambitious father was reported to have fixed up the selector with a 5,000-rupee-a-trick prostitute, masquerading as his wife. If this happened, commented Kadambari Murali of the Hindustan Times, it was ‘far less than what some parents have allegedly paid to get their sons to play for Delhi’.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English.’ Nandy then argues that cricket’s success on the subcontinent was testament to the game’s intrinsic compatibility with ancient Hindu culture. With reference to the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, he argues that Indians prefer slow-burning dramas and endless digression, that they have an equivocal view of destiny, in which victory and defeat are always partial. These qualities, Nandy argues, are provided by cricket. Thus, Indians did not merely acquire the game of their colonial occupier – in some deep cultural sense, they owned it all along.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“that there’s a rhythm, if not an algorithm, to cricket that many South Asians identify with. No one’s fully defeated; no one’s fully victorious. Just when you think you’re fully defeated, someone scores a double-century.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“It opens magnificently: ‘Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English.’ Nandy then argues that cricket’s success on the subcontinent was testament to the game’s intrinsic compatibility with ancient Hindu culture. With reference to the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, he argues that Indians prefer slow-burning dramas and endless digression, that they have an equivocal view of destiny, in which victory and defeat are always partial.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“This was a service often provided by the batsmen, on occasion by Tiger’s own monocular medium-pace. One commentator referred to the tactic as India’s ‘non-violent bowling policy’.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“As early as 1952 this led India’s great batsman Vijay Merchant to predict that India’s fast-bowling stocks would suffer as a result. ‘Above all, the partition has deprived India of future fast bowlers,’ he wrote. ‘In the past, India often relied for fast bowling on the North Indian people, who because of their height and sturdy physique, are better equipped for this kind of bowling than the cricketers of Central India or the South.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“I would like the public of Bombay to revise their sporting code and erase from it communal matches. I can understand matches between colleges and institutions, but I have never understood the reason for having Hindu, Parsi, Muslim and other Communal Elevens. I should have thought such unsportsmanlike divisions would be considered taboo in sporting language and sporting manners.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“He was the sort of accomplished, anglicised Indian the British had sought, as a matter of policy, to create. He was, as Lord Macaulay would have noted approvingly, ‘brown in colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Nehru jokingly called himself the ‘last Englishman to rule India’.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“It was said he once chastised one of his batsmen, Chandu Borde, for wearing a Maharashtra state cricket cap on India duty; at which Borde pointed out that Pataudi himself often wore his Sussex cap. ‘Ah, Chandu,’ Tiger replied, ‘but Maharashtra is not Sussex.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“When I got out for a duck, they said I was no good because I’d only got one eye. And when I got a hundred, they said there must be nothing wrong with my eyesight after all. I’m afraid Indians are a very cynical people.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India

“The joke was that Vizzy hunted tigers – of which he claimed to have bagged over 300 – by placing a transistor radio in the jungle and boring them to death with his commentary.”
― James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India