Opinion
Auspicious Signs of IPL Stirring
Community Feeling
by Shylashri Shankar
Everyone agrees that the
Indian Premier League (IPL) has produced a fine spectacle but disagrees
on whether it is good or bad for cricket. Film star brand ambassadors
like Akshay Kumar and owners like Shah Rukh Khan and Preeti Zinta, the
Washington Redskin cheerleaders and others provide the glamour and glitz
to the three-hour cricket spectacle staged in the arena. Will the IPL
produce a Roman spectacle, a fierce locally held identity that could
spark hooliganism of the European football league variety, or a more
diffuse community that spurs qualities of good citizenship?
On one end of the spectrum, you have the Roman gladiatorial spectacle
where citizens came, cheered, saw a death and left satisfied. For
Romans, the gladiator versus the beast was a bloody show that gave them
a chance to come together and feel Roman against the outsiders (the
gladiators and perhaps the beasts too).
On the other end of the spectrum, you have a situation where people with
overlapping loyalties come together and cheer for their teams or for the
underdog, but perhaps not caring enough for the winners or losers. For
instance, if one is born in Chennai, has lived for a period in
Hyderabad, and now resides in Delhi, which team is one loyal to? One may
be happy if any of the three gets to the finals. We can call it the
production of civic overlapping communities.
And in the middle of the spectrum, you have the strongly held local
loyalties of a Dilliwala versus a Mumbaikar (similar to American
football fans) who would die rather than cheer for the other team even
if their team was not playing in the match. We can call it tribalism.
It is unlikely that the IPL will reproduce the Roman scenario because
the players are local, national and international. Pakistanis jostle
with Australians and Indians in one team, which, unlike the Roman
spectacle where gladiators were not Roman, makes it hard for the
spectators to feel Indian against the outsiders. In the IPL, the stakes
are not life and death, and the boundaries are not between citizens and
outsiders.
If not the Roman scenario, will the IPL produce fierce localism verging
on hooliganism? The European experience with football suggests that fans
would use any means, including hooliganism, to push their teams to
victory. Hooliganism for sociologist John Clarke is a reaction on the
part of alienated youths from disintegrated working class communities
against the commercialisation and spectacularisation of football. The
advertisements for IPL certainly suggest that the ideal viewer ought to
possess almost tribe-like loyalties to a team. For fierce tribe-like
city loyalty, IPL has to have a core fan base, which is not yet present
and may never materialise.
"How can you generate city loyalty in a sport that is so focused on
national identity?" says cricket historian Ramachandra Guha. Committed
cricket fans are still ambivalent about IPL because they argue that the
Twenty20 variant is a batsman's show and does not give a fair chance to
the bowler. Guha and others argue that IPL commodifies cricketers and
denudes the craft of the game. IPL may produce consumers, not committed
fans, so fierce localism may not materialise either.
A nation is an imagined community, said British social anthropologist
Benedict Anderson. Imagined because members of even the smallest nation
will never meet or know all their fellow members "but in the mind of
each lives the image of their communion". Every sport has its own
imagined community. For instance, football and rugby in England attract
the white, male, working class audience and exclude those like women and
ethnic minorities who do not fit the category. Basketball is the
favourite of ethnic minorities (mainly black) in the UK. But cricket
transcends class, religious and linguistic cleavages. Go to any park or
street in India and you will see poor and rich boys playing cricket,
perhaps not together. Cricket fans include men and women of all ranks.
Will IPL produce Amartya Sen's multiple and overlapping imagined
communities among the cricket fans of the world? What IPL may do is to
bring fans and others together for three hours in a stadium, instead of
just watching it from a distance on the small screen. The combination of
sport and spectacle in the IPL games may generate an imagined community
that transcends jingoism. There are promising signs for such a
development. Notwithstanding the Bhaji-Sreesanth slap episode, the
interaction between players on the field has been characterised by
camaraderie rather than conflict. Among viewers too, there was fellow
feeling as we, in one Delhi game, struggled to make sense of the
scoreboard. Finally, people started using their cell phones to check
with friends who were watching the match on TV and gaily shared the
information with the rest of us. The start of a civic community perhaps?
Maybe that is premature, but there are auspicious signs.
Tocqueville noted about America that citizens' groupings formed around
sport to cultivate cultural values of equality, liberty, excellence and
virtue. IPL could create a community based on the shared experience of
watching a game. But to do so depends on several factors: a hassle-free
experience for the fan in the arena, good security and policing,
non-prohibitive ticket prices, players who display camaraderie with the
opposing team and play in the spirit of the game, and more competitive
pitches that offer batsmen and bowlers a fair game.
Unlike international cricket or any other game where India's national
pride is at stake, an IPL game generates less jingoistic nationalism,
and more community-like feelings. I asked a Delhi-based friend's driver
whom he and his friends supported in IPL. He said that he supported the
Delhi Daredevils and the Kolkata Knight Riders. He was not a Bengali. It
turns out that they support teams with good players from the under-19
contingent. So speaketh the true cricket 'affectionado' for whom the
sport trumps parochialism.
The teams that comprise players from New Zealand, Australia, Pakistan
and India, among others, are melting pots that subsume racial, class and
religious differences. One supports the entire team like Kolkata Knight
Riders, not just Sourav Ganguly or Ricky Ponting. This helps educate and
acclimatise fans and viewers into thinking globally not locally. One
hopes IPL will produce more communities of viewers who share an
enjoyable experience for three hours and learn to be civic-minded. But
we have a long way to go.
(Shylashri Shankar is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy
Research. She can be reached on shylashris@gmail.com)
Boloji.com is owned and managed by
Boloji Media Inc Privacy Policy |
Disclaimer No part of this Internet site may
be reproduced without prior written permission of the copyright holder.
