Democracy’s XI: The Great Indian Cricket Story - Book Review

A journalist sums up the evolution of Indian cricket from diffidence to dominance through a hand-picked team straddling different eras

Cricket, like any team sport, lends itself to lists. For connoisseurs, drawing up an all-time eleven is an exercise seasoned with nostalgia and strong views. Television journalist Rajdeep Sardesai has taken that initiative a step further in his book Democracy’s XI: The Great Indian Cricket Story.

A news-scribe anchored to political reportage, Sardesai’s previous book was 2014: The Election That Changed India. 

Yet, as evident in his tweets, Sardesai is also fond of philosophical musings, old Hindi songs and cricket. His links to the willow-game mixes genetics — his late father Dilip Sardesai was a former India cricketer — with a fan’s obsession for the game. 

Sardesai Junior has played too and he has a profile page on Cricinfo with the numbers: seven matches for Oxford University in 1987, yielding 222 runs averaging 27.75. Candidly, Sardesai admits that he finally preferred the ‘less strenuous world of journalism’.

Rewarding merit

Democracy’s XI isn’t entirely based on pure-performance and staggering statistics, though legends like Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar are intrinsic to the 371-page tome. Sardesai’s eleven is essentially a socio-anthropological dive into different eras, varied geographies and fluctuating economic conditions that threw up players, who reflected a nation on the move, its democratic credentials largely evinced through cricket. 

It is a subjective list entirely driven by Sardesai’s desire to show the game’s far-flung roots and it being a barometer for rewarding merit. “Seventy years after Indian Independence, we could well argue that cricket is one of the few largely meritocratic activities,” he writes.

The author’s eleven features Dilip Sardesai, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, Bishan Singh Bedi, Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Mohammad Azharuddin, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Virat Kohli.

Since nepotism is an oft-used word these days, there could be the odd query on why Sardesai’s father is on the list, but there is no denying that Sardesai Senior was a fine player and more importantly as a cricketer hailing from Margao, he proved that there is more to Goa than just football. 

In that sense, Dilip Sardesai fits into the book, and additionally his tale reveals the amateur spirit around cricket in the 1960s and the obvious lack of money, far removed from the crores that garland Kohli and company.

In his introduction, Sardesai describes his book as an effort to paint “anecdotal mini-portraits of eleven cricketers who in their own unique way represent the universal and pluralistic appeal of the sport.” 

Sardesai has stuck to that benchmark and it helps that being a journalist with an experience of close to three decades, he has at varying points interacted with these players. The guard is lowered and cricketers open up to him and it makes for a good read.

Read the original article on: The Hindu