The IPL and India’s identity

IPL has warped India’s regional identity, it is decidedly urban India and this is, perhaps, its greatest strength.

Brazilian footballer and former East Bengal club star Douglas de Silva, witnessing the frenzy of support for Brazil in Kolkata during the 2002 football World Cup, is said to have remarked: “It feels like I’m in Brazil!” After the hysteria that accompanied the felicitations to the Shah Rukh Khan-owned Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) on their winning the fifth addition of the Indian Premier League (IPL), we must wonder what King Khan feels. It certainly must seem funny that he has been banned from the Wankhede Stadium in his own home town, Mumbai.

KKR’s captain Gautam Gambhir declared himself a “son of Kolkata” and Shah Rukh, already West Bengal’s “brand ambassador”, must surely feel some kinship. In a moving enough speech, he said: “We had all come from different states — some had come from Mumbai, Gujarat, Delhi — and made this city our home. So we wanted to win the hearts of the Kolkatans. Today, I felt that I have won the heart of Kolkata.” The crowd cheered in approval.

The shift of allegiance has been sudden and dramatic. Even as of May 5, when KKR was set to face Pune Warriors in a league match at the Eden Gardens, many prominent Kolkatans had vowed they would back the rival team and wear Pune colours because it was being led by Sourav Ganguly. It was time to avenge for the ‘insult’ that the franchise owners had dealt their favourite son. But all is forgiven, it seems.

Indian TV channels that showed amazing scenes at the Eden Gardens on the day of the final, where West Bengal’s eccentric Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her attention-hungry ministers crowded the dais with Shah Rukh and the KKR players, said that the state government, that is hopelessly broke, spent considerable scarce resources on the ceremony. Banerjee, alternatively, exhorted the film star to dance, held hands with him, got hugged, cheered, screamed and ran towards the crowd in the stands. It was as if the KKR had won the World Cup, not a club tournament. We could wonder how many among the 70,000 screaming and dancing fans at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens, and another 25,000 thronging outside, were part of the “No Dada, No KKR” protests that arose when former Indian star and KKR captain Sourav Ganguly was left unsold at the 2011 IPL auction. That campaign had won millions of signatures and hugely compromised stadium attendance during the previous IPLs.

This time around, forget Ganguly, there was not a single Bengali in the KKR team that won the IPL final against the Chennai Super Kings led by Mahendra Singh Dhoni. The IPL has warped India’s regional identity. Mumbai Indians are currently led by Harbhajan Singh, otherwise captain of the Punjab state team; the Chennai Super Kings are led by Dhoni, from Jharkhand; and the Rajasthan Royals are led by Rahul Dravid from Bangalore. The IPL is decidedly urban India and this is, perhaps, its greatest strength.

Not everyone agrees. Historian and cricket writer Ramachandra Guha is aghast: in a scathing article in The Hindu titled “Smash-and-Grab Crony League”, he wrote: “The IPL is bad for capitalism, bad for Indian democracy and bad for Indian cricket”. He notes that not a single city in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state and among its poorest, was awarded a franchise. “Nor any city in Bihar, Orissa, or Madhya Pradesh either. To leave out four of India’s largest states — all cricket-mad, and which collectively account for close to half the country’s population — must seriously disqualify the League’s claim to be ‘Indian’.” Perhaps, Guha needs to consider that the players from these states are members of the city teams of the league.

The IPL, in this and previous versions, has been criticised for many reasons: for vulgar display of money, lack of transparency in allocation of franchises or player auction processes, boorish behaviour by players and stars under the influence and, possibly, player corruption, claimed to have been exposed by the tedious match-fixing sting. But the league has demonstrated for India that the big cities are rapidly moving out of regional affiliations. That could be indeed be bad news for sectarian politicians and their language identity politics: for Mumbai’s Bal Thackeray, for instance, and his even more aggressive nephew Raj Thackeray, who once questioned Amitabh Bachchan’s loyalty to Maharashtra because a character he plays mouthed the lyrics “Chhora Ganga Kinare Wala” from the movie Don. Shah Rukh though could be the new Don of Kolkata.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 11^th, 2012.