LISTICLE
Follow UsLists are just hard, okay? Shakespeare should have just asked “what to pick and what not to pick” and made it the defining existential question of our lifetimes.
List-making becomes even harder when the topic is cricket books. Sports, by its very nature, is a partisan activity. As a fan, you are incentivized by following one team or player. From merchandise to eyeballs and social media numbers, sports have been mercilessly encroached on by the capitalist industrial complex.
Amidst all this, remaining free and fair and still picking your six favorite cricket books of all time is a mind-wrenching task. But it’s also fun because where else will I get to regurgitate my love for well-written sports literature?
The selection criteria were simple for me. Good sports writing always places the game in the context of the society in which it is played. It takes a mere sport and makes it a prism to look at society and the humans that play it. In these moments, sports emerge from the background of our lives and become more than just an entertaining time pass medium.
Cricket books have been doing that for quite some time now; hence, most of the books in this list are of that ilk. I wished to include core cricket classics like Bob Woolmer’s ‘Art and Science of Cricket’ and the recent ‘Hitting Against The Spin’ by Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones; however, that’s for another list. There’s also an honorable mention list of four books that couldn’t be a part of the main one.
So, no further waiting. Let’s dive right into the list!
War Minus The Shooting by Mike Marqusee
On the surface, it’s the journey of an English journalist through the subcontinent during the 1996 World Cup. However, peel off the cricket layers, and you’ll find a scathing reportage of everything good and bad about South Asian cricket in that era. It’s as much about the socio-political and economic dynamics of cricket in the subcontinent as it is about the 1996 World Cup, and that’s why it remains a classic even after 25 years.
The commentaries on rampant nationalism of the 90s, the match-fixing scandals, media moguls, race, and Western hypocrisy are some of the most insightful I have ever read by a non-South Asian author. His observations about the game and its political and economic dynamics back then remain so prescient today that the book felt like a cricket non-fiction version of George Orwell’s 1984.
Moreover, Marqusee’s prose is so full of his characteristic panache and wit that it’s hard to put down the book once you begin reading. A seven-hour train journey was all it took me to gobble this book like a whole almond.
Special mentions are due to Siddhartha Vaidyanathan and Mahesh Sethuraman, who helped revive this book with their newly founded publication house, 81 All Out Publishing.
Pundits from Pakistan by Rahul Bhattacharya
The book has an intense underlying awareness that weaves it together like a thread. That awareness is about the India Tour of Pakistan in 2004 being much bigger than the game itself. Bhattacharya treats it with reverence in the book and constantly underlines it using anecdotes, history lessons, personal experiences, and riveting descriptions of cricket.
It’s also a book where the prose style is so eloquent that it even occasionally drowns the content. Bhattacharya’s genius lies in using these writing superpowers very judiciously. He leaves them unrestrained in match reports that are adorned with metaphors and allusions but only sprinkles it like garam masala over other parts of his text.
While the book discusses India-Pakistan relations with cricket in its background, Bhattacharya makes you think quite a bit about the stereotypes young Indians are fed about Pakistan and vice versa. He offers you anecdotes and history lessons, and once you let the prose guide your mind through it, you’ll find that the Radcliffe line in your head isn’t that definite anymore.
Published by Picador in 2005, Pundits from Pakistan remains a Kohinoor in the crown of Indian cricket writing.
A Clear Blue Sky by Jonny Bairstow and Duncan Hamilton
David Bairstow, aka 'Bluey', played in over 450 county matches for Yorkshire, scored 13,961 runs & took 961 catches and did 138 stumpings as a wicket-keeper. Once he left the game, life obviously wasn't the same. For reasons not fully known, Bluey died of suicide in his 47th year, leaving behind an eight-year-old Johnny, a daughter, Rebecca, a half-son, Andrew, and his wife, Janet.
Ever since then, it was a tough journey for Johnny Bairstow to come to terms with his father's tragic death. Once, when he was a kid, Johnny put his hands in his father's old wicketkeeping gloves. He felt an odd sensation as if he was holding hands with his father. Life wanted him to relive the unmitigated trauma of his dad's death through cricket.
Jonny Bairstow’s autobiography constantly feels like an attempt to face that trauma. And that is exactly why it stands out amongst the asphyxiating mass of cricket autobiographies that come out every year and read like a page-three scandal. It’s an extremely personal account of the early life of an active and popular cricketer and allows its readers to peek inside the inner life of their star.
Brilliantly penned by Duncan Hamilton and Jonny Bairstow, the book is a journey of grief that ends in triumph, and cricket, our glorious game, is in the background of it all.
The Fire Burns Blue: A History of Women’s Cricket in India by Karunya Keshav and Sidhanta Patnaik
There are books, and then there are BOOKS! The Fire Burns Blue is of the latter kind as it chronicles the history of women’s cricket in India in the most complete, interesting and passionate fashion possible.
The lack of scholarship around women’s cricket and the unavailability of statistics and sources didn’t deter Karunya Keshav and Sidhanta Patnaik. They start off with the epochal innings of Harmanpreet Kaur at Derby in 2017 and go on to tell the story of how women’s cricket in India reached that stage where a woman from Moga, Punjab, can grab the cricket-loving nation by its collar and make them watch women's cricket.
The anecdotes of past women cricketers and administrators seem so incredulous when read in the current context that the book can be read solely for them. These anecdotes were once left marinating in the myriad lanes of oral history. But the authors combined together and gave us a detailed and well-written account of how the other half of the population struggled to play a game that has ensnared a billion-strong nation.
The Fire Burns Blue, published in 2018 by Westland, is one of the most important books ever written in Indian sports.
Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka
This is the only fiction book on the list and arguably one of the best cricket fiction ever written. Hence, no matter which corner of whichever cricket archive you are searching, Pradeep Mathew is a name you’ll never find.
However, it’s just surreal how real Pradeep Mathew seems when one of the greatest modern writers from Sri Lanka writes about him. Shehan Karunatilaka is now a Booker Prize winner for ‘The Seven Moons of Mail Almeida’, but for me, ‘Chinaman’ still is his finest work.
The novel is about an alcoholic journalist who is on a quest to regain the legacy of a chinaman bowler, Pradeep Mathew. The journey is intended to make somehow the journalist recover his own greatness while discovering someone else’s, and it takes him through a wide mix of quirky, disgusting, corrupt, but funny characters.
Like most good novels, it’s also a deeply emotional and gritty portrayal of the place it’s set in. I promise you wouldn’t have seen Sri Lanka in such a light before.
Published in 2010, Chinaman remains a delight for cricket and literature lovers alike.
A Corner of a Foreign Field by Ramchandra Guha
Social histories of sports hardly get better than this, and when you limit them to cricket, it’s needless to say that Ramchandra Guha’s seminal work is a pioneer in Indian cricketing history.
The first time I saw it in my school library, its cover was all torn and battered. Clearly, our library needed more cricket books, and it was also evident that there was something special about it. Alas, my English comprehension wasn’t good enough for reading it in sixth grade.
But when I read it a few years later, I instantly fell in love with it. The best part about Guha’s storytelling here is how he has enmeshed the historian’s eye for detail with his entertaining game descriptions. It preserves the lucidity of the book. The context of British colonialism and the ongoing nationalist struggle is underlined at every crucial juncture to remind the reader that cricket wasn’t played in a vacuum then and certainly isn’t now.
The stories of the Parsi cricketers, and that of the likes of Palwankar Baloo, C.K. Nayudu etc, have left this book and travelled wide and deep throughout India. It was a rare classic that lived up to its hype and much more (alas, I couldn’t say the same about CLR James’s Beyond the Boundary).
Honourable Mentions
Beyond a Boundary by CLR James
The Art and Science of Cricket by Bob Woolmer
The Unquiet Ones by Osman Samiuddin
The Great Indian Cricket Circus by Abhishek Mukherjee and Joy Bhattacharjya
