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Vinay
Lal Published
in "Humanscape" Magazine, Mumbai, September 1999 issue, as "Why
Indians Should Have Supported Pakistan in the World Cup Final")
In the World
Cup of cricket that concluded earlier this summer, Australia soundly thrashed
Pakistan in the final and lifted the game’s most prized trophy. Pakistan’s
defeat was a matter of great rejoicing in India, as if India herself had
triumphed. Arriving in Delhi from Osaka the day after the final on June 20, I
heard from my friends that some people had even exploded fire-crackers in the
streets and distributed sweets. In the culture of the Indian subcontinent,
sweets are distributed, as is widely known, on the most auspicious occasions,
such as the birth of a child or a marriage, to mark success in examinations,
or to felicitate friends and neighbors on holy days. However, some years ago,
the exchange of sweets began to take on new meanings, and at the time of Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards
in 1984, it was widely rumoured that some Sikhs, seething with the spirit of
revenge for the attack launched by the Indian army upon the Sikhs’s most
venerable shrine, the Golden Temple, celebrated the news of her death by
distributing sweets in the streets of Delhi. However groundless the rumours
may have been, they were enough to instigate some Hindus, encouraged by
political leaders, to create a reign of terror for Sikhs in the nation’s
capital for a few days. Not less than two thousand Sikhs, and possibly many
more, were killed in that short pogrom. Fifteen years later, less than a
handful of convictions have been obtained, and the killers and their bosses
are still in business. Sweet must have been that revenge which was spurred on
by sweets, calamitous alike for the eaters and givers of sweets. Of
course sweets were never just
sweets, since in any system of signification the signifier (sweets) is likely
to signify many things at once. We know that sweets are tempting, but in their
irresistibility is all too often a shade of the corrupt. That infernal box of mithai,
which may have in it more than just sweets, has led one too many policeman,
civil servant, bureaucrat, politician, or the clerks who man the offices of
the utility companies down the road of bribery and corruption. But the notion
of how sweets might corrupt us is rendered with far more subtlety in
Premchand’s short story, "Motelal ka Satyagraha", where Motelal,
who has embarked on a fast in the cause of the nation, and to provide the
masses with exemplary leadership, rips in the stealth of the night into boxes
of barfis and containers of rasgullas
dripping with sugary syrup. The travails of the stomach, in the common
estimation, are of greater consequence than the rumblings of the nation; and
certainly Gandhian-style satyagraha demands compliance with more exacting
standards of discipline than is suggested by abstention from sweets. One
suspects that Gandhi would have been deeply aware of the semiotics of sugar,
just as he was of the semiotics of salt. How else can we understand his march
to the sea at Dandi, the grand finale of which consisted of no more than
Gandhi bending down to the water, collecting some salt, and so breaking the
salt laws? A pinch of salt, it is said, broke the back of the empire, and
Gandhi might have ruminated on how sugar, on which the British and French
empires built their wealth, became the prime killer in the ‘advanced’
countries of the West.
Our sweets
have never been just sweets, but they were that much. Alas, so deeply has the
insidious politics of the nation-state system enthralled us that even our
sweets are no longer sweets. We have become incapable of thinking beyond the
nation-state, as if any other form of community is inconceivable. There have
historically been many other ways in which people have organized their
affairs, and in the scale of things, the nation-state is a relatively new form
of political arrangement, an enfant
terrible. The nation-state system arose in the conditions of internecine
European warfare in the mid-seventeenth century, and was bequeathed to the
colonized part of the world as the European powers beat a retreat. The
transformation of a nation into a nation-state has seldom been anything but a
bloody affair, and nearly everywhere people, whose inheritance includes
multiple linguistic, religious, and cultural identities, were cudgeled,
usually with brute force, into speaking the same language, adopting the same
dress, declaring their affinity with one religion, or otherwise rendering
themselves into one species of human being, under one flag and one national
anthem. In
the Indian sub-continent, the process of nation-state formation was
accompanied not only by the ferocious blood-letting, mass migrations, the
abduction and rape of women, and uprooting that are encompassed under the word
‘partition’, but since then by the vivisection of Pakistan in 1971, the
memories of which for some victims and perpetrators alike are intertwined with
the earlier holocaust, and even by the numerous secessionist, dissenting, and
working-class movements that characterize the social and political landscape
of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. How the politics of cricket conspires with
the politics of nation-state war mongering should be amply clear from the fact
that both the Pakistani cricket
team, after the abysmal loss to Australia, and Nawaz Sharif, after his meeting
with Clinton in Washington at which he agreed to exercise his influence with
the mujahedeen (guerrillas) to
withdraw to the Pakistani side of the Line of Control, dreaded to return home.
One can scarcely doubt that a victory on the cricket-field would have been
followed by a tumultuous homecoming, just as an emphatic declaration by the
United States of support for Pakistan, instead of the cold reception that
awaited Nawaz Sharif, would have encouraged him to return home at once, where
he would have basked in the warm glow of mass approbation. Instead, much like
the aeroplanes that momentarily disappear from the radar scene, both the
Pakistani team and Sharif vanished, as if in muted testimony to the famous
Indian rope trick, and surfaced a few days later. The homes of the Pakistani
cricket players were stoned, and the effigies of Nawaz Sharif were openly
burned on the streets of Lahore and Islamabad: each form of disgrace spoke
metonymically for the other loss, for the defeat of the nation-state. Let us
recall, too, that in Bangladesh the earlier defeat of Pakistan on the
cricket-field at the hands of what was formerly its other, feminized half, was
at once celebrated with the declaration of a national holiday, and
Bangladesh’s triumph in cricket was likened to the wresting of independence
by East Pakistan from West Pakistan.
No one should
imagine, consequently, that Pakistan’s defeat was welcomed by Indians only
because of the small-scale war that was then going on in the heights of Kargil,
and the feeling of betrayal experienced by many Indians at the aggression of
Pakistan and Pakistani-supported forces. Pakistan’s defeat on the cricket
field in these times of conflict is doubtless sweeter to many Indians, but
cricket has been a battle-field of rivalry between the two nations-state since
at least the late 1960s. Indeed, when the two countries met in an earlier
qualifying match, Pakistanis and Indians imagined that this was the final of
the World Cup. India handed Pakistan the defeat that least of all it can
tolerate, and to some it no longer mattered if India reached the final: the
World Cup had been played out, and the celebrations on the streets in Indian
cities were on a grandiose scale. The last time sweets were publicly
distributed to such fanfare was when India tested the nuclear bomb and so
declared itself a nuclear power. It is a sign of our times that our sweets
have now become so charged, vehicles of masculine prowess and nation-state
jingoism. Some families do not announce the birth of a girl with sweets, but
perhaps the government will now institute a national policy ensuring that
sweets are only handed out when a boy is born. Boys of what the colonial
regime described as the "effeminate" races, such as Bengalis, the
Hindus of the Gangetic Plains, and the rice- and idli-eating
Tamilians, will doubtless pose some tricky problems.
No longer are
our sweets sweets, even our games are no longer games. The hard-edged
professionalism that accompanies international sports rivalries, the sheer
power play that so firmly characterizes professional sports, the ruthless
competitive urge which sends players and fans alike into a frenzy, and the
nation-state triumphalism that follows the return of each successful athlete
to his or her country, have all taken the spirit of play out of the game. The
millions, indeed billions, of "dollars" – rubles, rupees, and
rupiahs are not the currency of international sport, any more than they are of
world commerce -- that are at stake in these sporting bonanzas, from the World
Cup (of soccer, that is) and the Olympics to the various self-aggrandizing
American sporting events – the Super Bowl on Super Sunday in the ‘greatest
country on earth’ -- have transformed sports into a commercial venture that
brings it into stiff competition with the armaments industry for the amount of
revenues it generates. If the merchants of death can have no better sales
pitch than to advertise their own fighter aircraft or artillery guns as the
most effective destroyers of the enemy, the most eminent sportsmen and
sportswomen of our times are those whose attraction resides in their power to
vanquish their opponents. He who does not play to win, must face the
opprobrium and humiliation of defeat. The modern world is particularly
disdainful of losers. Yet, if one plays to win, then one is no longer playing
a game; one is only making a statement, displaying one’s might, acting on
behalf of other interests, serving out an ideology, and allowing oneself to
become a vehicle for the expression of debased expressions of national
greatness. In
the interest of altering our conception of games, and from thence of politics
and the meaning of the nation-state, it becomes necessary to step outside the
established cognitive framework. To this end, I wish to suggest, and will
shortly elaborate on the point, that it was a sad day for India when Pakistan
went down to Australia in a crushing loss. Many Indians, particularly those
who pride themselves on being modern, rational, and patriotic, will be
outraged by this sentiment, and I will rattle their tunneled nationalism and
further disturb their sensibilities by stating that Indians were morally bound
to lend their support to Pakistan, even while a battle may have raging between
the two countries on the peaks of Kargil. Let me state at once that it is
perfectly possible to adopt the view that the best side should win, though
doubtless nationalist and cultural predilections will enter into any
assessment of what counts for "best", and even more reasonable to
take the view that one should not support any side at all. The latter may
appear to be more consistent with the argument that we should restore to
sports the spirit of games, but this alleged neutrality is also consistent
with the pretension, which advocates of sports hold with firmness, that
politics and sports have nothing to do with each other. Quite to the contrary,
if sports and politics are tied together in a blood wedding, as I have
suggested, it becomes imperative to create a different political reading of
sports, and to open it up to moral and cognitive spaces which would, in a
manner of speaking, make a merry sport of sports. There is also the
consideration that, as a matter of course, most people will support one side
rather than the other, and so it behooves us to consider what should be the
basis for the political choices that we in effect make.
A Pakistani
friend of mine, a prominent Muslim intellectual who has been settled in London
for over thirty-five years, once told me that his son, then ten years old,
asked him whether he should support Pakistan or England in a cricket match.
His son was born in Britain, and like the greater majority of his peers,
speaks English at home and otherwise ‘identifies’ with England. In reply,
his father set up three scenarios. If Pakistan and Australia were playing each
other, he advised his son that he should lend his support to the English team.
England is the "nation-state" to which the family now belongs, and
one has obligations, as a citizen, as a moral subject, and as someone who
claims rights and receives services, to the state to which one belongs. But
what if Pakistan and England were playing each other, his son asked,
anticipating the second scenario. His father explained that, in this case, he
was bound to support Pakistan. England may well be the nation-state to which
he and his son furnish their allegiance, but the "nation" is an
entity in which a human being is more comfortably and reasonably housed than
in the "state". People surely commit violence in the name of the
nation, though here the nation is usually inextricably intertwined with the
notion of the nation-state, and it is also useful to remember that what makes
a state a state is the monopoly it exercises in law over the right to use
force. In common parlance, the nation-state speaks to us from the
"head", but the nation touches our "heart"; the
nation-state is disciplinary, but the nation is a site of communitas: thus
nearly in every language and cultural tradition, though there are exceptions
such as that of Germany, the nation is rendered as the "motherland".
The state demands our political loyalties, but the nation moves
us in myriad ways that affect our lives as social and cultural beings. My
friend then set up the third scenario. What if India and Pakistan were playing
each other on the cricket field, whether in Britain or elsewhere? His son
assumed, as would most people if similarly placed, that he ought to support
Pakistan, but his father explained that the matter is more complex. Though
Pakistanis lay claim to their own nation-state, civilizationally speaking they
are Indians as much as those who live in India. There is no such thing as a
Pakistani civilization, and though Pakistanis might like to believe that their
civilizational moorings are derived preeminently from Islam, they should
apprise themselves of what middle eastern Islam, which has set itself up as
the true and authentic version of the faith, thinks of the Islam of South
Asia. They might be shocked to learn that the most eminent scholars of Islam
in the West and the middle east are likely to think of South Asian Islam as
highly contaminated, as little better than the Hinduism with which it has
lived in close proximity for over a millennium, and perhaps worse than
Hinduism on account of its apostasy. The true civilizational home of Pakistan
is the Indic world, the culture of South Asia as a whole, but a recognition of
this does not in the least strip Pakistanis of their Islam. It would, on the
contrary, make them more confident of their Islam, and they might recognize
that the greatest Muslim scholars and reformers since the nineteenth century,
with notable exceptions such as Shariati, have emanated from the Indian
sub-continent. Likewise, the Hindus in India, if they were not so accustomed
to thinking of India as a nation-state, might begin to think of Pakistan as an
inextricable part of Indian civilization; they might even, however unthinkable
it sounds, recognize in Islam a part of themselves. Civilizational
loyalties, howsoever hard to cultivate, should take precedence over the jejune
attachment to the nation-state with which we are all so comfortable. The idea
of "civilizational loyalties" may not be so easy to grasp, and today
the vast majority of the world’s people, especially the young, have only
grown up with no other idea but that of the nation-state and the hatreds that
the nation-state system fosters. The word "civilization" is likewise
burdened by a lamentable past and the histrionics of history. Everywhere the
march of the colonial powers was trumpeted with the resounding call of the
‘civilizing mission’. The nineteenth century even instituted a
‘civilizational scale’, and where one stood on this scale, say at the top
or the bottom, could have something to do with the shape of one’s nose, or
the contours of one’s hair. But if people can kill in the name of God,
religion, and humanity, it is scarcely surprising that oppressions should have
been unleashed in the name of ‘civilization’. That can, however, be no
reason to abandon the idea of ‘civilization’, for civilizations, unlike
modern states, have great resilience, and can entertain a plurality of often
conflicting ideas. Though the nation-state, for example, is firmly tethered to
discourses of history and science as it came to be shaped in the modern West,
a civilization entertains a notion of the plurality of sciences, just as it is
more hospitable to non-historicist and a-historicist modes of comprehension
and narration, whether construed as folktales, prophecy, oral literatures,
proverbs, mythological tales, epics, puranas, or mother’s wit. To grasp this
idea of ‘civilizational loyalties’, consider further that among Pakistanis
and Indians, the generation that lived at the time of the partition still
speaks fondly of the closeness of Hindu and Muslim relations, the manner in
which ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ (when they were openly known, especially
to children, to be such) partook of each other’s festivals, and the almost
imperceptible ways in which Muslims and Hindus shaded into each other. Among
the younger generation, which was spared the pains of the partition and
migration, and which could have been expected to work towards healing the
divisions, the hatred often runs much deeper.
There are
certainly other, equally compelling, reasons why Indians should have been
supportive of Pakistan in the final with Australia. Though my principal
argument scarcely requires any props, Australia, a country which has seldom
shown any interest in sharing the world-view of the South or signifying its
affinity with the people of the formerly colonized world, cannot inspire hope
among people who aspire for justice or equality. The architect of the
Australian win, Shane Warne, has on more than occasion shown his profoundly
racist leanings, and a great many members of the Australian team are similarly
afflicted with racist sentiments. Vivian Richards recalled in his
autobiography that nowhere did he face such intense racist animosity as in
Australia, and no one can forget the intense heckling that the Sri Lankan team
encountered on its recent visit to this continent, which is barren in more
than one way. Finding it difficult to play Murlitharan, the spin bowler who
sent England reeling at the Oval last year with a haul of 16 wickets in one
match, the Australians accused him of ‘throwing’ the ball, and the player
had to suffer the indignity of having a laboratory test, where it was
confirmed that a deformity accounted for the particular manner in which
Murlitharan bowled. All of this transpired to the accompaniment of unabashedly
racist pronouncements on television and in the print media; and though
Murlitharan was cleared of the ‘charges’, and had his reputation restored
to him, there was scarcely any apology from the fanatic Australian public. To
have a country nurtured in the genocidal mentality lecture an ancient
civilization on ‘sportsmanlike’ behavior is an intolerable idea, but few
Indians (or other South Asians) have given thought to this matter. Somehow
Australians think that, having become ‘multicultural’ in the American
fashion, pressing forth with a puerile conception of identity politics, they
have become the very embodiment of pluralism.
Thus, there
is in the tale of the misbegotten sweets, a great many more tales to which we
should be sensitive. Though it has not been my intent to furnish a semiotics
of Indian sweets, such an exercise can alert us to the manner in which the
most complex questions can arise from a consideration of seemingly little
things. Far more germane for the present is the sobering thought that if we
have reached that nadir where the gift and exchange of sweets is itself
beginning to follow the contours of the debased nation-state system, our
sweets should be treated like poison. We should call our games battles, fought
with escalating venom and intensity, and perhaps we might find that on the
battle-field of guns and mortar, even amidst the senseless artillery duels,
there is an iota more of the common sense of humanity, a jot more of the
spirit of games that has largely vanished from sports. Kargil awaits its Manto,
and in South Asia we should await the return of cricket to what passes for
cricket in the World Cup.
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