Kumar Sangakkara - A voice of the nation - Sri Lanka

SANGAKKARA SPEAKS UP - A different history of cricket and pluralism

Mukul Kesavan http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110710/jsp/opinion/story_14208607.jsp

Kumar Sangakkara’s Cowdrey Lecture delivered at the invitation of the MCC at Lord’s has been widely praised for its outspoken criticism of corruption and political interference in the administration of Sri Lankan cricket. It isn’t hard to see why this part of his lecture seemed newsworthy: active South Asian cricketers don’t make a habit of risking their careers by calling out dysfunctional and dishonest cricket administrators. It is, however, the least interesting passage of a remarkable speech. Sangakkara gives us a history of Sri Lankan cricket, specifically of the three decades that his country has been a full member of the International Cricket Council. This isn’t a second-hand history cribbed from someone else’s chronicle: this is a great batsman’s account of Sri Lankan cricket’s coming of age. As if this weren’t ambitious enough, Sangakkara’s account of his country's cricketing evolution sets it firmly in its political context: Sri Lanka’s bloody communal divisions and its civil war. The narrative style he uses to tell his story is the first-person memoir, so by the time the speech ends, it is at once a cricketer’s prescription and a citizen’s creed. With a self-awareness that is rare amongst post-colonial elites, Sangakkara emphasizes the comprador origins of cricket in Sri Lanka. Till the late 20th century, representative cricket in Sri Lanka was monopolized by a tiny, anglicized collaborating class, institutionally represented by half-a-dozen private schools that socialized the children of Sri Lanka’s ruling elite into English. One of Sangakkara’s themes is the way in which Sri Lankan cricketers shook off the orthodoxy drilled into them by colonial public schools and found a way of channelling the idiosyncratic flair that he sees as Sri Lankan cricket’s signature style. Till the Nineties, says Sangakkara trenchantly, Sri Lanka produced talented cricketers who lost with grace. “What we needed at the time was a leader. A cricketer from the masses who had the character, the ability and above all the courage and gall to change a system, to stand in the face of unfavourable culture and tradition, unafraid to put himself on the line for the achievement of a greater cause. This much awaited messiah arrived in the form of an immensely talented and slightly rotund Arjuna Ranatunga.” I allowed myself a small shudder of delight at the thought of Sangakkara saying this in a lecture about the spirit of cricket to the guardians of cricketing decorum at the MCC, since Ranatunga pretty much tore up Auntie Mary(lebone)’s manual of cricketing etiquette in the course of an eventful career as Sri Lanka’s captain. From wagging his finger at the umpire, Ross Emerson, when he no-balled Muralitharan for chucking to turning his lawyers loose on the ICC when it tried to fine him, Ranatunga did everything he could to intimidate people that he thought were trying to push Sri Lanka around... and he succeeded. As a spectator I thought he was magnificent when he drew a line near the stumps and forced the grandstanding Ross Emerson to stand where he, Ranatunga, wanted him to, after he had no-balled Murali, so it’s good to know that Sangakkara sees him as the man who turned Sri Lankan cricket around. The spirit of cricket comes in many distillations and the sort that Ranatunga dispensed was a potent brew. Sangakkara is so well-spoken, so much the fluent barrister, that the MCC’s membership embraced him as one of their own and rose to give him a standing ovation. What they didn’t realize was that they were applauding a speech about the spirit of cricket in which that smiling enforcer, Arjuna Ranatunga, had been formally canonized as Sri Lankan cricket’s patron saint. It was a rhetorical coup. But the great matter of Sangakkara’s speech is the business of living in a violent and divided society during the Eighties and Nineties and the role cricket played in giving Sri Lankans hope through a horrible time. He starts telling this story with a startling flourish: he recalls the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 as a time of rapt happiness. He was six years old at the time so when Tamil friends of his father and their families came for refuge to Sangakkara’s home, he was delighted because he had friends to play with all day long for many days on end. This vicious, politically sponsored pogrom and the secessionist terror that it helped spawn nearly tore Sri Lanka apart. It was in this uncertain world, a world in which parents travelled in separate buses to make sure that their children weren’t comprehensively orphaned by a random explosion, that Ranatunga gathered the players who would give Sri Lankans something to live for. Sangakkara counts them off: Sanath, the provincial from Matara, Murali, the Tamil from Kandy, Kaluwitharana, Aravinda de Silva, not one them from the posh public schools that had been the nurseries of Sri Lankan cricket, but originals each one, who would go on to win the 1996 World Cup for Sri Lanka and make cricket both a mass sport and Sri Lanka’s national game. But before that happened, something was needed to fuse the team into a single unit and forge a bond between the team and Sri Lanka’s people. That something, of course, was the no-balling of Muralitharan by Darrell Hair on Boxing Day at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1995 which rallied all Sri Lankans in collective indignation. It’s this ability to make big schematic connections that makes Sangakkara a compelling historian. In his telling of this story, the World Cup win makes the Sri Lankan team a microcosm of Sri Lanka’s better self: “Our cricket embodied everything in our lives, our laughter and tears, our hospitality our generosity, our music our food and drink. It was normality and hope and inspiration in a war-ravaged island. In it was our culture and heritage, enriched by our myriad ethnicities and religions. In it we were untouched, at least for a while, by petty politics and division. It is indeed a pity that life is not cricket. If it were we would not have seen the festering wounds of an ignorant war.” Sangakkara’s experience of what cricket meant to a small, racked nation and his ability to evoke both the darkness of the time and the role of the team as a kind of beacon, make his belief that Sri Lankan cricketers are the keepers of a sacred trust seem deeply felt, not just inflated windbaggery. The Sri Lankan team in its diversity becomes a blueprint for a pluralist Sri Lanka, and cricket becomes, potentially, an agent of reconciliation at the end of a brutal war. Time and again Sangakkara returns to Murali in his speech, not just as a symbol for a diverse Sri Lanka, but as a moral actor whose extraordinary relief work after the tsunami exemplifies the team’s responsibility to its people. Even the frightening and near-lethal attack on the Sri Lankan team bus in Lahore becomes a way of understanding at first hand the violence suffered by every section of Sri Lankan society during the civil war. It is in the context of this near- religious conception of cricket’s role in the life of his island nation, that Sangakkara attacks the administrators who have milked the game since the World Cup victory in 1996. This isn’t what his political masters in Colombo wanted to hear; already the sports minister has condemned Sangakkara speech and ordered an inquiry into his conduct. Given the controversy and criticism that Channel 4’s film, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, has stirred up, the regime of the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, needs bad publicity like a hole in the head. But having seen disaffected Tamils protesting during Sri Lanka’s English tour, Sangakkara was reminded that a great game, which ought to have been used as a catalyst for national reconciliation, had been reduced to a cash cow for greedy men and was moved to speak up. He ends his speech with a resounding affirmation of cricket as the embodiment of Sri Lanka’s pluralism: “Fans of different races, castes, ethnicities and religions who together celebrate their diversity by uniting for a common national cause. They are my foundation, they are my family. I will play my cricket for them. Their spirit is the true spirit of cricket. With me are all my people. I am Tamil, Sinhalese, Muslim and Burgher. I am a Buddhist, a Hindu, a follower of Islam and Christianity. I am today, and always, proudly Sri Lankan.” Sangakkara almost certainly overstates cricket’s capacity to embody diversity and transcend division. Some might find his quasi-mystical identification with Sri Lankans of all sorts a little over the top. But his speech has one thing going for it: this isn’t Lalit Modi speaking. Or Sharad Pawar. Unlike India’s mute cricketing maestros, too busy counting their money to think about cricket and its connection with the world, this is the testament of a great cricketer trying to be a good citizen. Even (or especially) in Kalyug, that’s reason enough to listen.