Why cricket, and not football, rules in India

With the FIFA World Cup in progress, the question once again comes up – why is cricket the game at which Indians do well rather than football, or even the national game of hockey, in which India has slipped from the heights it achieved under greats like Dhyan Chand.

Is there something in the Indian approach that makes it inimical to team sports like football? This is a speculative piece that looks at the games from this perspective.

Football and cricket are both team sports but they are not alike. Football (like hockey) depends on individual performances being coordinated, and the decline of India’s national game hockey can be traced to individual skill (dribbling and stick-work) being supplanted by orchestrated effort (short passes and coordination) as in football. Germany, Netherlands and Australia have subsequently risen as hockey-playing countries.

In cricket, on the other hand, performances are sequential rather than orchestrated. In this respect, it is like the Indian kabaddi. It can be argued that orchestration, even in other disciplines, is not an Indian speciality. Indian--unlike Western-music and dance have not depended on it. Their strong points have been melody and individual performance rather than harmony and choreography.

The jugalbandi is perhaps to cricket what the orchestra is to hockey and football. Cricket may therefore be a more ‘Indian’ (or, rather, South-Asian) team sport than any other played internationally. Other games where Indians have done well are badminton and chess, in which individual effort is paramount.

Tradition in India has not valorised individual effort (as, say, in the US) but the practices of religion may provide us with a clue since religion often holds the key to social practices outside the most basic. The way a religion develops in any milieu, for instance, tells us many things about the tendencies in the arts there, and an explanation is that both are responses to the unknown, and they were driven by the common needs of the community.

Sport was not a response to the unknown, but may have begun as an alternative to combat, perhaps to quell the fighting instinct. But it was nonetheless also a part of community activity. By and large, the earliest sport – like wrestling and sprinting – was restricted to competitions between individuals. It is widely argued (though also contested) that team sport began in the West, and England takes the credit for most of them.

Cricket appears to have been played in the 17th century between different parishes (administrative districts under the church) and this sends the game into territory at least indirectly related to religion. Football is also credited to England but to a much later period, perhaps the 19th century.

The sports in ancient India involving physical exertion were largely martial–of which Kalaripayattu is an example. It has been noted that physical perfection was an integral part of Hinduism and a way of fully realising the self was through the body. Since sport has been associated with religious life in both England and India, the characteristics of a sport popular in a certain milieu could also have associations with the way religion develops there.

Music began with religion and common prayer could have led to the discovery of harmony – the notion of coordination between different sounds to produce a more pleasing effect. My proposition here is that once harmony was discovered it was inevitable that choreography (coordination in human movement) and team games (coordination in the effective playing of games) would be discovered.

In India, Hinduism placed an emphasis on individual salvation rather than common submission to God, and common prayer did not develop as in the West. Indian music therefore did not develop as harmony but pursued melody. It may be broadly argued in this context that sport could have taken the same course and become tied to individual performance.

Cricket was only one among the colonial team sports that caught on in India. But it perhaps became most popular because it was not a team game involving coordinated activity; individual effort still ruled. When India dominated the hockey world, individual effort still counted, but with the game being played more like football today, it has lost ground since Indian teams cling to individual effort.

While football is globally the most popular physical sport, its popularity in India does not see Indians play it well enough to get into the FIFA finals; temperament inculcated by tradition apparently prevents it.

(The author is well-known film and culture critic)