About a week ago, Peter Roebuck, the sports columnist writing about IPL-2 in The Hindu (All credit to the organizers) said that “… [the South African] hosts – deserve credit for putting on a fine show.” This year I did not fly down to South Africa to spectate on the spectacle, saw fewer games on TV than last year and also each game more briefly than before. So, I am not in a position to comment on what he wrote.
But, he also scribbled that “South Africans have embraced contests between Rajasthan and Punjab, Bangalore and Deccan …”. I can very well take exception to this and I would not be on sticky wicket if I did.
Watching IPL this year was a slightly different experience for me. During shots of the crowd I tried to take a census of people who appeared to be black South Africans. I wanted to find out how this event was being received by the hoi polloi, particularly blacks. Alas, the numbers just did not add up to what Roebuck wrote. There were very few blacks in the stands. Sure, I could spot many “coloureds”, possibly of Indian ancestry, but blacks? No. The most prominent black, unfortunately he looked to be the token, was the current president Jacob Zuma, and that too during the finals and not earlier. There have been no reports on the TRP equivalent on South African TV channels for IPL games . I expect they would have been scraping the bottom.
In South Africa, from what I have heard and read, both rugby and cricket were dominantly “white” games, rugby more so than cricket. While the Rugby World Cup of 1995 became an icon for the then fledgling Rainbow Nation of South Africa, thanks to the imposing presence and sagacity and audacity of Nelson Mandela, wearing the Springbok colors, nothing like that seems to have happened to cricket. Sure, cricket did not have the same burden of being an intensely hated symbol of apartheid as rugby, with its “blacks-only pens at rugby stadiums … always full on international match days, cheering the Springboks' opponents”. And by the time the Cricket World Cup came to South Africa, in 2003, the idea of Rainbow Nation was beyond being seriously undermined by the rump Boer supremacists. And, I quite specifically remember that the Cricket World Cup had more black participation from the bleachers as compared to at IPL-2.
I admit that even though I am not directly comparing Rugby World Cup of 1995 with the outsourced Indian domestic Indian Professional League (though with foreign participation) of 2009, there indeed is a taste of apple-orange in my comparison spanning even the large time interval. Yet, the absence of blacks at IPL-2 matches told me that the caravan was not as welcome as it was claimed, except for the raw, short term economic benefits.
Therefore, seeking your indulgence, I am going to assert that South Africa pretty much ignored IPL-2. A bucketful of whites and a handful of “coloureds” do not make up South Africa. They, particularly the former, did indeed make up a make-believe South Africa before 1994. Where were the blacks at IPL-2? Not in the stands.
Peter Roebuck was wrong in writing “South Africans have embraced [IPL].”
Raghuram Ekambaram
No comments:
Post a Comment