A contemporary chronicler, writing in the 1850s, observed that Indians “were rather apt to look on a cricket match as proof of the lunatic propensities of their masters the sahibs, and to wonder what possible enjoyment they could find in running about in the sun all day after a leather ball”. Soon, what had been deemed lunatic and marginal, came to be seen as central. By 1981, according to the writer R Gopal Krishna, “cricket, Lata Mangeshkar and the transistor make India one nation”. These days, with the wealth of its leagues, the theological status that fans accord star players, its diasporic outposts in Sharjah and New Jersey, cricket is still used as a lens through which to assess the country’s fantasy life and its realities.
Aravind Adiga, whose first novel The White Tiger won the Man Booker prize in 2008, has always been drawn to that gap between the glitter and gleam of India Shining and the violence, inequality and social misery that give a partial lie to the nation’s desire to rebrand itself. Selection Day follows the shifting fortunes of 14-year-old Manju Kumar and his better-looking, apparently more talented elder brother Radha. Both would be social lepers were it not for their cricketing prowess. From an early age they were coached by their father Mohan, a lowly chutney seller, who had brought them to Mumbai where they live in a single-room shack on the edge of the city.
Another writer, perhaps one more inclined to neorealist poetics than the kind of broad-brushed satire at which Adiga excels, might have chosen to place Mohan at the centre of this novel. In his relentless incantation of proverbs, his insistent superstition (telling Manju not to shave until he’s 21 because the sensation of razors on flesh will make his hormones crazy), and also his devotion to his dreams (taking his kids to swampy dumping grounds where, sporting leg pads chewed through by rats, he forces them to practise strokes), he’s both absurd and touching.
Everything hinges on Manju’s ability to break schoolboy batting records, avoid the baneful influence of his rival, Javed, and enter the big time. On this rests not only their father’s hopes of breaking out of poverty, but also the reputation of Tommy Sir, allegedly the best talent scout in the country. Also holding his breath is Anand Mehta, born into a family of stockbrokers, and described as “driven, anglophone, numerate, and freed by postcolonial entitlement from almost all forms of liberal guilt or introspection”. It’s Mehta who also hatches a sponsorship programme, which in return for a small investment in the teenage Manju promises to earn him untold millions on future earnings.
This, then, is Indian cricket. It’s about grooming and commodification, about high school coaches who serve as “fat pipes in the filtration system” that channels and exploits the potential of the undercommons. According to the cynical Mehta, it’s a form of social control, a state-sponsored scheme “to pacify hundreds of millions of desperately horny young Indians of the lower social classes”, a tool to combat “rogue Hindu testosterone”.
Mehta is forever gabby, forever entertaining. At one stage he declares of his fellow Indians: “We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff.” He himself, so cynical and alive, is as much at the heart of the novel as Manju, whose sexuality-conflicted growing pains might have been more poignantly animated. But Adiga has written another snarling, witty state-of-the-nation address about a country in thrall to values that 19th-century moralists would have damned as “not cricket”.
Selection Day is published by Picador (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.93
