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Romancing the Game
The Commonwealth of Cricket: A Lifelong Love Affair with the Most Subtle and Sophisticated Game Known to Humankind by Ramachandra Guha, Noida: HarperCollins Publishers, India, 2020; pp 347, `699.
I first encountered Ramachandra Guha in his book Wickets in the East: An Anecdotal History. This was in the early 1990s. While India did have fine sports journalists, there were not many cricket books by Indian writers, the exceptions being a Sujit Mukherji or a N S Ramaswami. Guha’s book was like a fresh breeze, a proclamation of rare talent. But even before his arrival as a writer of cricket history, he had announced himself with his first book, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989).
Through all these years and all his books, if there is one thing that defines his writing, it would be the lucidity of his storytelling. There may be 90 pages of references and archival notes at the end of his India After Gandhi (2007) but through the other 700 pages, Guha the writer is focused on the joyous task of taking his readers through the fascinating history of the times.
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