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The Magic of Indian Cricket
she did understand the deep-seated British desire not to be pushed around any more. The memories of the shrinking red imperial colour on the map; India, Suez, Aden, Rhodesia, are still vivid in many minds and, as Mrs Thatcher said after the Falklands’ victory ‘it shows we can still do some of the things that made Britain great’. I am not saying, as Salman Rushdie said, that the British still hanker after an Empire or import immigrants into this country to indulge their empire fantasies. The British Empire was not all bad, as my father always maintained, but the point is that for many Britains the sudden change from the greatest power on earth to struggling European one is, I think, difficult to stomach. The Falklands provided an antidote and they eagerly welcomed it. The war also brought home to me the gulf that fundamentally separates me from even my closest English friends. I was, I must confess, against the Falklands enterprise but though a good many of my English friends also felt the same way they could not but get emotionally involved with the tragedies and the successes that unfolded in the South Atlantic. I remember one night talking to a friend about this and saying, after the Argentinians had dropped a bomb which did not explode, ‘You know you English are very lucky.’ The friend, who I had never suspected of any patriotism, fairly flared up. ‘What do you mean lucky? Luck has nothing to do with it.’ What I meant is that the British are unique among nations in having avoided being conquered for nearly one thousand years – not since the Normans. Look at any other country in Europe and you will see a cycle of conquest and liberation. France was under the German jackboot some sixty years ago, Russia still mourns her war dead, and large parts of Asia, Africa and South America have been entirely remade by conquest. America has not been conquered but she is only two hundred years old. I come from a country whose history is one of repeated conquests with supposedly superior Indian forces strangely unaccountably losing to marauding foreigners. I am no longer puzzled by it but it still pains me to read Indian history. It also gives me a certain perspective on the world, a certain way of looking at it which is different from how my English friends look at it. Some of my English friends occasionally interpret this as touchiness, a chip on the shoulder, when it really is a cry for understanding. My English friends can be sure about the world because they have made so much of it. I cannot, because I do not quite know what world, if any, my ancestors have left for me. The world I live in is the world made by others, very often by Englishmen, certainly by Europeans, and not by my ancestors. This requires certain adjustments on my part which my English friends do not have to make. It would be nice to say this book about Indian cricket is unique. I would like to think I have said things here that have not been said before – or at
