The Single-Most Unified Purpose

Divided through the simplicities of geography and physicality, society becomes unified to cheer on what they all love.

By: Swarit 11.2

Although the British brought modernity to India and its neighboring nations, over their two-century rule, a greater amount of torment and suffering was unleashed onto the people of Southern Asia. Famine, lack of medicine, and racism cloud the emergence of concepts and ideas that later people learned to love and make their own. A stick and a ball bloomed into the creation of giant fields where people from all over would gather to watch their heroes hit, catch, and throw a ball.

When it was introduced, the sport of cricket slowly turned into a form of minuscule rebellion. Yes, the ‘colonizers’ were good, but they weren’t natural. Spectatorship turned into constructive criticism, and criticism into desire. The desire to prove yourself, in something you know you can do perfectly, something that just came easy to you. Years of being undermined in your own lands, and the first thing that makes you feel empowered is a foreigner sport? Peculiar situation.

1792, the first ever cricket club in India has become a reality. However, for the next century, there wouldn’t be any major progress of cricket in India, until the end of the 1800s, when India was granted the title of the third nation to have test cricket (format of cricket) nation.

Every decent poet always comes to a point in their career when they realize that happy endings are a figment of imagination that only exist in the words they write on parchments of paper, and it wasn’t long after being granted test cricket status, that the cricket’s ascension to near divinity in India were pushed aside by the rising tensions caused from the indication of the country’s partition in 1947. A nation filled with rich history was left divided as a parting gift from the British. The left and right side of Indian Geography was separated into East and West (later Bangladesh) Pakistan.

Amidst the horrors of being evicted from your homeland because of the denial to shift your religious values, and the loss of family members never to be seen again in the chaotic crowds being moved by the aftermath of August 15th, Cricket was forgotten for a while, only to come back and light the spark of joy that was desperately needed for years.

Maybe happy endings do exist.

Or do they?

You see, there was only one way of fighting colonialism, and that was by forming a united front, no matter where you were from, what you looked like or what god you believed in. After centuries of the people’s uniformity in end goals (removing the British from their lands), divisions were blurred to a point where they wouldn’t be mentioned if they weren’t blatantly stated in an everyday conversation. Colleagues following the principles of Islam weren’t the concerns of any Hindus, and vice versa. Until of course, the partition of 1947.

It turns out, the most proficient method of causing divisions amongst a united people is, literally, dividing them. Leading them into false beliefs, that the brothers and sisters they’ve been arm in arm with for centuries, have been conspiring to overthrow each other.

Suddenly, differences in the way people look start to become more apparent. India now has a North-east and a South and a North, not that it always didn’t. It’s just that, when the people of India used to refer to themselves, they wouldn’t say “I’m Indian”, they would just say “I’m North Indian” or “I’m South Indian”. Now there was a need to add regional prefix before your nationality. Years and years went on, and something as simple as even just communication between people of one nationality became a difficulty.

Enter: The hero that supposedly saves the day, Cricket.

Nowadays, although each person is different in India, there is one statement that is true for a majority of them: they all love cricket. It’s absolutely everywhere; in the gullies, in houses, in giant stadiums made solely for the purpose of housing thousands of dreams at a time. Dreams of winning the world cup, dreams of forming bonds with people you don’t even know, dreams of finally being a nation that’s fully united yet again. The greatest feeling in the world, is sitting in the Ekana stadium in Lucknow and hearing the unison of fifteen thousand people yelling the same thing, “India, India”. In that moment, communicating with a fellow audience member doesn’t seem so hard anymore, it’s calm like no other.

A happy ending? Far from it. But I get where the poetry comes in.