Mike Marqusee - War Minus The Shooting : A journey through South Asia during the 1996 Cricket World Cup

First published in Great Britain 1996

by William Heinemann

an imprint of Reed International Books Ltd

This revised and updated edition published by 81allout Publishing in 2021

81allout Publishing pte ltd,

Singapore

Copyright Mike Marqusee 1996

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Paperback ISBN: 9798766891307

Cover photograph Kamal Julka

Author photograph Mark Ray

Cover design by Vinayak Varma

Praise for War Minus the Shooting

A classic, reflecting on a time and a tournament when cricket was mobilising its commercial clout, with all the consequences now playing out.

Mike Atherton , former England captain and chief cricket correspondent of The Times

An insightful, joyful traipse through cricket's largest neighbourhood just before its geographies were redrawn and its futures deliberately went separate ways.

Sharda Ugra , senior sportswriter and author

As fresh and alive now as it was when it first came out, War Minus the Shooting remains essential to understanding the modern pose of cricket. As a subcontinent travelogue on the forces of commerce, nationalism, history and politics driving the game, it is an unmatched masterpiece.

Osman Samiuddin , Senior Editor, ESPNcricinfo, and author of The Unquiet Ones: A History of Pakistan Cricket

'A perceptive exploration of crickets intersection with geopolitics, identity, capitalism, and South Asias post-colonial political realities, War Minus the Shooting is one of crickets most enlightening reads.'

Andrew Fidel Fernando , Sri Lanka correspondent ESPNcricinfo and author of Upon a Sleepless Isle: Travels in Sri Lanka by Bus, Cycle and Trishaw

Contents

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Achin Vanaik, Pamela Philipose and their sons, Anish and Samar. They were not only my patient hosts in Delhi, where I cluttered their flat with newspaper clippings and cricket books, but a constant source of support and stimulation in my efforts to make sense of the World Cup and the south Asian society in which it was being played.

Travelling as a stranger for three months in the subcontinent, I was the beneficiary of countless acts of kindness from cricket officials, hotel workers, journalists and academics, political and social activists, and ordinary fans. I am grateful to them all.

I wish to thank my colleagues in the Indian and Pakistani press, who made me feel welcome everywhere, and who shared their knowledge and contacts generously. Special thanks to my friend Pradeep Magazine for his constant encouragement and his quiet outrage at iniquity, whether in the cricket world or elsewhere. Sharda Ugra, one of the best young cricket writers in India, was helpful in detailing the historical background of cricket in Bombay. I am also indebted to Kamila Hyatt, whose knowledge and judgement helped me find my way through the labyrinth of Pakistani cricket politics.

Thanks also to Mushirul Hasan, N Ram, Neelan Thiruchelvam, Jayadeva Uyangoda, Mohammed Tehseen, Ramachandra Guha, Arun Daur, Emma Levine, Ian McDonald, Suresh Menon, G Rajaraman, Clayton Murzello (whose Azhar imitation was the best I heard in India), A Sivanandan, Huw Richards (for invaluable pedantry and sound advice), Colin Robinson, and Liz Davies.

City names have been retained from the original version of the book, published in 1996.

Foreword

Mike Marqusee died on January 13, 2015, at the mid-point of the eleventh World Cup. A couple of days later, I had reason to visit a media event at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where eight Indian cricketers including Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni modelled their new Team India uniform, sponsored by Nike, branded seemingly by about half of Indias top twenty corporations.

It was, of course, painful: half an hour one would never get back, where the hapless players were as bored as their attendant hacks, but everyone felt obliged to go through the motions about the laser ventilation holes in this breathable engineered knit. It was kind of a nice moment too. On getting home, I pulled down Mikes book about the sixth World Cup and found the passages in War Minus the Shooting where he described a skirmish between cricket authorities and cricketers over the logos they could wear, which was not over either the aesthetics or morality of advertising, but over control of the most prime of prime sites, cricketers bodies, and involved the subsuming of individuals into corporate identities. Yep, I thought. Mike was on to this twenty years ago. The only difference is that, once resisted, the subsuming had now taken place.

Mike was a cricket writer sui generis. That is to say, he was barely a cricket writer at all. Rather, he was a writer whose ken included cricket alongside left-wing politics, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, and sundry other concerns. Fiction, too. He first tackled cricket ten years before War Minus the Shooting in a novel, Slow Turn (1986), a doubly improbable sport-cum-political thriller set in mid-1980s Madras, essayed by a self-described deracinated New York Marxist Jew who edited Labour Briefing , and who would move on to co-author an acrid denunciation of British Labour contra Margaret Thatcher in Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (1992).

It was having been mildly detained by Slow Turn that a few years later had me pick up Anyone But England (1994) probably Mikes best-known and most successful title, endlessly quotable, serially reprinted, and memorably described by one reviewer as better than CLR James on speed. If anyone was the inheritor of Jamess mantle as the scrutineer of crickets political and racial economy, it was Mike. As Beyond a Boundary hummed with hope, Anyone But England was laced with unceremonious put-downs: English cricket neatly mirrors the decline of Britain as an economic and political power, but it does more than that. It also encapsulates the neurotic struggle to come to terms with that decline. The author photo shows him sitting in an otherwise empty stand at Lords. A metaphor? He was certainly willing to sit out from the crowd, critiquing cricket in terms reminiscent of his verdict on British Labour even if it wasnt entirely clear how his objectives were to be achieved:

Democracy and the market arose together and together they forged English cricket. But increasingly these two forces are pulling in opposite directions, in cricket as elsewhere. English cricket, like English society, can be renewed only by more democracy but in todays world that means less market. The dictatorship of the marketing men and the sponsors has to be overthrown but not to be replaced by the old amateurs. English cricket, like the British economy, has to be reconstructed from the ground up.

In War Minus the Shooting (1996), Mike turned his attention to south Asia in a tripartite World Cup, won romantically by Sri Lanka, at the expense of finalist Australia and also co-hosts India and Pakistan. This time, the view was from ground level, as he arrived in Sri Lanka at the tournaments outset to find the countrys first game against Australia abandoned after security threats against the visitors. In its place was an invitation game involving a combined India and Pakistan an almost unthinkable idea now but extraordinary enough then, involving as it did such scorelines as Kaluwitharana caught Tendulkar bowled Wasim Akram. For once in Mikes writing one feels a quiver of romance: As bowler and fielder ran to embrace each other, it was hard to believe that not twenty-four hours before Indian and Pakistani troops were exchanging fire across the disputed Kashmiri border. Not for the only time that day, I felt a lump in my throat. Im usually fairly resistant to cricket sentimentality, but I had no defence against this spectacle of subcontinental amity.