I wept for George the Best

It is not easy to walk the streets of Mumbai and not feel guilty about being a Bengali these days. Sourav Ganguly’s exclusion – and then, inclusion – in the Indian team has assumed political proportions – so much to question the myth or reality of a nation-state like India that has to negotiate many other furtive nation-states turning sides within itself.

It has not been long since I have arrived in Bombay and I think I have been doing quite well, dodging the traffic and eating at sweaty, old-world Irani joints. I had no intention to face this trouble so early in my life outside Kolkata – this contest between nationality and para-nationality, between Bengal and India, so on and so forth. But I have to take a stand. Or somebody else will. A hundred thousand fellow Bongs already have made it incumbent upon me. So I am under compulsion to prove that I am no more or less Indian than the man sitting next to me having Kheema-pao, oblivious about the latest scores.

There is more in this comedy of errors than just a middle finger! Here is a deposed captain of a young Indian team who had so far eschewed all forms of provincial nepotism. Ganguly’s was a truly pan-Indian team, and he, a truly nation-minded captain. Today, however, he must face this accusation about his people. Here is a man who made a virtue out of an aggressive, new India but was shelved because he was not found fit for a newer India. Here is a batsman with one of the best records in international cricket who must prove himself again and again. Here is a leader who made the captain’s chair sacrosanct. But has lost to a coach more ambitious than the captain itself.

But when all is said and done, the scenes in Kolkata before and during the match shame me. These are not my people! Bengalis are not jihadis heaping a curse upon our fractured nationality! They are educated people who, having to live with multiple and derivative identities, have done well for themselves outside their native territories. Yes, there is a population – the distraught, emotional, hoi polloi, who, nurtured under neurotic communism and betrayed by their sense of pride, stand among half-truths about self, identity and nationality! But who among us Indians is not interrogating his or her own?

I was born in the tired ruins of an imperial city called Calcutta. A city that I found took itself too seriously to swallow any exclusion, though almost from the day I was born I was fed with the untiring rhetoric of being left out in the bigger games. But then again it is also one of India’s most enlightened and cosmopolitan cities. It may not have much to offer now but has done its job pretty well. It has shared the burden of Indian history better than most. And has suffered badly.

I am not arguing for nostalgia over performance. The beleaguered left-hander Sourav, though our boy, is not a great cricketer, at least for me. He is a man of limited talent who, in form, is breathtaking, and out of it is gawky. He was an aggressive captain, not an extraordinary one. His records are enviable and at times he was a match-winner. But that’s it.

But still, between a coach with a finger to spare and the pointless protests of a few thousand pranksters I cannot let my people and my state be mocked again. Sourav has made his way back to the team. Thank you so much. He may not be in two months hence. Thank you so much for that too. I mourned yesterday, but not for India but George the Best and gulped a few more pegs for this man who drank life to the lees. And to cheer myself up, I did not support South Africa but watched Brian Lara play another of his kingly innings in Australia! So I must say this to Mr Chappell: we are doing fine. We do mourn the death of the Indian captain and the coronation of the Indian Coach. Apart from that, as long as India wins, we, the Bengalis, do not mind and do not really care.