Chasing Like Dhoni: The sham meritocracy of Indian cricket revealed

Chasing Like Dhoni: Exploring the Underbelly of Indian Cricket

by Aayush Puthran and Samod

Published by Penguin India

272 pages  ₹ 499

 

Dear reader, close your eyes and think of cricket. What do you picture? Is it the Indian women’s team hoisting  their World Cup trophy? A T20 innings that went viral? Maybe you’re older in your memory? Perhaps you picture Tendulkar and Dravid batting through an afternoon or Kallis steaming in at Ponting. Whatever the image, chances are it wore the same dress, of victory and glory. 

 

But that costume is the painted wood of the Trojan horse, showing the Trojans exactly what they wanted to see. Chasing Like Dhoni: Exploring the Underbelly of Indian Cricket by Aayush Puthran and Samod is an excavation of the cricket-shaped horse. “In a national life increasingly bereft of heroes, cricketers have become the most enduring idols — figures the nation continues to rally behind,” they write. But,as the authors insist, “the story of Indian cricket belongs as much to those who fall short as to those who reach the pinnacle”.

 

Right now, somewhere in India, a coaching academy is selling a family a dream it can’t deliver. That dream, the near-religious pull cricket exerts on the country, is where the book begins. But “the chance of making the national team is about 0.001 per cent and of playing in the IPL or WPL about 0.005 per cent. By comparison, cracking UPSC, the toughest exam, is significantly less competitive.” None of that stops parents from pinning their own unfulfilled ambitions, or their family’s only shot at escaping poverty, on to children (willing or not). Vaibhav Suryavanshi’s recent rise makes for a good headline and a misleading lesson: That talent alone, spotted early enough, is all it takes. Glitter-eyed parents imagine the same destiny for their kids. “Despite modern education and progressive outlooks, many Indian parents see children as extensions of their own identity.” 

 

So three-year-olds, five-year-olds, are enrolled in a future they had no say in shaping. Even talent has to survive a system rigged well before the first ball is bowled. “It is in local circuits that nepotism has its most deeply rooted and damaging impact (...) careers are shaped or stalled, and merit often loses out to influence,” the authors note.

 

Talent is only ever half the equation; the other half depends on the body you’re born into: Your gender, class, caste, region, religion, age. Nowhere is that clearer than in women’s cricket. Sports authorities and ministers have often said the quiet part out loud, dismissing the sport itself and the women playing it. Competition, ironically, is the easy part. What isn’t easy is the journey before the first ball — being permitted to leave home, thereafter facing sexual exploitation and non-existent infrastructure.

 

The Unnao village that called Archana Devi’s mother a witch is the same village that, months later, gathered to watch her daughter win a World Cup. In between, there was a father lost to cancer, a younger brother lost to a snakebite, and a mother who kept the family and her daughter’s cricket alive, all while being socially boycotted for daring to do so. Archana Devi was part of the Indian team that won the 2023 women’s Under-19 T20 World Cup. What does it take for a woman to be considered a “real” athlete in the public eye? According to a BBC study, “37 per cent of respondents felt female athletes did not appear ‘feminine enough,’ while 38 per cent believed women’s sports were less entertaining than men’s.” Even the coverage that does exist rarely helps, choosing instead to focus “more on the objectification of women athletes and teams”.

 

Cricket (like India) likes to imagine itself as a meritocracy where the ball doesn’t ask your surname. It isn’t. 

 

The sport remains a game of the urban upper castes, and Rinku Singh’s rise is a good example. After his five consecutive sixes secured an improbable win for KKR, headlines chased something else: “Finally, Rinku Singh’s caste has been revealed: Not Jat, not Thakur, not….” Caste is “an all-pervasive social reality marking the economic, political, and social hierarchy in the country.” A study cited in the book found that “only 11 per cent of players come from Backward Caste Hindus, despite these groups constituting more than half the Population”. India must stop asking where a player comes from and start asking “how many Ekalavyas still wait outside the nets”.

 

Geography discriminates, too. States like Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland face resource shortages so severe and a discrimination so seldom spoken of that their absence from the national team is unquestioned. But 

 

sometimes it only takes one name, one accomplishment, to open a door that’s stayed shut for decades, as in the case  of Robin Minz, the first Adivasi cricketer.

 

Cricket collects its casualties — someone discarded from the national team, another waiting for years, always too young or too old, yet another retired after a full career but unmoored from the only life they knew.

 

“In Indian cricket, the door never fully closes. But it also rarely opens wide.” Machismo leaves no room to say any of this aloud.

 

 “For all its glory, cricket is still just a game. Yet millions are convinced, perhaps willingly deceived, that it can heal them, if not forever, then long enough to mask the wounds temporarily,” the authors remark. 

 

Cricket runs on a wheel that resembles life’s own — unreliable, ungenerous. Still, the wheel turns, and millions of Indians climb onto it each morning, chasing entry into a club that has room for so few. Dreaming, against odds this steep, is its own act of hope — and resistance.

 

---

The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor. Instagram/X: aroomofwords