Photo: courtesy Wikipedia (Moti Nandi) & You Tube (Sukumar Ray)

Thursday Blog on RAJUMUKHERJIONCRICKET.BLOGSPOT.COM

Cricket & Literature

Shakespeare and Tagore never wrote on cricket. Surely they had other important subjects in mind. But that did not stop many other great literary figures of English and Bengali literature to contribute their views on this great cultural heritage of Britain.

We have discussed the associations and contributions to cricket of Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse, HG Wells and Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett in this series. Recently JU (English) alumni Soma Mukherjee has further related that eminent authors of the distinction of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelly, Keats, Byron and George Orwell among others have also rendered superlative contributions to the British national pastime.

These world famous writers have raised cricket literature far beyond the writings on any other sport in the world. Both in terms of quality and diversity. The richness of cricket literature has generated a very high level of prose and poetry because of the august presence of these illustrious authors.

Cricket literature has a unique dimension of its own in the pantheon of the game. It is not restricted to international cricket scenario at all. More so is the coverage of village-green cricket, local school matches, college and university cricket. Even club and road-side cricket.

In India hardly any established novelist wrote on the game. Dom Moraes did make a beginning with The Grass is Green but did not pursue. Eminent author RK Narayan too wrote a wonderful piece MCC on young, village boys trying to form a cricket club.

Fortunately in Bengal, eminent researcher Shankari Prasad Bosu left behind some splendid authorship on cricket before delving into his magnum opus on Swami Vivekananda. He delighted in relating the cricket stories of old, among which ‘Ball porey, bat norey’ (Ball drops, bat moves) was the most popular.

My wife Seema brought into my focus a most unusual illustration: sketch of a lady-in-saree square-cutting a pumpkin! My all-time favourite author of nonsense-verse, the famous writer Sukumar Ray – Satyajit Ray’s exceptionally brilliant father – drew an inimitable illustration to go with the absurdly, immortal line: kumro niye cricket khele keno rajar pishi?  (Why is the king’s aunt playing cricket with a pumpkin?)

Every Bengali-speaking child is aware of the genius of Sukumar Ray through the pages of ABOL TABOL. The quote appears in the widely acclaimed nonsense-verse ‘Bombagarer Raja’, which was written between 1921 and 1923.  As a close relative of Prof Saradaranjan Roy, the father of Bengal Cricket, to Sukumar Ray the game of cricket was not a mere sport but an emotional attachment. Was he the first to put cricket in print in Bengali literature?

But the man who brought cricket to the centre-stage of Bengali literature was none other than the eminent novelist / short-story writer Moti Nandy. Moti-da was a master story-teller with turns of phrase that had the connoisseurs yearning for more. His literary efforts traversed all sports, but his first love remained cricket. My mentor in more ways than one. Much more on him later.