Eleven Gods and a Billion Indians by Boria Majumdar is a recently released book on the secrets of the second most followed sport in the world. The novel, however, is not limited to tracing the profile of the game of Cricket itself, the sportsman, or the dramas of rivalry. The author adds much more to it. The book is strewn with considerations on politics, power, and current happenings.
Match Fixing, Captain-Coach fights, ICC domination, and IPL secrets to the era of the Ranji. These are some of the themes that intersperse the chronicle and that completes the fresco of the modern day cricket. There are many pearls of wisdom offered in the novel. Here cricketers move like crazy pawns in a neo-liberal, rather anarchic system, in which cricket plays its part.
Cricket, it is known, is the sport that the British have exported to the colonies, and which is still played and followed with a certain religiosity. India climbed world cricket in a disruptive way. With a sudden entry into the scene, it displaced the old sentinels like England and Australia. The IPL has traced the boundary line of a new era, recording the rise of the T20 cricket league to the top of the list of the game.
Cricket is the most powerful game that has appeared in India and is now an essential element of geopolitics like religion and business. The BCCI is a center of power that is more and more neuralgic. Together with the latest major IPL clubs of the subcontinent, the game to preserve its purity must come to terms with the real, new, owners of cricket.
Boria Majumdar tells about the power games and the cash flows, the corruption and the scandals that hide behind the global cricket. He reconstructs the red threads of a multi-billion dollar market that involves the political and economic super houses of India. From the politicians to the business tycoons, to the Bollywood actors, the bond that unites the interests of people to this sport is increasingly strong and often turbid.
The book reveals the names of stakeholders, companies, and politicians who want to take possession of the game and its teams. It shows that the game of cricket now is not just about the administration of a sport and its championships. It is also a source of revenues and legitimacy. Because cricket leads the masses in India, it creates social consensus.
Cricket is a theater that hosts games of power and financial wars, as pervasive as they are invisible in the eyes of the spectators. If the game is even more critical to the income it generates, it has become just as crucial on a political level. The book reveals the whole truth about who really controls global cricket and behind the scenes of the most popular sport in India.
In this context, cricket becomes a key to the interpretation of the reality and the existential dilemmas of the various characters. It is a journey that takes the reader in the spaces hidden behind the dressing rooms. With a formidable mention of true incidents, there is something more in every line. Precisely for this reason, it is perhaps one of the most fascinating narrative challenges.
From Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Virat Kohli, Anil Kumble, MS Dhoni to Mohammed Azharuddin everybody is on this team. As it is understood, it is a multifaceted novel. Boria Majumdar masterfully manages to bring out a compact and complete unit, mixing realities and in a broader sense the action. It's not easy to tell cricket in a novel. The book feels like watching a film or the game itself live on TV, with its two-tone transposition of black words on a white background.
Cricket is (also) our world. The author reflects its vices and virtues. The author tells the story of an addiction, a drug for monomaniacs that is called "cricket" and that brings with it others. The book is a kaleidoscope of very vivid images, transcribed with an inventive and loose prose that is extremely natural.
Melancholy and irony, bitterness and hope, are all elements of a chorus that intones a love song for cricket, the true protagonist of the book and the glue of the whole novel. In other words, it is a great novel written by an extraordinary cricket commentator of our times.