The Boundaries of Sports Nationalism

The recently concluded Indian Premier League 20-20 tournament has been a phenomenal success by all accounts. Many of the naysayers were forced to sit up and re think their predictions and even their predicaments in the face of the results that the heady mix of star power (cricket and films), media, marketing and oh yes, that little ol’ insignificant creature called money produced- in your face, in your TV screens, powerful enough to create a soap opera like drama that even drew the reluctant, not so cricket desperate housewives like moths to the ever shining beacon of cricketing luminescence.
The month and a half of cricket madness produced its fair share of controversies (like any blockbuster in this land of controversies would), but the sheer intensity and the high recall value of the IPL was such that after a week, it became hard to imagine a life without the 8’o’ clock phenomenon. Had there actually been a time when we sat in front of the TV trawling the channels mindlessly in search of legitimate fare for evening entertainment. All that was temporarily history as the idiot box metamorphosized into the fool’s paradise.
Night after night audiences in their homes and in the stadia cheered on as their favourite hero’s ( many a time not with an Indian sounding name) donned a local team jersey and battled it out in the middle for four hours with opponents that sometimes contained players who were inostentiably their national team mates.
This got me thinking about the success of this league itself? Many times have glamour and cricket brushed shoulders but no one had been able to imagine a format that brought the two in such close heady contact, so as to feed off on each other and reach a point where it was impossible to gather who benefitted the most. Was Sharukh Khan using his star power to make the crowd go into a mass frenzy cheering for the Kolkata night riders, or was he just another instrument in this spanking new fast food game, who was trying to ensure that his star power was not diluted by the rising stature of our cricketing icons, foraying into the lion’s den to ensure that his charisma remained in the public consciousness? Your guess is as good as mine.
However, the IPL produced something that cricketing fans could not possibly complain about- that dream team. Cricket, rightly put is a national past time in India and while I’m uncomfortable about elevating the sport’s status by creating metaphors to describe its success, it is however true that over the last decade and a half cricket has reached that enviable status as a national obsession which can be hated or loved, but not ignored. Coming back to that phenomenon called the dream team, many an Indian cricket lover has spent hours of precious time and energy tracking the fortunes of not only his or her favourite team, but that of other teams as well, that contained players that were more revered here than perhaps even in their own nation.
So, cable TV fondly nurtured this phenomenon, until it produced varying levels of cricket following and various prototypes and sub prototypes of the cricketing fan, who could on the one hand obsessively follow the travails of the home team, but on the other hand, develop an inner, sub conscious, or sometimes super conscious affinity for opposing teams because of their skill, talent, and ability to produced stunning team coordinated efforts.
What cable TV began, the internet nourished and suddenly cricket, like many other phenomena, was a remote or keyboard click away. The theory of diminishing marginal utility was simply unheard of in this world.
Marketing principles talk about something called the product life cycle, wherein every product reaches a maturity stage, where it must diversify or innovate in order to survive. The cricketing product, was diversifying and innovating at a frenetic pace, and while most of it happened external to the product itself – cable TV and the internet were external tools that unwittingly created subtle product differentiations, twenty- twenty internalized the product innovation- probably analogous to the distinction between a physical reaction and a chemical reaction.
The birth of one day cricket produced the first phase of product innovation, but the turnover time was much greater in the case of one day cricket because it grew unaided by the mass media phenomenan.
The stage was however set by the time twenty twenty entered the fray and what we had was a formula for instant success. Cricket had long survived in the face of shorter, more intense sports, but the era of the mass media pitted these other sports against cricket and were chipping away at the viewership, by small amounts, but chipping away nonetheless. While, I’m sure the creators of twenty twenty or the IPL would not have thought of twenty twenty as a mechanism to counter dwindling audiences, no matter how small, they had unwittingly created a formula, which not only re invented the game, but also re invented the concept of mass viewership, bringing in sectors of viewership who had previously not considered the sport an effective pastime.
Yet the question remains, why the IPL and why India? The IPL was no doubt modeled on the English premier league, which has over the years become a bastion of loyalty toward sporting clubs. It is hard to imagine instant loyalty toward IPL teams similar to EPL loyalties, that have been generated over a much larger time frame.
Loyalty to the league had to be created before loyalty to the teams, so to speak, reinventing the nationalist phenomena of local loyalty spawning supra nationalist loyalty. That could be done, only through effective product marketing. Effective product marketing is a successful tool only if the product itself is successful, and in this case, what better way to create a successful product that by using product symbolism that was sure to generate an instant loyalty.
Therefore, the already existant fan base for national and international cricketers was capitalized to the hilt by creating teams that consisted of combinations hitherto unheard of- Shoab Malik and Virender Sehwag in the same team, Warney and the Pidgeon facing off, Sachin and Sourav facing off- all this packaged into a format created to thrill and titillate and produce spurts of ecstacy? The cricketers therefore embodied product symbolism as they each became vehicles of sporting marketing aimed at creating loyalties, not to towards the teams but towards the league.
Why was this essential? Simple because of the need to create mass viewership. It was not sufficient to create islands of loyalty where only the matches of local teams were followed. Rather a pan nationalist league loyalty had to precede and outshadow local loyalties and the incessant marketing and repeated broadcasts strove to bring about a situation wherein it was no longer unnatural for a cricketer from madras to give his all to a delhi team or for that matter, for an aussie to bhangra! That to me is the true success of the IPL- to make a situation of novelty one of normalcy.
The first year of the IPL has therefore ended in its success simply because it stayed away from creating divisive team loyalties, rather it spawned pan league loyalty. India, is by all accounts, a nation of contrasts , and it has turned every theory of democracy, multi pluralism and nationalism on its head, and created a unique standpoint which is hard to decipher but easy to understand. For instance, the theory of democracy states that only elite, enlightened societies can perpetuate it. India, however, has withstood the test of democracy since its inception as a nation embroiled with divisive class, nationalist and secessionist movements. Democratic and divisive tendencies have survived both inspite of and in tandem with one another.
Similarly, cricket following in this nation has many levels attached to it, as I have earlier mentioned. While, on the one hand, there exists a latent, powerful loyalty towards homegrown teams and heroes, on the other, there exists, equally powerful pulls towards teams and heroes from other teams, born out of an immense knowledge base, nurtured by mediums of knowledge transfer such as the television and the internet.
The IPL appealed to the latter fan, not the former and succeeded in enticing the latter fan to shed his nationalist coat and don a more internationalist garb, wherein his dream team came to life, not once , not twice but several times, and in combinations he could never dream of, leading him to the altar of sporting delight, while simulataneously enabling him to maintain that neutrality that every true sporting fan hopes to possess.
Isn’t the term the Indian cricket league a terrific misnomer and should it not be re named international Premier League?