All the cricketers who took the field in India’s U-19 World Cup opening game against the USA on Thursday were bound by a common heritage. They were either Indians or of Indian descent, with the Stars and Stripes embossed on their chests. And when India’s national anthem rang out before the match, the parents of most American cricketers sang along, even though they had the flag of the United States wrapped around them.
Those moments were metaphorical of the primacy of India and South Asia in the tournament — being hosted this time by Zimbabwe and Namibia — and the cricketing world at large. Tournament records show that one in every three cricketers in the competition is South Asian, or traces their ancestry to the region. This excludes those of Indian and Pakistani heritage who comprise the East African nation of Tanzania, as well as the descendants of indentured labourers in South Africa and the West Indies.
The numbers capture the story of how the coloniser’s sport has been taken over by the colonised. Of the 240 cricketers in the tournament, 60 hail from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. From the other teams, 32 have family roots in South Asia, including 28 from India and two each from Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
While it is well known that Indians form a majority in teams from several associate nations with sizeable diasporas, they are now breaking into the national teams of more established sides such as Australia, New Zealand and England. Australia has two players of Indian and Sri Lankan origin, and New Zealand has four — a trend that suggests a healthy integration of South Asians into mainstream societies there. It was different in the past, as Australia’s Usman Khawaja, the recently retired batsman with Pakistani roots, once said: “All my coaches were white Australian, all the selectors were white Australian, and they didn’t really understand me or my culture.”
John James, the Australian U-19 all-rounder whose parents migrated from Kerala to New South Wales, says he has always felt a sense of belonging — be it in school, with his mates in the New South Wales youth team, or when he ferried drinks for the Test players during the New Year’s Test in Sydney last year. His accent is that of a local speaker. “I feel very Australian, having been brought up here. I do speak Malayalam at home, but I am Australian in everything because I grew up in an Australian environment,” James told The Indian Express.
In the last few years, Australia has embraced its multiculturalism, with a report in The Sydney Morning Herald showing that participation in the country’s cricket by players with South Asian backgrounds has doubled to 20 per cent in the past five years. Indeed, apart from Khawaja, Gurinder Sandhu and Tanveer Sangha have worn the famous yellow jersey.
Such integration had set in a couple of decades earlier in New Zealand. Apart from the four players in the U-19 squad, two of the mainstays in the senior team are sons of migrants who arrived as early as the turn of the century. “Not just cricketers, there are a lot of coaches from India in the New Zealand set-up,” says Wellington-based Debu Bainik, who is from Assam and has coached, among others, national New Zealand cricketer Will Young. Behind New Zealand batting star Rachin Ravindra’s emergence was Sriram Krishnamurthy, who mentored him during his time with the Wellington Firebirds.
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England’s U-19 squad has two cricketers with Pakistani links. Farhan Ahmed is the younger brother of England international Rehan Ahmed. Ali Farooq is from Loughborough Town, where South Asians constitute 15.7 per cent of the population. The England and Wales Cricket Board, on its part, has launched a South Asian Communities Action Plan, through which the governing body is engaging with these local communities via workshops and proactive schemes.
The players and parents, irrespective of roots and nationalities, share similar stories of sacrifices and setbacks, tears and tension. James’s parents are registered nurses who relocated to Sydney from West Bengal’s Kharagpur when he was only a few months old. “Their timings were really odd — they had night shifts and sometimes worked two or three shifts successively. In between all this, they had to drive me to the academy for training and then pick me up again,” he says.
In a Cricket Australia video, his teammate Aryan Sharma speaks about the sacrifices his parents made. “My dad visited Australia to attend his brother’s wedding in 2000 as a visitor, then moved here in 2005. My parents always used to tell me that moving from one country to another was hard. It was initially difficult to adapt to the Australian lifestyle,” he says. But both Aryan and James insist that they are “strictly Australians”.
New Zealand all-rounder Snehith Reddy, meanwhile, loves the “tongue-burning” biryani from his father’s home state of Andhra Pradesh and adores the Telugu movie star Junior NTR. He was only one year old when his parents shifted to Hamilton and set up a cafe there. Every weekend, his father, Krishna, took him along to his club cricket games, and gradually Snehith too got hooked — living up to the stereotype that sport is a rite passed down generations. If not the father, it would be an elder brother, as it was for the USA’s gifted all-rounder Utkarsh Srivastava. For James, it was a friend who moved to Sydney when he was six or seven. One way or another, cricket binds South Asia with the world, and the world with South Asia.
