TO appreciate the cricketing acumen of Jemimah Rodrigues and her feisty teammates as also the women players from distant lands who played in last week’s World Cup matches, I should lean on an aphorism my daughter shared with me: Half the world is women. The other half is their children. What then accounts for the vile invectives flung at Jemimah Rodrigues?
For want of a better explanation, Pablo Neruda’s lines from the ‘Fable of the mermaid and the drunks’ could help us see the viciousness on display in the cowardly caverns of the internet. Neruda’s searing lines describe a trusting mermaid who strays into a tavern of drunk and abusive men. “They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs/ and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor/ She did not speak because she had no speech … Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light, and suddenly she went out by that door/ Entering the river she was cleaned, shining like a white stone in the rain…”
Jemimah played an innings of her life to outwit a formidable Australian team thereby putting India into the finals against South Africa. Her teammates, chiefly the one who was summoned at the last minute to stand in for an injured colleague and who took the best performance prize in the final match to mock the selectors, brought back elegance and class that had eluded Indian cricket in recent years.
Jemimah was viciously trolled after she gave the credit for her outstanding performance to Jesus Christ. There’s a background to it. Her father was stripped of his membership of the prestigious Hindu Gymkhana Club in Mumbai last year over communally inspired claims he sought to convert people to Christianity on the club’s premises. The father denies the charge. That plus the stress of being kept on her toes perpetually by the selectors was as good a reason as any for her to share her angst publicly.
Which player does not have a prayer on their lips when they brace for a tense contest? Is there a dearth of Indian players or their fans who perform yagnas and make temple visits to seek boons for this or that game? No less a person than Gandhiji was a devotee of Christ, quoting often from the Sermon on the Mount. And forget not how Diego Maradona described his World Cup winning goal against England in 1986. Impishly and not without double entendre he said: “It was a little with the head of Maradona, a little with the hand of God.”
Which player does not have a prayer on their lips when they brace for a tense contest?
The ugliness we witnessed from Indian fans (and some players) towards Pakistan’s squad in a recent cricket contest is sought to be passed off as an aspect of national fervour. How then shall we explain pretty much the same louts attacking a quality Indian player like Jemimah Rodrigues? Let’s face it. Contrary to a widely indulged belief, sports and politics have seldom if ever been separated from each other, and the connection precedes the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. Denying the bond is a fool’s errand.
It was Europe that collectively conjured the idea of the modern nation state, paving the way for newfound but eventually vulgarised nationalism to tether the fleet-footed human spirit to a yard of coloured cloth. (The non-resident India for all his shortcomings is at least honest in switching his national loyalty at will.) The idea of thousands of years old nationhood claimed by some Indians is clearly a canard. Before the 17th-century innovation of frozen borders, human loyalties and identities would change by staying still while empires expanded and contracted around them. Else it would have been tricky for Shelley to compose Ozymandias as a commentary on how egos of transient men in power are laid low by the vagaries of time.
Given that the history of sports precedes the innovation called nationalism, it is safe to conclude that elements other than those driven by national identity were in orbit when Indian players were ordered not to shake hands with Pakistani players. The sickening behaviour, while insincere, was not much different from say the mealy-mouthed boycott of the Moscow Olympics by the West, which Pakistan and some others had dutifully embraced. That decision may have unwittingly allowed the Indian hockey team to walk away with the gold medal, it’s last in Olympics. However, what was posited in the 1980s to be in Pakistan’s national interest would be described by senior Pakistan ministers in recent days to have been a grave and self-harming error.
It cannot be national interest that admiring Brian Lara or Donald Bradman is a most agreeable thing to do but applauding the swinging yorkers of Pakistani bowlers is not. The narrow national spirit was in abeyance when Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong defied gravity to applaud the questioning spirit of Galileo. Likewise with sport. When Bob Beamon scaled improbable heights to become an invincible long jump athlete in Mexico City the world cheered on.
To underscore the link between politics and sports, the origin of the marathon was rooted in a political legend. It was a minor military victory that the Athenian city state scored over the formidable Persian empire of Darius. The ancient Greek legend Pheidippides, ran from the battle site of Marathon to Athens in 490 BC to announce the Athenian victory over the Persians. The modern marathon was created for the 1896 Olympic Games to honour this story.
Curiously, when Hitler staged the 1936 Berlin Olympics to legitimise Nazi rule, no Western country thought of boycotting the games. Instead, the US sent Jesse Owens, the legendary African-American athlete who won four gold medals. While his participation challenged Hitler’s racist worldview it also threw a convenient cover on America’s own racist reality. The World Cup victory should help lift the veil from the anti-women subterfuge being perpetrated by a combination of nationalism and religion in India today.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2025
