The news is that the slightly conservative Oxford University will soon incorporate cricket literature written by the finest cricket scribes into its PG course of 'appreciation of liberal arts and English literature.' This's a heartening news. The students of English literature will surely benefit from this innovative decision because cricket is the only game that lends itself to sublime literature. No other game has fascinated the wielders of pen the way cricket has. Right from the beginning, there've been cricket writers like Sir Neville Cardus, West Indian Sir C L R James, Ausralian Sir Ray Robinson, Noel Coward, Peter Roebuck, Lawrence Booth, to name but a few. Cardus, who was basically a music critic, wrote musical prose.
His magnum opus, " Cardus on Cricket," is
regarded by many as the most fascinating piece of written English.
In
one of his essays in this book, he described Carribean George Hedlee, the
black Bradman, as "A batsman so exalted and infallible that even if
he desired to get out, angels stopped him to commit a cricketing harakiri and
the opponents commiserated...! " Or when he described Sir Garfield St.
Auburn Sobers in full flow in the first ever tie in Test cricket at Brisbane
in 1961, " Gary's 132 in the first innings had all the ingredients of
Beethoven's symphonies. His every shot reminded the lovers of music, the
nuances of a well-orchestrated symphony...." But Oxford is
not the first University to introduce cricket literature to its Masters degree
course in contemporary English literature.
Jamaica and Barbados Universities among the
Carribean islands along with Adelaide and Christchurch varsities in
Australia and New Zealand respectively, have been teaching cricket literature
to their post graduate students of English literature. Indian universities can
also take a cue from these universities as cricket is a religion in India and
most of the students, even female students, can also relate to it. Instead
of age-old format of all the Indian universities teaching same English poets,
American literature, post modernism and commonwealth literature at college and
university levels and churning out the same stupid students as well as
utterly monotonous professors, isn't it a pathbreaking decision to emulate
Oxford and other universities while chalking out the syllabus for
English literature?
India
has also produced a few wonderful cricket scribes like K N
Prabhu, Rajan Bala and to some extent, Sumil Gavaskar, who never had his books
ghost-written. The late Rajan Bala's English was so beautiful in his
numerous pieces that Pakistan's late cricket commentator and scribe,
Umar Qureshi, requested University of Lahore to incorporate one of
Bala's pieces on the famed 3 Ws of West Indis into the syllabus of
degree courses. It was finally incorporated. And here in India, students have
still been studying the same old stuff with no innovation and imagination.
Can't the UGC take a leaf out of the books of these varsities
and spruce up the overall syllabus of literature?
-----Sumit Paul
