New Book validates Cricket role in West Indian identity

It was not a shot emulated by many.  It originated in Kanhai’s approach to the game of cricket which was to overcome the bowlers and win.  Kanhai came from very humble beginnings - Port Mourant Sugar Estate in Berbice, Guyana.  That origin had a lot to do with his game as Seecharan explores in this book.   “I play my cricket in two ways – first as a means of enjoyment (both for me and the spectator, I hope) and second to win”, Kanhai declares.  He shared this attitude with another West Indian batsman, who was to come after him, Antiguan Sir Vivian Richards.

 

What would lovers of West Indian cricket not do to see their like in the West Indian team of today – players who value the game for the game itself, and who excel at it not only for their own glory, but also because they understand that they carry the pride of the West Indian people in every stroke they play.

 

From Ranji to Rohan is a superbly written book.  Seecharan’s use of the English Language is as graceful as it is descriptive and his research is meticulous in the proven manner of his previous publications.  He calls on the work of a host of experts in almost every cricketing nation, among them John Arlott, CLR James, and Sir Hilary Beckles.

 

It is a book about cricket, and yet it is more than that.  It is also a book about how Indians in Guyana established their West Indian citizenship by staking a claim for places first in their national teams and then in the West Indian team.

 

Staking the claim was not easy.  In the case of Guyana, the struggle was tied up in class differences, racial bigotry and even politics.  Like Kanhai, Cheddi Jagan, Guyana’s firebrand politician from the 40s to the 60s, also came from Port Mourant, and the sugar estates of Guyana were his hotbed of resistance to colonial exploitation epitomised by the British, firm, Booker, that owned the majority of the estates and a good chunk of the Guyana economy.

 

Among the Indian players from Port Mourant who came to represent the West Indies in Cricket Test matches were Kanhai, Joe Solomon and Ivan Madray.  Basil Butcher also came from Port Mourant and played for Guyana and the West Indies at the same time as the others.  He was not an Indian but he too faced the obstacle of breaking into a Guyana national team when the Cricket authorities resided in Demerara and belonged to its well-established clubs.

 

 

And then along came a man who would transform all that: the Barbadian and West Indian batsman, Clyde Walcott.

 

other Guyanese test cricketers

 

It is paradoxical, given the difficulties that currently surround Guyanese Indian immigrant labour in Barbados that it was a Barbadian that helped to unearth the cricket talent of Indians on the Booker sugar estates and secure their places in the national and West Indian teams.

 

Walcott arrived in British Guiana (Guyana became independent from Britain in 1966) in 1954 recruited, as Seecharan explains, “by the Sugar Producers Association following the recommendation of Jock Campbell (the progressive Chairman of Booker)”.  The political context of his arrival was continual strikes on the sugar estates and a report by a Colonial Office-appointed Commission which recommended that cricket clubs be set-up on each estate.  Cricket – “a status symbol distinguishing the white managerial elite from the Indian workers created a new area in which social prestige could be won”.

 

As Seecharan describes it: Walcott’s “was a towering presence that infused cricket in British Guiana with a sense of purpose and resolve that had eluded it for most of its existence.  Imbued with the moral compass of the black Barbadian middle class, a product of the elite school, Harrison College, he was the ideal man for the volatile Guyanese political environment of the 1950s, rendered even more hazardous by the intractable race issue”. In three years, he had four Guyanese in the West Indian test match team – three of them from Port Mourant.

 

It is an everlasting tribute to Clyde Walcott as a great human being as much as to his capacity for recognising cricket talent that Seecharan records Ivan Madray, one of the Indians that Walcott guided from Port Mourant, as saying: “I could have walked to the end of the earth for Clyde Walcott”.

 

Clem Seecharan is Professor of Caribbean History at London Metropolitan University.  As a true academic he supports his assertions with empirical evidence. His Bibliography is extensive and his research material includes interviews with cricketers Basil Butcher, Joe Solomon and Ivan Madray.  But Guyanese political leaders are there too:  Cheddi Jagan and Eusi Kwayana.

 

For all that, as a product of a Berbice village himself and a young boy as Rohan Kanhai’s batting exploits were being hailed all over the cricketing world, Seecharan admits that “for Indo-Guyanese, including myself and boys growing up at the time of of Kanhai’s ascent”, his taste for the game and the way he played it, “came out of our unconscious craving for a great West Indian batsman to transport us to the heart of creole sensibility – West Indian authenticity”. 

 

 

This book starts with Ranjitsinghji, the Indian Prince who played for England and dazzled cricket spectators between 1896 and 1912.  He was an inspiration to the Indian Diaspora in the West Indies and this is well chronicled by Seecharan.  But, the book’s main theme explores the role of cricket in authenticating Indo-Guyanese as West Indians. He does a convincing job, and has written a book that will enthral all Cricket lovers of all races and nations.

 

Seecharan ends by pointing to the necessity for integrating Caribbean countries in the same way that West Indian cricket is integrated  - as a representation of our oneness and a source of our pride.  “Chanderpaul and Sarwan”, he says, “could now be an example pointing the way for the politicians toward genuine regional integration, based on our diversity, not some imagined creole procrustean mould”.