Hail a dazzling genius-brat who hates losing and thinks manners are for sissies. He’d rather be crude and competitive than courteous and an also-ran, the old Indian good-loser.
Ramachandra Guha, India’s only serious historian of cricket, wrote recently that Virat Kohli could be India’s greatest-ever batsman, greater even than the divine trinity of Indian batting – Gavaskar the creator, Dravid the preserver, and Tendulkar the destroyer.
Guha’s praise for Kohli should have few critics: cricket fans know truth when they see it. They also know that Kohli is already the toughest, most cussed captain to lead India, a man his opponents fear, even as they bridle at his behaviour on the field. One had only to look at him in the Johannesburg Test to know that he can be an obnoxious man.
After the fall of the fifth wicket, he cupped his ear in a derisive acknowledgment of the stunned silence, then gestured to the South African spectators—until then raucous and partisan—to zip it. The game won, he bowed extravagantly to the stands, not as a signal of chivalry or courtesy, but as mocking proof of his triumph.
For all his extravagant gifts, there’s a tastelessness to Kohli that reflects modern India: The post-Nehruvian disregard for social niceties—manifest in everything from the way Indians drive, talk to each other, board airplanes, or treat waiters at restaurants. Kohli chirps—to use the modern euphemism for on-field abuse—and scowls; he glares and remonstrates, getting in umpires’ faces. But unlike much of modern, badly behaved India, Kohl is also world-class at what he does, able to compete with anyone under all conditions.
Consider the wicket at the Wanderers, as spiteful as any demon you could care to name from our demon-ridden scriptures. It was a Putana of a pitch, with poison in its breast. South Africa had gone 2-0 up in a three-Test series and craved a clean sweep to repay India for the thrashing meted out on their last tour of the subcontinent. This was intended to be a vengeful, whitewash-wicket, no matter the protestations of innocence made by the South African management.
Previous Indian teams and captains would have quaked at the sight of the Wanderers strip, and then gone into a fatalist shell for the rest of the match. In other words, they’d have conceded the game before a single ball had been bowled. Not Kohli. He saw the pitch, he saw the grass, he saw the burgeoning cracks, and he chose to bat first—in effect, to go over the top with his troops and run straight into the enemy’s fire.
The bravery—and cockiness—of that decision soon became apparent. India scored 187 in the first innings, but no commentator said they got “only” 187. Cheteshwar Pujara, India’s Sphinx-like number three, told the press after Day One that the total was worth 300 when measured by cricket’s equivalent of purchasing power parity. As if to confirm his assessment, South Africa barely overtook India in its first innings.
By this time, late into Day Two, it had come to be acknowledged by anyone watching that this was a bad pitch. Yet how bad? India had doctored its tracks when South Africa toured, but spin-friendly wickets pose dangers only to egos and batting averages, not to life and limb. Conditions cooked to suit the fast men, on the other hand, can be physically perilous. Remember dear old Bishan Singh Bedi declaring India’s first innings closed at 306/6 at Sabina Park in 1976 to spare his bowlers (himself included) from injury? Kohli would rather kill himself than resort to such self-protection.
India’s second innings was a study in courage, the batsmen battling through everything South Africa could hurl at them. No one complained, least of all Kohli, when batsmen were hit on the chest, the arm, the shoulder, the thighs, and, repeatedly, the gloves. Imagine the consternation, then, when the umpires took the teams off the field when South Africa batted a second time. Dean Elgar, the opener, was hit on the head by a short ball from Jasprit Bumrah, and the umpires—who’d dithered for nearly three days and not ruled the conditions unsafe—suddenly found the pitch too unreliable for further play. Play was called off and Kohli was incensed. His face said it all: “How dare you deem the very conditions that my men had to endure to be too dangerous for my opponents?”
As the match officials, managers and captains all conferred, rumours swirled that the match would be called off. The rules dictated that play would continue if both captains agreed, so long as the umpires did not deem the conditions to be manifestly unsafe. Faf du Plessis, South Africa’s captain, agreed to play on. This did not surprise me: The wicket, after all, was the one they’d ordered up for themselves. Not to play on it would be like disowning a child. In any case, the South Africans aren’t among the cricket world’s whiners. Even in India, when ambushed on tracks that turned square and spat like an old witch, they hadn’t complained about conditions. They went out and played, promising themselves that India would be repaid in kind on this return tour.
But there was a darker pressure at work in Johannesburg. South Africa would not have wanted to risk jeopardising India’s tour by refusing to play on. India would almost certainly have pulled out of the rest of the tour—comprising six lucrative One-Day Internationals and three cash-rich T20s—had the Test been called off. And du Plessis would have found himself entirely unwelcome as a player at the IPL. Money talks loudly, even when it whispers.
But Indian money shouts. Cricket is the one sphere in which India commands global dominance, and the swift resolution of the Johannesburg pitch crisis is a reflection of the power India wields.
Contrast India’s pathetic inability to do anything about the dangerous pitch in Jamaica in 1976 with the ease with which it got its way in South Africa in 2018. An impoverished India, closed to the markets, its players barely able to compete abroad, its team boasting not a single pace bowler in its ranks, was bullied in the West Indies and regarded as pushovers. Today, no one messes with the Indian cricket authorities without risking punitive consequences.
Alyssa Ayres, an American political scientist, has written in a recent book that “the new cricket world order also tells us something about the attitude a wealthier and more powerful India might bring to its international [political] approach in the future.”
There’s no denying that Indian cricket has an unlovely face. The Board of Control for Cricket in India is the coarse enforcer of the international game. The wider world may still speak disparagingly of Ugly Americans, but in the cricket sphere, there is open and rueful talk of Ugly Indians.
Virat Kohli is an Ugly Indian. For the moment, at least, he’s also a victorious one, a dazzling genius-brat who hates losing and thinks manners are for sissies. He’d rather be crude and competitive than courteous and an also-ran. Who are we to say that his way is wrong? Jai Hind.
Tunku Varadarajan is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.