2020.8: Shruti Sharma, COVID-19 and Cricket: Playing with the Contagion and/of Caste
Out of all the team sports that are played and watched in India, cricket is the one sport that can easily adjust to the new normal unleashed by the outbreak of novel coronavirus. The nature of the game lends itself to physical and social distancing norms. For batters, their helmets and gloves can become symbolic of protection not just from being injured by the pace of a bowled ball but also from transmitting or contracting the virus if they happen to come physically close to another player. This physical closeness usually occurs during discussions with batting partners, if two players run into each other, or if a brawl with a player from the opposition side takes place. However, for social purposes like celebrating a century or a victory, these two symbolic objects that enforce distance – the helmet and gloves – do not suffice and have to be avoided at all costs. Although fielders and bowlers can easily avoid coming physically close to each other – for social purposes like celebrating a wicket through hugs and maintaining a safe distance while strategizing – the object of contention becomes the ball itself. All of the space within the boundaries of the field is occupied through the medium of the ball – the bowler running up with the ball in hand, the bounce of the ball on the pitch, the willow striking the ball directing it on the field, and the fielders set in motion to catch and throw the ball back to one of the two ends of the pitch where a teammate is stationed.
One would imagine the main contention is the frequent touching of the ball by players on the fielding side. But that is not so. There is another layer to the touch of the ball – a shiny yet rough layer – which comes from saliva. To begin the play of international tournaments amidst the uncertainty of the pandemic, the International Cricket Council’s Cricket Committee “unanimously agreed to recommend that the use of saliva to polish the ball be prohibited” because of the “elevated risk of the transmission of the virus through saliva,” although they found “no need to prohibit the use of sweat to polish the ball” as it is “highly unlikely that the virus can be transmitted through sweat.” This ruling is aimed at addressing fears that the ball could become a carrier or transmitter of the virus.
Soon, we will see cricket telecasted on television without stadium spectators. The ball – though protected from being a fomite – nevertheless will continue to flourish as an object in and through which discriminatory social relations and caste-based norms are concealed and transmitted. Saliva is used to shine one of the two sides of a cricket ball made from cow hide and sewn together with wild boar bristles. The leather ball wears and tears over the duration of play, and so the strategy behind shining one side is to keep it in a condition where the ball’s movement can be manipulated and controlled. Through applying saliva and rubbing the ball on his trousers, the bowler maintains one side and leaves the other side rough. Hence, over the course of play, a ball ends up having a rough/old side and a shiny/new side.
The two sides of the ball divided by a seam is a metaphor for the simultaneous embedding in and distancing from the social norms and relations concealed in the ball in its commodified form. The shiny side – nurtured and maintained – symbolizes the aesthetic spectacle that cricket is in a stadium and on television. This aesthetic fuses play with nationalist fervor. The rough side of the ball becomes a signifier of the spaces where cricket is produced – socially, spatially, and temporally distant from the aesthetic site of play.
The two spaces – of production and play – and the multi-sited lives and social relations amongst them, are deeply interlinked through the medium of the ball. It is the ball that moves through the touch of various hands from the invisible unchanging places of production to the aesthetic and conceptually dynamic spaces of play. From the rearing of a cow in the countryside to its slaughter in an abattoir, tanning of its hide in a tannery, hand-sewing of its hide in a factory, and finally its consumption as a cricket ball, this object traverses through gradations that manifest materially in the spatial division of locations and social division of laborers.
Implicated in the ball’s spatiality are Brahmanical social relations and norms of caste, based on practicing ritually ordained distance through the ideology of purity and pollution. “Remember, leather – as the carrier of the ideology of purity-pollution – has been regulating the human touch among the Indians,” writes Gopal Guru (2018). Those who work with leather, especially cow hide, are considered polluting to touch by caste-Hindus. Yet, “the live skin of the leather workers is treated as defiling and disgusting, while the dead skin in the form of leather ball…becomes intimate to the upper-caste body.” The intimacy of the upper-caste cricketer, revered at the top of the ladder of caste, to leather is evident in the licking of cow hide with their saliva to shine and polish one side of the cricket ball – the side which becomes a metaphor for their own polished existence built upon the sweat and labor of those pushed to the bottom of the caste ladder, relegated to the last rung of contempt. The ball can be licked but the leather worker cannot even be touched.
We see how the meaning of an object changes as it traverses on its journey from its raw/taboo form to its finished/aesthetic form. Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) who strongly advocated and struggled for abolishing the caste system and is known as the Father of the Indian Constitution, would call this a journey – in degrees of ascent – from contempt to reverence, up the ladder of the institution of caste. This ladder of aesthetics – the moral grammar of which is controlled by touchable hands – is not just for the social object that the ball is but also for those engaged in working/playing with the object at various stages/spaces, and their bodies and bodily fluids – saliva and sweat. Hence, both biologically and socially, already existing social and physical distancing norms that emanate from the Brahmanical ideology of purity-pollution are being reinforced in the realm of cricket.
The act of putting saliva on a cowhide-covered cricket ball is portrayed as an innocent act – for the sake of the game. COVID-19 has taken away this innocence from the cricketers perform it. However, prior to the question of the legality of using saliva to doctor the ball, caste-Hindus had given themselves the moral and social sanction of playing with and licking the most supreme taboo, a dead cow‘s hide, in the form of the ball. This is possible because the cricket ball is so omnipresent that it has become a secular object – to be touched, licked, and celebrated.
A persistent defamiliarization with the hegemony of upper caste consciousness needs to be undertaken to locate the manifestations of caste, not just in nooks and corners but also where we do not expect to it, right in the center of (dis)play. This consciousness has clawed like an eagle’s so deep into our ideological/caste-selves that we do not have the conceptual capability to think of the cricket ball as anything other than in its finished form. Around the aesthetic object for play within the stadium spectacle, social realities of multiple actors involved with the game are concealed and varied illusions – of nationalist unity and victory – manufactured.
Shruti Sharma is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She can be contacted on shrutimpsharma@gmail.com.