THE way Bangladesh is losing in the Asia Cup has Bangladeshi cricket lovers terribly dismayed. But what is missed in the whole issue is that the game of cricket is not organic to Bangladesh and its primary historical identity. And, it now stretches into all contemporary institutions of the formal state — the peasant identity or the paddy field culture. Thus, there is a systemic conflict. Or shall we say a historic conflict between our village heritage and the demands of modern cricket and a ‘modern’ state?

Cricket’s origins are no secret having grown in the upper class playing fields of England. It did not grow in the bowels of feudalism which ended in the 16th century but commercial and industrial capital. With that, came the need to have educational institutions to serve the new order.

Seminaries built by the church were focused on producing clerics to serve the European religious structure that feudalism had created. But as feudalism ended, the demands for the new clerics were met with the new public education institution — public schools like Eton, Harrow, etc. They were the new ones, the ‘secular seminaries’, that produced the soldiers of capitalism, more sophisticated than the previous edition and more risk analysis-driven that led to the creation of the new education.

It was in this environment that cricket developed signifying the specific mindset of the new world. The player in a cricket team is both an individual and a corporate person. When a batter and a bowler stand against each other, they are both, simultaneously. The player has to face the opponent as the individual and also score and get the wicket to defeat the other team, a collective objective. It is the typical performance of capitalism. The entrepreneur is successful and, with the player, also the market.

Nothing truly projects the culture of the post-feudal era than cricket does. It is not possible for a peasant society — post-feudal but not market capitalist — to recognize this. That is because his world is much different where such freedom and responsibility and, more importantly, the conditions of playing a game are very different.

In a world dominated by agricultural activities that drain away all the life force, sports is a luxury that has no space. The individual has no space in his head and the person does not face the world as one. The person is always a part of a family, a clan. It is not the person’s fault that the payer has been pushed into a world, a sport, that mind cannot grasp. The person is pre-cricket.

Cricket semiotics in rice economies

GOING through the comments made by fans and believers, one notices the production of one villain — the chief of the Bangladesh Cricket Board and by extension party politics. Specifically, a large chunk believes that Tamim, ousted because of politics, or Riyad could have made the difference had they been in.

The team as a whole is abused but the main reason cited for the defeat is not poor capacity of the players and their lack of fitness, mental or physical. In other words, the individual responsibility of the players is denied primarily and the entire onus of the burden is placed on a higher power.

Nobody will ever call the BCB chief a quality administrator, but no one ever blames the players. Any reference to players comes with the argument that they do well when politics is good. It is the same players, same playing conditions, etc, but it is not the players who are no longer individuals but lathials of the matbars who follow his orders. This is how the village political economy functions and individual responsibility has a low place. And, so does the cricket team.

The psychology of depending on one player as the deliverer, on the other hand, is an appropriate example of Bangladesh’s saviour/pir/devata complex — very rural again — which can be traced to pre-formal societies in Bengal. In agriculture, control over the weather and other factors is very low; so, the dependence on the deity is inevitable and that is how it goes in cricket too.

Informal peasant state and cricket

BANGLADESH does not have a ‘modern’ industrial economy-based history and even now it is missing. Unlike market capitalism, crony capitalism by its very definition is based on rural power relations. The ‘antiya-bangsha’ network works as the substitute of completion. Hence, no quality control and transparency.

What they do is to make sure that the network is not disturbed. So, other institutions also function similarly. If bureaucrats are seen as members of a network whose role is to facilitate the function of the same, it becomes clear. Thus, the students’ political groups function as the ‘political seminaries’ of yore which the public schools and church institutions did.

Basically, cricket as a game comes from another era which we are not in. the Indian Premier League is a good example of how the game has changed and gone global while we remain bogged down with retirements and resignation which need interventions by the prime minister, no less.

It is not how a modern cricket system operates and it never will. But as both the major political parties are committed to crony capitalism, a by- product of the village system, an urban game like cricket can never work in Bangladesh.

Afsan Chowdhury is a researcher and journalist.