Ananda-Nalanda took Cricket to the masses

British invented the game of cricket to sunbathe during their Summer and hence they designed the game to be played for five days in the open. Yet there was no guarantee of a result even after playing that long because the result was always secondary. Sunshine is such a rarity in England that to call somebody 'sunshine' is to accord him the highest form of respect and intimacy, but here in Sri Lanka to call somebody 'sunshine' would be to make him a sweltering experience.

British culture

Over the years however, cricket became so much a part and parcel of British culture that the term cricket has even come to symbolize British national characteristics, albeit with a tinge of propaganda. To identify something as 'not being cricket' is to castigate it as 'unfair', signifying that everything about British and Cricket is necessarily 'fair'. The reality however is that there was nothing fair about the way the British had violated the Kandyan Convention in 1815 and quelled the civil riots in 1818 and 1848 committing genocide on unarmed populations. That however is another long story that again is 'not cricket' and also beyond the scope of this column.

The game of cricket was first played in Ceylon by the planters in the 1840s and then the cricket clubs started to spring up in the city. In the 1870s the game was introduced to missionary schools where the anglicized progenies studied, mainly as a means to affect the 'required balance' in their curricular.

A game, if it is to be successful at the international level, has to be necessarily popular through the length and breadth of the country, because it is through such popular participation that the country's best talent will emerge to represent the nation at international level. But having played cricket for well over 100 years, by 1970s the position of cricket in Ceylon was rather rudimentary and limited in participation.

In fact, being a student of a big time cricketing school in the 1970s, I often used to wonder whether we could justify our 'doctrinaire enthusiasm' for the game at the time, when we as a nation were not even considered for the basic level of 'Test status' by other cricket playing nations.

Urban areas

It was still the time when only a few suave schools played cricket and cricket was considered the exclusive domain of those who spoke and behaved in English. As a result cricket as a game was just lingering around the urban areas with little signs of being opened up for the public. At the national level, we had two constrains. One was the lack of facilities and equipment for greater participation and the other was the lack of popularity of the game at the village level.

The first issue was due to limited finances but the second issue was mainly due to communication because commentaries of all the cricket matches played in Sri Lanka that time, be they quasi internationals or school 'Big matches', were given only in English. There was a school of thought at the time that it was not possible to give Cricket commentary in Sinhala because our mentality then was such that we would rather do without Sinhala commentaries than desecrate the 'traditions' of cricket.

Sinhala terms

In this social milieu, two commentators, Premasara Epasinghe and Palitha Perera were bold enough to rise up to this challenge and commence Sinhala commentaries for the annual Ananda-Nalanda Big match in early 1970s, introducing and coining their own terms in place of the esotery associated with cricket. At times the newly coined Sinhala terms sounded funny such as when they blurted Davi Giya meaning 'burnt out', when all what had happened was that a batsman had got out. What generated more amusement however, was the description of fielding positions in the cricket field, as some positions had the potential to be translated as Maru Kakula(fine leg) and Mada Thitha (silly point) in Sinhala. However the two articulate commentators were able to weather the initial difficulties with time and establish Sinhala as a medium of commentaries for cricket in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala commentary caught up with the public and soon it was heard even at wayside boutiques and street corner houses.

Thus, the precedent was set for the commentaries to be given in Sinhala and that became even more relevant to the cricket lovers when international teams toured the island. Even though Sri Lanka was yet to be admitted to the Test status, I could still remember how Bandula Warnapura and Sunil Wettimuny were elevated to iconic status when they mauled the Aussie attack of Lillie and Thomson at the 1979 World Cup. Now the masses understood cricket and its technicalities better and they took national pride in the thought that our boys could hold their own against the best in the world. Test status was awarded to us in 1982 and the fact that this happened at a time, when Ananda and Nalanda had peaked in their cricketing exploits with even rural Maha Vidyalayas showing a keen interest, could not have been a mere coincident.

Test status

Even after gaining Test status, the performance of our national team was in fits and starts for some time. It was in 1996 that our national team reached its speak winning the World Cup of cricket and incidentally that national team had six players from Ananda and Nalanda as against none from those suave schools that had treated cricket as their colonial legacy. It was the likes of Jayasuriya from Matara, Aravinda from Balapitiya, Arjuna from Gampaha and Muralidharan from Katugastota that finally put Sri Lanka in the cricketing map. After Sri Lanka won the World Cup, a senior Sri Lankan player commented to the international media stating that, "For years we played cricket the traditional way. We called our coach 'Sir' and we were more concerned about our manners and traditions of the game than getting bat to the ball. This attitude however changed in the late 1980s with more village boys joining the fold and that I think is the turning point in Sri Lankan cricket."

The morale of this narration is that, 'There are certain beneficial things that we have inherited from our ex-colonials when they left us after 443 year rule. But if we are to make the best use of such leftovers, we have to adopt those to suit our conditions and mores, making them our own, rather than treating those with awe and obeying those with colonial servitude.' [email protected]