"So there we are, all tangled up together, the old barriers breaking, the new ones not yet established, a time of transition, always and inescapably turbulent. In the inevitable integration into a national community, one of the most urgent needs, sport, and particularly cricket, has played and will play a great role".

Just substitute 'sub-continental identities' in place of 'national community' and 'coexistence' instead of 'integration' and you have the great CLR James writing about the forthcoming Indo-Pak cricket series! So accurate and so incisive.

Cricket in the subcontinent does not have the same political, cultural, and racial connotations that CLR deconstructed for the Carribean cricket in the early 50s.

Yet -- it is not a breathtakingly counter-intuitive realisation -- cricket and some form of nationalism have got entwined in the subcontinent in quite a unique manner.

The purists on both sides -- scholars of nationalism and lovers of the game of cricket -- cringe at the thought of mixing the two, but the fact is that some form of nationalism is on display in the match.

But the fact is that the cricket field is a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles, which are charged with social and political significance.

Drawing from CLR's analysis of the Carribean, the sub-text of cricket has been an ideological weapon of subversive, anti-colonial, and creole nationalism.

But with times having changed, cricket in today's global environment has been altered a great deal by new technologies, capitalism and revised geo-political landscapes.

More than cultural resistance, in the present-day context the focus has to be on the power of cricket as a means of positive national expression for the resolution of conflict rather than a resistance of hegemonic behaviour.

The idea now is to reappropriate cricket and make it a meaningful instrument of post-colonial associations and bonds rather than see it as an anti-colonial resistance that it had been at a specific historical stage.

In some way, the logic of the analyses of CLR James has to be inverted. For him what made cricket such a vital political instrument was not the winning or losing but its aesthetics. He demonstrated the nuanced aesthetics whereby the batsman's posture and stroke became a mode of social representation.

The 'cut' signifying a belligerent affront to the exigencies of colonial rule -- a stylisation of emancipatory ambitions; or "playing it safe" being seen as conceding to the welfare state of Keynesian liberalism.

All this is delightful symbolism. But in the current context of India and Pakistan, the emphasis has to be on winning or losing. This is not accepting the capitalist value system as much as it is recognising the political and power matrix of today in the subcontinent and how it will affect the future of politics.

The opposition of Indo-Pak batsman and bowler still serves as a metonym for the broader antagonism between two versions of nationalism; between contesting themes of identity; between competing nation states.

But the fact is that in reality, one state is definitionally a failed state. It has virtually nothing, except cricket, that can be a means for national expression.

Faced with centrifugal tendencies all across, it is one way to keep affirming its nationhood to itself, if not to others. The overall context in which the matches between India and Pakistan will be played is one where India is way ahead of Pakistan in economic power, and standing far, ahead of it in the global community; Pakistan, on the other hand, is a failed state struggling to wash away it rogue state image and has its back to the wall.

Significantly, the two are talking to each other and Kashmir is closer to a resolution than it ever has been in the last 32 years. The last time that it was this close to a settlement was the Shimla Accord.

Even as we are close to a resolution of the Kashmir dispute, it is quite understandable that the Pakistani State cannot concede much given its internal dynamics. In the current context, any concession is bound to strike at the roots of its nationhood and drive it down the fundamentalist path.

In such a situation, India needs to help Pakistan reaffirm its national expression to itself. What better way to do this than lose the cricket series!

For India to lose the cricket matches, will be a moral posture of the superiority and self-control of the power politics that will create the space for Pakistan, which is outside the power circle, to join in.

This is critical, if India has to ensure that Pakistan keeps moving forward on the path to the long pending resolution of Kashmir. So cricket nationalism in India has to give way to long-term strategic national interest.

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