Making monkeys of themselves: the spectators who were ejected from the Wankhede © Getty Images

In Baroda and Bombay, Andrew Symonds, the only non-white, Afro-Caribbean member of the Australian side, was heckled by spectators who called him a monkey, and made ape-like motions in case he hadn't got their point. The Sydney Morning Herald published a photograph of two middle-class, middle-aged Indian men making like monkeys. Symonds, his captain, his team mates, and Australian newspapers thought this was as patent a form of racism as you were likely to witness on a cricket field and said so. The ICC wrote to the BCCI expressing concern.

Sharad Pawar said he hadn't received the ICC's letter. He borrowed the theme of cultural difference that Ricky Ponting had used earlier in the series in another context - that of sledging - to make his point. In the days that followed, this became something of an Indian theme: the Australians had misunderstood the crowd's gestures. There was no racism intended. The police commissioner in Baroda even supplied an alternative explanation: the monkey chants were no more than the spectators invoking the simian god, Hanuman.

The non-official reaction was similar. The newspapers were slow off the
mark. Some suggested that Indian crowds had always jeered combative
cricketers like Symonds; the monkey business was volatility, not racism.
Indian crowds had been known to call West Indians "kaliyas" or "hubshi" and English cricketers "goras" because they were, respectively, black and white.
The implication was that Symonds with his dreadlocks and face paint, more or
less invited the heckling by turning out in a contemporary version of
blackface. Looked at reasonably, it was possible, the argument ran, to see
it as no more than a kind of empirical teasing where unsophisticated
spectators named what they saw: gora, kaliya, bandar.

Some opinion pieces struggled with the large question: are Indians racist?
And if they are, are they racist in the same way as white people who are racist?
Critics referred to the Indian obsession with being light-skinned, a
preference happily specified in classified matrimonial ads and further borne
out by the sale of fairness creams. One writer described this preference as a form of "soft racism", an attitude similar to notions of white superiority in western societies, but different in two ways: a) there was no republican history of state sanction for racist prejudice, unlike in white settler colonies like Australia and South Africa in the past b) the variation in skin colour within networks of caste and kinship in India made "hard" bigotry, genetic racism, difficult. Others made the point that caste discrimination,
specially the practice of "untouchability" was as vicious a form of discrimination as apartheid or segregation.

As the days passed, a pattern emerged in the public response to the taunting
of Symonds. The reaction after Baroda was defensive. After the Bombay match,
where Symonds was booed at the prize-giving, and where the monkey
taunts were repeated, the Indian response changed: the police evicted the
worst offenders and charged them in court, Pawar denounced racist behaviour
as unacceptable, and newspapers carried editorial mea culpas. It was Hamish
Blair's brilliant photograph of two middle-class Indian men in the Wankhede
stands, trying to look like apes and succeeding, that swung Indian public
opinion away from denial towards an acknowledgment that there was a problem
that needed to be named.

And its name is racism. It's silly and deluded to look for anthropological
explanations that will turn racist behaviour by Indians into something
subtly different. Cricket writing by Indians in English sometimes makes the
mistake of thinking of the "average" Indian fan as non-English speaking and
therefore naïve and unsophisticated. This assumption makes it possible for
"us" to explain "their" behaviour away as a kind of unschooled brutishness
that is unfortunate but not wicked. This is why Blair's photograph is so
important: it shows you upwardly mobile men - who probably discuss the
virtues of one malt whisky over the other, who possibly holiday abroad, whose
children certainly go to private schools that teach in English - using one
of the many international codes they've learnt in their cosmopolitan lives,
the Esperanto of bigotry. The mudras they're making aren't derived from
Kathakali : they're straight out of the international style guide to insulting black men.

It's hard for Indian fans to cede moral advantage to an Australian team.
They are so much better at the cricket that outrage is often the only
consolation we have. It's hard to fault the Australians' behaviour on the Symonds
affair: they've made their point, done the BCCI the favour of not lodging an
official complaint, been appreciative of the board's belated denunciation of
racism, and have signalled their willingness to move on. The Indians, after a
slow start, have redeemed themselves by booking the bad guys. To keep up the
good work, we need to do the same again. And it doesn't have to be a racial
insult the next time round: it could be, given our versatility in the matter
of prejudice, a religious slur.

To say this isn't to concede some civilisational defect but merely to point
out that we can't enjoy the glow of self-righteousness without the rigours
of self-examination. Our virtue as a nation is that we committed ourselves
to an inclusive pluralism. Our aim as a cricket-playing nation ought to be
to live up to that ideal.

	Dilip Vengsarkar must stop playing to the gallery © Getty Images

Dilip Vengsarkar, the current chairman of selectors, has been in the news, most recently on account of his public warning to India's 'seniors' (read Tendulkar, Ganguly and Dravid) that they couldn't take their places in the team for granted, that they needed to earn their keep.

Vengsarkar has a habit of shooting his mouth off, but this statement was so unnecessary that it drew a double reproach: one from India's cricket board, asking him to stop making public statements about the team and another from the new captain of India's ODI team, MS Dhoni, who went out of the way to praise the performance of India's veterans, saying categorically that the team had no replacements for them.

And well he might, given that Ganguly's recent form and Tendulkar's, has been outstanding in the one-day game. Dravid's form in the four matches against Australia has been disappointing but he played a couple of outstanding innings against England in the limited overs series that followed the Tests, and given that he voluntarily gave up the captaincy in both forms of the game in the very recent past, he's scarcely the sort of player who needs to be told not to be complacent.

This is unlikely to stop the chairman from offering his opinions to the press because indiscretion has been his watchword since he was appointed to his present office. After his retirement from the game Vengsarkar wrote columns for a while, the copyright for which vested with a company of his devising called Dilip Data Syndicate. He could revive that company to sell his opinions to the newspapers, a sort of rent-a-quote service, so that the remainder of his tenure could be profitably used.

It's not unusual for national selectors to behave oddly. For many it is their return to the limelight from the shadows of retirement, their last reprieve from the obscurity into which all ex-cricketers disappear. Actually, that should read 'used to disappear'. Now, thanks to sports channels and news channels on television, all sorts of cricketers remain in the public eye long after retiring from the game. Nikhil Chopra and Syed Saba Karim, two cricketers with very modest international careers figure in a comic cricket show, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and Arun Lal have successful broadcasting careers, Ajay Jadeja overcame scandal and retirement to become a fixture on cricket shows and to figure in celebrity dance competitions and Navjot Singh Siddhu is more than a mere Member of Parliament, he's a cult figure.

But perhaps it's unfair to compare Vengsarkar to these men, who are, after all, much younger than him, players who were still playing at the highest level when the great tide of globalisation came to lift cricketers to levels of fame and wealth unimaginable through the years in which Vengsarkar played his cricket. On the other hand, I can think of players of roughly his generation who remain more vivid in public memory than Vengsarkar. I'm not talking about Gavaskar, who as India's greatest batsman, is an immortal, with whom comparisons are odious. Nor of Kapil Dev, for the same reason. A good player to compare him to is Ravi Shastri.

Like Vengsarkar, Shastri played for Bombay. He was six years younger but he retired from international cricket around the same time as Vengsarkar did, in 1992. Like him, Shastri captained India occasionally without ever becoming captain of India in his own right. Vengsarkar led India for as many as ten Tests, played international cricket for India for sixteen years (as many years as Gavaskar did and five more years than Shastri) and was a part of the side through the glory years in the mid-eighties when it won the world cup in 1983, the so-called world championship of cricket in 1985 and the series against England in 1986, in which triumph Vengsarkar played a leading role.

And yet, the contrast between the current standing of the two couldn't be more marked. Shastri is arguably the most successful cricket commentator India has produced, earlier this year the BCCI was literally begging him to take over the team after the debacle of the World Cup and he has just accepted, on his own terms, the headship of the Board's cricket academy. Vengsarkar, on the other hand, vanished from the minds of the cricketing public for a dozen years and when he returned as chairman of selectors, he courted the attention of the media, something that Shastri accepted as his due. And the cricket academy Vengsarkar runs is is called, forlornly enough, the Elf Academy.

	An elegant, pivotal presence at No. 3 in the '80s © Getty Images

It isn't just Shastri. Take Mohinder Amarnath. If Shastri is six years younger than Vengsarkar, Amarnath is six years older. Like Vengsarkar, he had a long career (nearly twenty years of Test cricket with gaps in between) and a Test average just above 42 which is better than good. But Amarnath pops up on television as an expert, as a commentator, as an actor in commercials: he is a figure in the world of cricket, whereas Vengsarkar, before his elevation to the chairmanship was not.

Perhaps the reason for this is that Vengsarkar is a self-effacing sort of fellow, not the pushy sort who courts the media. This is hard to believe given how keen he is to supply soundbytes to the press, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Even so, his post-retirement obscurity is puzzling. Gundappa Viswanath, the most modest, retiring cricketer this country has ever had the good fortune to produce, remains a presence in the cricketing public's mind despite his shyness, in a way that Vengsarkar doesn't. This might have something to do with the fact that Vishy was a genius, but if you look at his figures, he has a lower batting average in Tests than Vengsarkar does, fewer centuries, he played his last ODI a year before India won the World Cup in 1983 and he never experienced the adulation and publicity that Vengsarkar and his team mates did after the coming of network television in 1982. And yet Viswanath has a hold on the affections of Indian cricket fans that Vengsarkar can only dream of.

Vengsarkar's invisibility is puzzling because he was a first-rate cricketer. He scored seventeen Test centuries, many of them to win or save matches for India. He was, after Gavaskar, our finest player of fast-bowling in the '70s and '80s, he helped us win a Test series in the mid-eighties which was our last win there for twenty years, and through his career he was an elegant, pivotal presence at No. 3 in the batting order. He was affectionately called the 'Colonel' because of his organized, near-military bearing and he did score those three splendid centuries at Lord's. He was an unlikely contender for obscurity when he retired, and yet that was his fate.

It may be that India's cricket establishment took too long to call upon his services: the politics of the Indian cricket board are indecipherable to anyone outside its grubby structures. Or it might just be a function of personality: there are people who are instinctively liked and there are others who seem to have had a charm bypass. Whatever the cause of of Dilip Vengsarkar's long years in the wilderness, he would do well to remember that he was a fine player in his time. His reputation will be better served if he uses his past experience and his present eminence to pick the best teams he can instead of picking on great players and playing to the gallery. The regard of posterity should be a greater prize for a cricketer of his standing than fifteen minutes of 'fame'.

This post first appeared as an article in the Kolkata based Telegraph.

"Ricky Ponting has accused India's early-series attitude of being "fake"
after their behaviour turnaround during the third ODI on Friday.
Mahendra Singh Dhoni, India's captain, publicly complained about
"harsh words" from some of the Australians during the 47-run loss,
but Ponting claimed Chris Broad, the match referee, congratulated
him for the way his side approached the game." (report in Cricinfo).

	Ponting and Dhoni - Not quite a sign of things to come © AFP

To raise useful levels of friction
You need to sledge with conviction
A quality that's wanting,
In Indians, said Ponting.

To snarl one match and snitch the next
Is to stray from sledging's sacred text:
Which bids you: Go mano a mano
(If you can-o).

To drag the ump into private chat…
What kind of manliness is that?
Turning it on and off like a gizmo?
That's not machismo!

Real men don't need to start jumping
To get their testosterone pumping.
These Sreesanths and Dhonis:
They're just phonies.

A history of transportation
Explains our gift for confrontation,
And our knack for raising hell,
Also why we travel well.

That doesn't mean we're less than good
We bear ourselves as sportsmen should
Unlike the excited oriental
Who tends to look mental.

While Dhoni sneaked and Bhajji raved,
The referee said we were well-behaved
Only losers think I'm a baddy:
I have a reference from Daddy.