Sujit Mukherjee is that rare bird, a first-class cricketer who is also a first- class writer. An Indian Cricket Century collects the best of his essays, written over four decades. Its contents range from portraits of great cricketers like Vijay Merchant and Sunil Gavaskar to wonderfully witty recollections of cricket as played in locations as unlikely as Patna and Philadelphia. Other selections deal with cricket's relation to nationalism, violence and language. This book, in sum, presents the distilled reflections on our national obsession of our finest writer on the sport.
The game of cricket has always attracted the attention of men known for more general contributions to literature or scholarship. C. L. R. James, the author of the finest book ever written on the game, was also a novelist, political pamphleteer and historian. In America, that largely cricket-innocent land, James is remembered as the author of The Black Jacobins a pioneering work on slave revolts - rather than as the author of Beyond a Boundary. Likewise, Alan Ross is known to others as a poet, travel writer and literary editor, yet we Indians know him more as the biographer of K. S. Ranjitsinhji and the editor of A Cricketer's Companion. His compatriot Edmund Blunden made his mark on poetry too, but in his spare time wrote Cricket Country, a charming evocation of the sport's place in English culture.
In this distinguished company falls the name of Sujit Mukherjee. Now Mukherjee has had at least five careers. The first is as a teacher of English literature at the universities of Patna and Poona. The second is as a literary historian, as the author of A Passage to America, a richly detailed account of Rabindranath Tagore's visits to that land, and more recently of Forster and Further, a suggestive analysis of novels written on Indian themes by foreigners. A third career is of a translator, who has rendered into English several classic stories and novels originally written in his native Bangla. A fourth is as a publisher, who in a long and distinguished career at Orient Longman promoted works by Indian historians, novelists and essayists.
These other sides to the man might not have been known to the India Today reviewer who, some years ago, wrote of Sujit Mukherjee that he was a sure contender for the best Indian cricket-writer slot. Mukherjee has indeed had a long-standing engagement with cricket, this running parallel to his other interests. Before he commenced teaching at Patna College he had already played in the Ranji Trophy for Bihar.
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