Ralph Cardu By Sankari Prasad Basu

Sankari Prasad Basu is better known for his books on the history of religion and religious institutions in colonial Bengal. But before he achieved fame as an authority on Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita, he used to be the finest writer on cricket in Bengali. Basu can be described in the same vein as John Arlott evaluated Neville Cardus– as ‘the first writer to evoke cricket; to create a mythology out of the folk hero players; essentially to put the feelings of ordinary cricket watchers into words’.[1] Basu joined Shibpur Dinabandhu College as a lecturer in Bengali literature in 1953 and soon started coaching the college cricket team.[2] His next workplace was the University of Calcutta, where he taught ‘Radhatattva, Krishnatattva,
He published a total of seven books between 1960 and 1975. As a matter of fact, the first six came out within eight years. while the last one was published not in a book format but as an addenda to complete the two-volume omnibus of his cricket writings. Incidentally, Neville Cardus died in the same year. He has written a single small piece ever since, a pithy critique of commercialization in cricket, which was published in Desh, a subsidiary fortnightly literature magazine owned by the Anandabazar group in the special issue commemorating the 1996 World Cup. Recollecting the experience of reading him for the first time, Prasenjit Bandyopadhyay
But numerous cricket-loving kids like me, who could not visit the cricket ground at will, had to satisfy the craving by listening to radio commentary. There was no television. We received live news of cricket matches through Ajayda, Kamalda’s commentary the same way as the blind Dhritarashtra of the Mahabharata was updated of the Kurukshetra war by Sanjay. This was not enough. We earnestly waited for the morning newspaper, and finished reading the sports page breathlessly as soon as it arrived… But this was not a mere journalist! The style of writing too was beyond what regular journalists were capable of. This was a new direction. This was the first time we realized that cricket could be literature.[4]

Basu was very much aware of cricket’s literary tradition. In the introduction to Romoniyo Cricket, he wrote that ‘the best innings played in the long and glorious history of cricket has not come off the bat, but off a pen’. This indeed evokes the poem by E.V. Lucas, ‘More mighty than the bat, the