Rather fitting that Mahendra Singh Dhoni announced his retirement from international cricket on August 15, which was the 73rd Independence Day of India. Ever since he first represented the country at the highest level of the game (it was in an ODI against Bangladesh at Chittagong, and he was run out for a duck) this Rajput from Ranchi has uncannily personified the aspirations and changing identity of hundreds of millions of his fellow citizens.
The outstanding writer Supriya Nair -- on sports, she is one of the best of our times -- pegged this phenomenon rather marvellously last year, in a Mumbai Mirror column entitled “Ease of Doing Business.”
Nair wrote: “Someday a millennial historian is going to write a chronicle of how India entered the 21st century. There, after the records of pogroms, dotcom booms, Arundhati Roy’s essays, and AR Rahman’s music, Dhoni’s name will arrive, closing out the end of the beginning of modern India.”
She explained: “Dhoni is the cultural statesman of a different India. He came of age in a voluble, neurotic decade. He will go out in a country of strong, opportunistically silent men and their renewed machismo. We cherish the appearance of rectitude but have no real interest in accountability. We dream of progress but the fantasy is increasingly militaristic. Making difficult things seem easy hasn’t lessened the difficulty of doing them. A millennial history of India may not even have to mention Dhoni to be about him in some key ways.
“Here, then, is the significance of this remarkable figure both on and off the field. He was physically dominant, and preternaturally calm, which made his teammates (and the almost proverbial ‘billion neurotic cricket fans’) confident they could win under any circumstances.”
But he also embodied the sport’s dubious slide into inside deals and oligopoly, causing irrevocable damage to the fabric of the game.
Within minutes of Dhoni announcing his retirement, social media filled with encomiums from around the world. I was especially struck by an unusual contention posted on Twitter by Keshava Guha, the novelist and editor who has an exceptionally sharp eye for sports. He wrote: “You’ll see three Sachins before you see another Dhoni.”
I emailed Guha to ask him to elaborate, and he responded: “Sachin Tendulkar, for all his genius and longevity, was the product of a specific tradition -- the Bombay batting gharana -- and of sporting infrastructure built up over the generations. You may not see his exact equivalent, but there will be successors -- there may already be one, in Prithvi Shaw.”
Guha said: “Cricketers are supposed to come from the Bombay maidan, not Ranchi. Dhoni took the democratization of Indian cricket up a whole new level. Then there was the matter of his self-taught, sui generis technique as both batsman and keeper. He ignored every page of the textbook. Finally, his personality -- ‘cool’ in every sense. The most unflappable sportsman I’ve ever seen, and yet he never seemed robotic. Articulate when he needed to be, but a silently commanding leader most of the time. Put it all together and you get something I’m certain I’ll never see again.”
I asked Guha what he thought about the flip side of the Dhoni phenomenon. He told me: “Probably decisively in my estimation of him, he was closely associated with the N Srinivasan regime that corroded the integrity of Indian cricket, particularly through conflicts-of-interest, and dictated terms in world cricket in an arrogant and undemocratic manner. Dhoni himself was instrumental in India refusing to accept the DRS, and was totally intolerant towards legitimate questions or criticism, whether from journalists or commentators.”
Of course, we cannot possibly hold Dhoni substantially responsible for the irretrievable tarnish that has affected the game he played so well. But it did happen on his watch, and it is partly his swagger which distracted us away from it.
Nair writes with insight: “We live in Virat Kohli’s world, but Dhoni is the astronaut who terraformed this planet. He made big city polish look foolish. He rendered pedigree, both technical and social, inconsequential. Of his self-confidence, his facial hair, his ready reckoning with the new T20 format, and his romantic effect on fans, little remains to said. Indian cricket watchers are so uninterested in his alleged links to corrupt cricket administrators and back room dealers that those headlines have become less than a memory.”
Earlier this week, after the retirement announcement, I emailed Nair to ask what she thought about the moment. She wrote back: “It’s difficult to say when any kind of change is really complete in sports. Dhoni was a harbinger of this era, but I don’t think it has ended, the way Tendulkar’s era ended when he retired. I think he paved the way for the Kohli era, so in some sense, he is still with us.”
Vivek Menezes is a writer based in Goa, India.