Aravind Adiga’s tale of poor Mumbai boys chasing cricketing stardom satirises a modern Indian obsession
A contemporary chronicler, writing in the 1850s, observed that Indians “were rather apt to look on a cricket match as proof of the lunatic propensities of their masters the sahibs, and to wonder what possible enjoyment they could find in running about in the sun all day after a leather ball”. Soon, what had been deemed lunatic and marginal, came to be seen as central. By 1981, according to the writer R Gopal Krishna, “cricket, Lata Mangeshkar and the transistor make India one nation”. These days, with the wealth of its leagues, the theological status that fans accord star players, its diasporic outposts in Sharjah and New Jersey, cricket is still used as a lens through which to assess the country’s fantasy life and its realities.
Aravind Adiga, whose first novel The White Tiger won the Man Booker prize in 2008, has always been drawn to that gap between the glitter and gleam of India Shining and the violence, inequality and social misery that give a partial lie to the nation’s desire to rebrand itself. Selection Day follows the shifting fortunes of 14-year-old Manju Kumar and his better-looking, apparently more talented elder brother Radha. Both would be social lepers were it not for their cricketing prowess. From an early age they were coached by their father Mohan, a lowly chutney seller, who had brought them to Mumbai where they live in a single-room shack on the edge of the city.
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