Even though Shivnarine Chanderpaul became the tenth batsman in cricket history to pass 10,000 Test runs on Thursday, the West Indies team is yet to reclaim its glory days. West Indian cricket and its intersection with culture and politics were the basis of the discussion. From the pitch to the page: The literature of Cricket at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest yesterday.
The panel included literary critic Brendan de Caires, cricket journalist and author Rahul Bhattacharya and novelist Joseph O'Neill. The forum was billed as a discussion on the challenges of translating cricket into literature, but the decline of the West Indies team and the frenzy that their past brilliance induced could not be avoided.
Bhattacharya shared that his favourite batsman is Brian Lara and that he was appalled three of West Indies' best players are currently playing in the Indian Premier League. Yet, the team continues to remind him of cricket from his youth. "For an Indian, watching the West Indies stirs nostalgia of cricket being beautiful," he said. Bhattacharya is the author of Pundits in Pakistan, an account of the India cricket team's historic tour of Pakistan in 2003.
O'Neill believes the advent of "hyper-capitalism" is part of the reason that cricket clubs and amateur players have decreased over the years. His novel Netherland is set in New York and charts the cricket-based friendship of a Dutch immigrant and a Trinidadian immigrant.