Anand and Ganga

From Trinidad to India
“Trinidad was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. Only the death of Pundit Tulsi had prevented them from going back to India, and even since they had talked, though less often than the old men who gathered in the arcade every evening, of moving on, to India, Demerara, Surinam, Mr. Biswas didn’t take such talk seriously. The old men would never see India again.” (From V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas)
Trinidad’s connection with India dates back to the 1840s, when the British encouraged Indian to migrate to this Carribean territory as indentured labourers on sugarcane plantations. However this nation has been a part of our consciousness mainly as a constituent unit of the West Indies, the regional Carribean Cricket Team. Indeed, Port of Spain’s Queen’s Park Oval has been India’s happy hunting ground and part of Sunil Gavaskar’s saga of graduating from a rookie to a great cricketer within weeks. The old men of the novel would never see India again or Mr. Biswas either. The novel and some other of Naipaul’s early novels like The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira offered the only insight into the Trinidadian Society to people in India. These novels presented the rural and semi-urban Trinidadian life in the context of migration, post-colonial struggle to find roods and mainly East Indian characters from Ganesh to Mr. Biswas holding centre stage.

Naipaul’s world was limited to those who read serious fiction in English and more Indians have read Naipaul’s non-fictional work than his novels. Naipaul moved on in his later novels and they are not set in the West Indies. However mainstream Indian consciousness, especially the cricket aficionados have known the exploits of Test Cricketers like Constantine , Hall, Ramadhin, Gomes, Bishops and above all Brian Lara. While Indians have followed India’s matches at Queen’s Park Oval and listened to India chase 403 at Port of Spain in 1976, the West Indies Cricket team was the home team.Indians in general associated Trinidad with the West Indies. That Trinidad had a Prime Minister called Basudeo Pandey or a cricket captain called Darren Ganga, did not excite the Indian much.
It is the shortest version of the game, twenty-twenty that brought the Trinidad and Tobago cricket team to India. The Champions League 20:20 had one slot for the West Indies Champion team. Ganga’s Trinidad team has been doing well for the past couple of years and is current holders of Stanford 20:20 title and are here in India because of this. T&T arrived in India unsung but will leave India as heroes and after having established Trinidad firmly in the consciousness of the Indians, whether they read Naipaul or follow the West Indies Cricket team or not. For the average Indian above the age of eighteen, the West Indies Cricket means little more than Zimbabwe or Bangladesh, mainly on account of the collective performance of the West Indies regional team in spite of having some very good players including Brian Lara, Chanderpaul , Sarwan and Gayle.
The Trinidad and Tobago team is the only national side playing in the CLT 20 tournament , the others are provincial or county teams or club franchises like the IPL Teams. T&T are a national side. A young team led by a shrewd captain Daren Ganga, they have shown remarkable unity and have brought back to cricket ,the joy of playing. And all of India has adopted it as a team to support now that all IPL teams have gone out of the tournament.
The fifteen men squad has eight players of Indian origin and one Navin Stewart is the only player from Tobago. The team represents the two major ethnic communities-the people belonging to African and Indian origin living in Trinidad. The picture that Indians are seeing on TV night after night is vastly more complex than the novels of Naipaul. William Perkins and Adrian Barath, Dinesh Ramdin and Dwayne Bravo give a picture of the world created in Trinidad in a way, a one off representation of the East Indians cannot. Anand, Mr. Biswas’s son in A House for Mr. Biswas leaves Trinidad for England like the novelist V.S.Naipaul had already done. The picture one got was that at there was not much of a future in the Caribbean Country for the “East Indian” community, especially the ones who tore down the cricket pitch in A House for Mr. Biswas. Those who chose to stay in the Trinidad and led ordinary lives have via the Champions League Twenty Twenty presented to Cricket Viewers all over the world and particularly India of a multicultural society playing together as a team and just like their football counterparts Soca Junior, capacble of causing an international appreciation. Only in case of T&T Cricket Team, the two major communities have joined together to announce the arrival of Trinidad to the comity of nations, the way the erstwhile West Indian teams did to bring West Indies to the world stage.
This is surely the beginning. TV channels bring the news of Ram Paul and Ram Din celebrating Diwali and overnight Kieron Pollard is pronounced correctly as “Kyron” and not “Kiran” and Navin Stewart as “Nevin” and not Naveen. Trinidad and Tobago, the “and Tobago” brought into focus by Navin Stewart is now a country that Indians over the age of six will always connect with. And this is a huge population and CLR James was right when he said:”What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” The Tulsis of A House for Mr. Biswas were unable to feel truly a part of the society in which they lived. And over the decades, the connection with India became slimmer. The succeeding generations of the East Indians made Trinidad their home in a way,the eponymous Mr. Biswas of Naipaul’s novel never could or his son never tried. And now it is with the T&T cricket team’s campaign in India that Trinidadians from the cricketers and their family to administrators and the journalist Vinod Mamchan of the Trinidad Guardian, who have made the connection with India, epitomized by the sponsor’s logo “Venky’s” on their shirt. In so doing they represent a proud small country and unlike Mr.Biswas , his son’s generation even from England can see that the community have gone back to india, not to live but to make a permanent relationship.

* Anand is Mr. Biswas's son in A House for Mr. Biswas and Daren Ganga is Trinidad & Tobago cricket captain.