Indian cricket, when asked to grovel

The defining fact of the India South Africa series is the catastrophic decline of Indian red ball cricket, where a visiting team can mock us with the ‘grovel’ word

- SHEKHAR GUPTA

Given how imaginative and colourful headlines on our Hindi TV news channels tend to be, I am surprised nobody has yet described South Africa’s thrashing of India as “Baune ka Badla” (the revenge of the dwarf).

At this point of human evolution, even the use of the somewhat sanitised dwarf is frightfully incorrect. Bauna is the more offensive Hindi/Punjabi pejorative for a short person.

This is exactly the description our Jasprit Bumrah had for South African captain Temba Bavuma, who towers over a brilliantly improved South African team at all of five feet, four inches. This was in the context of a consultation with wicket-keeper and stand-in captain Rishabh Pant on whether to refer a rejected LBW appeal to DRS or not. Pant said, “Yeh short bhi toh hai,” (he’s also quite short). Bumrah, sort of in resignation, concurred but used the word “bauna” and ended the sentence with the cuss word used across languages to send “compliments” to somebody’s sister: “Yeh bauna bhi toh hai b.......”

Now, “gaalis” have become a big part of competitive cricket and nobody any longer bothers. Women’s cricket has also caught up with men on this. To use “bauna” along with the more familiar “b” word, when you know the combination of a stump microphone and social media will leave you no place to hide, in spite of sanitised commentary, was mindless.

Bavuma is a giant of the game. His five-foot-four-inch frame doesn’t define his cricketing stature, just as it didn’t for Sunil Gavaskar; an inch more for Sachin Tendulkar or one less for Gundappa Viswanath. He's also a Little Master like them, given the South African context. He’s the first black captain in a nation still nursing withering racial divides messing up all its favourite sports, from rugby to cricket.

Bavuma responded by standing tall on a minefield in South Africa’s second innings in the first Test to score 55, the highest for either side in that Test. It set up his team’s victory.