Daily Times

Cricket is in the news once again: on the field the Younis Khans and Shoaib Maliks are earning accolades aplenty while behind the scenes the Pakistan Cricket Board’s (PCB’s) marketing department is in overdrive to sell its latest multi-million dollar venture, the Pakistan Super League. The regularity with which cricket dominates the headlines and captures the imagination of the people reveals the significance it has in the fabric of Pakistan. Yet, often we see that the sport itself becomes secondary; for many a viewer, a game of cricket becomes primarily an expression of nationalistic bravado while for the administrators of the game it has become but a transparent way of accumulating wealth. So, the ‘purity’ of sport — its raison d’être even — gets lost amidst the fog of tribalism and commodification.

What is this mythical ‘pure spirit’ of sport and where does one find it? A key facet of sports is to provide us humans the ability to create an alternate reality: when individuals set out to play a game, a hitherto neutral space is transformed into an arena governed by its own idiosyncratic notions of time and its own unique rules that exist outside of ordinary life. Thus, more than mere escapism and more than vulgar competition, the purpose of sport is for humans to reaffirm our capacity for spontaneous creativity. To find this unbridled creativity, one is forced by necessity to look beyond higher levels of organised sport. In other words, one has to take to the streets.

Consider the near-universal culture of street cricket. For all of its ubiquity, it remains oddly reviled. To those involuntarily caught in its orbit, street cricket is a nuisance where reckless young men take over roads and pavements to wreak havoc on their surroundings and risk getting run over by traffic. For snobs of the ‘proper’ version of the sport, street cricket is destroying future generations of potential players by encouraging ‘poor’ techniques. And for many of the practitioners themselves, street cricket is not a preference but a consequence of lack of available open space.

However, it is in the street version of the sport that true magic is witnessed. Unencumbered with formality, the players make do with whatever surroundings they occupy and whatever objects they have at their disposal, and create a constantly evolving and malleable universe that still manages to retain its logical consistency. Roads never meant for sport are transformed into bona fide arenas; fluid boundary lines are drawn and from a brick to a chair, anything and everything is used as makeshift equipment or as a marker of space. The road’s traffic and its other, possibly hostile occupants are then negotiated with to achieve a tense but functioning ecosystem. Anyone who has indulged in this activity knows how infinitely adaptable and enriching the sport can be as long as the participants are willing to go with it.

Therefore, in a country with already limited avenues for recreation, street cricket (much more than its organised and elitist counterpart) is a virtual necessity. Aside from the obvious benefits afforded by physical exercise and the above-mentioned need for humans to engage in actions of creative expression, street cricket (as a sport primarily played by largely disenfranchised youths) also functions as a tool to reclaim and re-appropriate the rapidly diminishing public space.

Urban Pakistan is being reshaped constantly by the unceasing march of neo-liberalism. As cities expand, open spaces — spaces that in another reality could have served as fields of recreation — are being parcelled out and turned into housing societies or shopping malls and this unfeeling process is abetted by a government with an unmistakable fetish for asphalt and concrete. Everything is privatised and everything is exclusive, including sporting activity.

In this context, playing cricket on the streets suddenly takes on the character of an unnoticed rebellion; the rituals and organisational practices evolve as the city evolves. In my incursions into the field, I have interacted with various street cricketers. They have an almost symbiotic relationship with urbanisation in a way that, to use that badly abused word, subverts the logic of expansionism. For example, on the outskirts of DHA Lahore, near the Ring Road, every Saturday night from 9:15 pm to 2:15 am, a congregation of motorbikes descends and for four straight hours the pet project of the Sharifs plays host to a series of simultaneous games of street cricket. The players are attuned with the location; they know when the traffic flow is minimal and they know during which timeframe load shedding does not take place. They can therefore indulge themselves without interruption except in the event of the odd police raid. These enthusiasts have been ‘uprooted’ from their previous arenas of playing by construction work on the nearby maidans (open spaces) they used to frequent but they are constantly finding newer and fancier roads with brighter streetlights in the ever expanding DHA where they can continue to have their weekly fun. It is almost as if the life of a street cricket enthusiast has been turned into that of a nomadic urban explorer, always on the hunt for new territory to claim and transform.

But for all the talk of street cricket’s egalitarian spirit, the above narrative is tarnished due to its obviously gendered dimension. Nothing can be truly liberating if it has barriers to entry for any segment of the population and if that ‘segment’ happens to be half of the population in the form of women, the rot is grave indeed. Of course, the lack of acceptance of women in public areas is not a uniquely street cricket problem. Shamefully, female presence in any public space is treated as an aberration; women regularly have to fend off a host of obstacles and threats by employing a myriad of strategies to avoid getting caught in a predicament, while at the same time are forced to justify the necessity of their presence. This oppressive experience will remain unfathomable to a male mind like mine, no matter how hard one tries to empathise.

Pleasingly, however, the fundamentally defiant quality of street cricket and its potential to reclaim public spaces has been brilliantly recognised by a burgeoning movement of self-described desi feminists, known as ‘Girls at dhabas’, whose project is to normalise the presence of women in public spaces and assert their right to enjoy the simple freedoms of movement and loitering. To this end, the group has relied on its members to organise street cricket matches in different cities, which have been triumphantly attended by women of all ages as they batted to strike one more blow against Pakistan’s entrenched patriarchy. It is hoped that with time this movement will gather more support and will encourage at least pockets of an environment where women participating in sports — and public life, more generally — are neither met with derision and harassment nor are treated as an object of curiosity.

It has to be said that mainstream cricket, despite its rampant popularity, contributes nothing of real value to society, especially given its submission to commercial interests and its role as a distraction from the real socio-economic problems of the country. But street cricket is shown to be an entirely different beast altogether. Not only does it have a refreshing and liberating spontaneity, it also possesses the potential to provoke some serious, grassroots level socio-political correction in the urban landscape. Protecting and promoting this culture of street cricket then takes on an almost moral urgency.

The writer is an Assistant Editor at Daily Times