Rage

How far is too far?

In the list of things that a professional footballer expects to dodge on a pitch, the severed head of a pig must come pretty low. Yet, there it was, lying near the corner flag on the lush green of Camp Nou. Luis Figo, the prince of Barcelona just a few months ago, stood a few metres away. He had committed what was perceived as an act of high treason by joining arch rivals Real Madrid that summer. As he stepped onto the pitch, draped in the exact shade of white that Barcelona fans loathed the most, a deafening chrorus of boos and hisses filled the air. And then the projectiles started raining. Paper, cups, straws - anything that was within reach.

Ask Barcelona and Real Madrid fans the score from that evening and they won't remember. The entire game was a public trial of one, and that pig's head was the verdict.

Figo had a glittering career either side of that evening, but for those ninety minutes, he was less a footballer and more a symbol, a story of betrayal that would be told for decades, put in books, and turned into a Netflix movie.

Ask Barcelona and Real Madrid fans, who were old enough to watch it live, and they would remember the atmosphere as if the game happened yesterday. In the long, illustrious history of that rivalry, this was an epic, canonised because of the air it was played under.

Allow me to reproduce an excerpt from Eduardo Galeano’s incredible book, Soccer in Sun and Shadow.

“Once a week, the fan flees his house for the stadium.

Banners wave and the air resounds with noisemakers, firecrackers and drums; it rains streamers and confetti. The city disappears, its routine forgotten. All that exists is the temple. In this sacred place, the only religion without atheists puts its divinities on display. Although the fan can contemplate the miracle more comfortably on TV, he prefers to make the pilgrimage to this spot where he can see his angels in the flesh doing battle with the demons of the day.

Here the fan shakes his handkerchief, gulps his saliva, swallows his bile, eats his cap, whispers prayers and curses and suddenly lets loose a full-throated scream, leaping like a flea to hug the stranger at his side cheering the goal. While the pagan mass lasts, the fan is many. Along with thousands of other devotees he shares the certainty that we are the best, that all referees are crooked, that all our adversaries cheat.”

Galeano calls playing without fans an exercise as futile as dancing without music. It's the fans, with their raw emotions and expressions, that transform a stadium from a physical space into an amphitheatre. They are the background score of any sport. So, easy as it is to wear hindsight-tinted glasses and call the tension at Camp Nou that evening as several notches too far, it is worth remembering that joy often walks hand in hand with anger and resentment.

But, ever so often, with all concessions and considerations, we indeed go too far.

In 2021, under the fading light of mid-July London, three English footballers missed their penalty kicks and Italy lifted the European Championship trophy. For the next few weeks, Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, and Jadon Sancho were subject to a scale of racist abuse so extreme, it sparked mini-movements across communities who were trying to restore some balance to the discourse.

Racist and discriminatory chanting is, who would've thought it, as common as racism and discrimination itself. And we should begin the Hardik Pandya conversation there before peeling off any layers.

On Thursday, as Hardik walked out to bat in the middle of a comfortable chase for Mumbai Indians, the crowd noise suddenly turned into a shrill, dron-ish din that even drowned out the commentary for a few seconds. It was the sound of 30,000 people booing one man, a common motif across all Mumbai Indians games this season.

The heckling got so intense that Sanjay Manjrekar felt compelled to start one of the games by asking the crowd to - his words, not mine - behave.

Booing is not new for Indian cricket, even when directed at its own. And maybe, some of it would've been accepted in Hardik's case as derision had it not been accompanied with unabashed casteist slurs. On vox-pops outside stadiums, fan cams, and social media, Hardik has repeatedly been called a chhapri.

The top search result on Urban Dictionary for chhapri is “Third class, low tier wanna-be cool people (generally guys), paired with coloured hair, speeding cars, cringe photoshoots and occasional low budget partying.” Scroll further, change spellings, but the core semantics stay the same.

While many will cling to the harmless contours of that definition, chhapri is not a slang coined by GenZ on Twitter. The word comes with dark roots. It refers to someone from the Chapparband caste whose profession is to mend temporary roofs and huts. If you want to find an intersection between the modern usage of the term and its origins, it would be at the point where someone becomes “uncultured”.

Take Hardik out of the equation and replace him with, say, Shubman Gill or KL Rahul, and you won't hear that term getting used. There is a reason why. Everything about Hardik, from his fashion to his demeanour and online persona, contrasts with how Indians accept their influentials. He is outspoken, wears a million tattoos and a bandana, and embraces a love for the high life. Gandhi, Nehru, and Lord Rama, eat your heart out.

But many others have been like that, I hear you wondering. You are right, but one of Hardik's crimes is that he was born a dark-skinned kid in a lower middle-class family. Put someone like that in a position where they're making millions every week, playing cricket for India while chewing some gum, and appearing in undergarment ads, you have the archetype of “wasted youth”. Take this silhouette to most places in India and people will tell you that this person deserves every slur they get.

Hardik’s aesthetics are Strike One. The deeper you go into cricket discourse in India, the more you realise that this is a battle he cannot win. He only needs to look closer to home, towards another man who played most of his cricket in Mumbai, and whose flamboyant lifestyle made many observers uncomfortable. Maybe, if Hardik can carry the Indian team on his back and land a World Cup, he can stop the noise, but I suspect even that would be temporary respite.

Strike Two is only a minor tremor. The Indian Premier League is a relatively new competition and moving between teams is fairly common for players. Hardik wanting to move from a two-year-old franchise to one where he grew up as a cricketer is completely understandable. One can't invalidate the feeling of betrayal amongst Gujarat Titans fans, but this is a league where teams overhaul rosters every three years, and every player has played for someone else, so a lot of that angst is a bit, I'm sorry, manufactured. This is not, no matter how far one casts their fishing net, a Figo-to-Madrid situation.

But there is a Strike Three. All reports suggest that Hardik demanded captaincy as a clause in his move to Mumbai Indians. His excellent track record for Gujarat Titans aside, he is a fast-bowling all-rounder who can bat anywhere in the order with aplomb. He is simply as rare a talent as they come. One can't blame him for wanting the throne, or the Mumbai Indians management for looking at him as too good an opportunity to pass up. But the way it all went down, and who this move toppled, lit an already-lubricated touchpaper. Consider the captaincy change at Chennai Super Kings and the message it came with: MS Dhoni had handed over the baton to Ruturaj Gaikwad. At Mumbai Indians, it felt less like a handover and more like a snatch.

Rohit Sharma is one of the Big Three in Indian cricket today. He transcends franchise loyalty and commands the kind of love and adoration that is preserved for the absolute all-timers. He recently led the India men's team to the doorstep of World Cup glory. You don't mess with such heroes. And in the eyes of the millions who wear Rohit 45 jerseys to stadiums and millions who don't, Hardik had done just that.

In ancient Greek mythology, a hero is the offspring of a human and a god. A bridge between mortals and the divine, the hero was garlanded with supernatural qualities and abilities.

“When considering Greek heroes it is important to recognize that hero worship was a part of Greek religion; stories of heroes were not just for entertainment. Not only did the Greeks have a rich tradition of myths involving great heroes and heroines, such as Herakles, Achilles, and Helen, the Greeks also worshipped heroes in some of the same ways that they worshipped gods.”

- Greek Gods, Heroes, & Worship

What the crowds are telling Hardik is that by messing with Rohit, he had messed with his devotees: us.

Let's play some footage from 1985. Long before Dhoni, Kohli, and Rohit, there were Kapil Dev and Sunil Gavaskar. Gems of the rarest kind, and two of India's greatest, playing together. During a Test series against England that year, Kapil Dev was dropped for the game at the Eden Gardens in Calcutta. The crowd saw it as Gavaskar, the captain, tripping the other alpha in the team. Their reaction throughout the match was so intense that Gavaskar angrily declared he'd never play another game in the city. And he didn't.

There's a line that often gets crossed when love and admiration turns into unhealthy devotion. Borrowing another excerpt from Galeano, “The fanatic shows up at the stadium prickling with strident and aggressive paraphernalia, wrapped in the team flag, his face painted the colours of his beloved team’s shirts; on the way he makes a lot of noise and a lot of fuss. He never comes alone. In the midst of the rowdy crowd, a dangerous centipede, this cowed man will cow others, this frightened man becomes frightening.”

The reaction towards Hardik Pandya has nothing to do with cricketing merit, and is instead a projection of our feelings and biases towards him and Rohit. Even on television broadcasts and news channels, where experts have the power to drive strong points, it has been completely glossed over that Rohit Sharma has been, to put it mildly, a sub-par batter for Mumbai Indians in the last six years. He also turns 37 this month. So, a conversation about succession planning, right or wrong, is not an outlandish idea.

The Mumbai Indians ship has definitely been jolted, but Hardik seems to have a thick skin, and he's skilled enough to be an asset for his team even in these choppy waters.

But if only the vitriol and toxicity began and ended at stadiums.

Last year, after Shubman Gill hit a brilliant century that took down Virat Kohli’s RCB, Virat’s fans on Twitter, wielding blue-tick accounts and thousands of followers, tracked down the Instagram handle of Gill’s sister and unleashed their anger there. You can imagine what kind of language was used. She ended up having to make her account private, and might have even temporarily deactivated it.

“The biggest lesson is to not get too involved emotionally in cricket. When will we treat sport as sport?”

This thought would fit right into a casual chat about cricket at a bar, among friends who root for different teams. Except, this is from an IndianExpress interview with Vijay Tibile. He lives in Kolhapur and his 65-year-old father was killed on March 30th over an argument about Rohit Sharma and Hardik Pandya.

If a team and captaincy switch is stirring these emotions, I wonder if it says more about us than the cricketer.