Dear Editor,
I have never forgotten my friend and colleague Abdul Baksh mimicking the most famous Indian cricket commentator of his day, Berry Sarbadhikari announcing: “Here comes Ramchand. India’s fastest bowler. He runs up and delivers, and Kanhai leans forward and smothers the spin, and the ball races to the boundary.”
Abdul and I, and so many others, were of that contemporary generation that sat, stood, in wonderment at the uniqueness of Rohan Kanhai’s stroke-play from the time he left Port Mourant, then a faraway place, to make his indelible appearance at the Bourda Ground of the Georgetown Cricket Club, then the mecca of Test Cricket – a style not since matched anywhere. His companion migrants from the said Port Mourant community were none other than Joe Solomon, Basil Butcher and Alvin Kallicharran.
It was Alvin who destroyed Dennis Lillee, the most feared Australian fast bowler at the time, hitting him for four consecutive sixes in one over, to carry the West Indies to winning the first One Day World Cup Series, played in England. Kallicharran, bareheaded, with white shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, was by far a more elegant image of fearlessness of that day than the multi-coloured, armour-guarded gladiators in today’s arenas. Many years after Alvin and I sat in the Georgetown Club, in Camp Street, when he abashedly recited how, at his request, he briefly coached the great Brian Lara one season at their county club, Warwickshire, when the latter was succumbing to a patch of ducks. Alvin said Lara’s form improved thereafter, but he was not altogether convinced that it had anything to do with his advice.
But to return to Rohan Kanhai, the master. Our generation of cricket lovers was dazzled by the magical way he converted his bat into a swashbuckling blade. He did not have to patent the stroke where he lay on his backside and hooked the ball for a certain six. No one in that great batting side of his times was acrobatic enough to attempt its copy. Kanhai played for Guyana and a West Indies team that was disciplined and well integrated.
All this time my colleagues and I were hardly conscious, if at all, that Kanhai was Indo-Guyanese, or for that matter, that we were a barrier away from idolising him, since we were supposed to be Afro-Guyanese. I for one, was too untutored, if you will, to be sensitive about such differentiation. That one should over-emphasise that Indo-Guyanese (alone) were disappointed in any of Kanhai’s failures, for example, is to demean his stature as a Guyanese cricketer. The denigration becomes worse when he is described curiously as an Indo-Guyanese West Indian cricketer. Perhaps because I happen to be Kanhai’s elder, my memory lapses would account for not recalling Lance Gibbs, Clive Lloyd, Worrell, Weekes and Walcott as Afro-West Indian cricketers. Certainly the great Frank Worrell would not have allowed any member of his team to descend to such disintegration.
Certainly neither was Ian McDonald in so many of his peons of praise to Kanhai ever detected as perceiving him through ‘Indo’ lenses. Neither did commentators and umpires, as I recall.
Why then when history has hallowed the inimitable greatness of a son of Guyana’s cricketing soil, he must be relegated to its pages as Indo-Guyanese?
Very humbly the undersigned takes issue with the most respected Dr Clem Seecharan for what may be regarded by some as diminishing the stature of a monumental cricketing figure – and indeed at an interesting juncture, when the Caribbean peoples have naught else about which to be proud but those glory days of cricket during which Rohan ‘Babulall’ Kanhai was one its shining stars.
Yours faithfully,
E B John
