The Commonwealth of Cricket, by Ramachandra Guha, published by HarperCollins. Price $39.99.
India, and Indian cricket, will be talked about a lot over the next few months as the New Zealand side prepares to take on the powerhouse in the first world Test championship final in England.
That's not to forget the annual IPL tournament that, for better or worse, will precede the Test event and also New Zealand's two warm-up Tests against England.
It seems funny for New Zealanders to view two Tests against England as warm-ups for the main event. But that is the case this year.
That is ironic, but why is another story for another time.
This time around, it is all about the smallest country of the regular Test nations involved in the game, taking on the biggest.
Indian cricket has become a centre point of the world game because of its sheer weight of numbers, the fanatical interest in the game, and the economic sporting powerhouse it has become in the television age.
Yet, for all its dollar-powered dominance, not a lot of the shape, character and history of the Indian game is appreciated by New Zealanders, at least.
That's why Ramachandra Guha's latest book, The Commonwealth of Cricket, is a timely addition to the market as he provides an often fascinating and insightful perspective of the game and what it means to him. It is also devastating in its critique of the machinations behind the scenes in the Indian game.
Guha is far removed from your average cricket fan, an academic with teaching credits at Yale, Stanford and the London School of Economics who is now Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Krea University in India's Andhra Pradesh. His love of the game was born from family contacts at the grassroots. They grew to include some of the game's top figures among his contacts.
There are times, especially in his youth, when his cricket fan bias intrudes in the story, but at the same time, it also helps mould the man who would have a role in some important moments in the Indian game. Meeting the Mansoor Ali Khan, the second Nawab of Pataudi was a case in point. The former Indian Test captain was to be the subject of a BBC interview on the social history of cricket in India. To be best prepared he wanted someone who could brief him. Guha was suggested, and they met to discuss the subject matter.
But in finishing and being escorted from Pataudi's home, Guha admitted an explanation of their first meeting, at a hotel when Pataudi was eating breakfast ahead of another day of Test cricket. Guha was picking up a ticket for the game from another of the players. He had asked Pataudi and his teammate Syed Abid Ali what room his contact was in. He then explained what Pataudi had been eating.
"As I reached the last line of my excessively extended recollection, the look on my host's face turned from confusion to contempt. The visiting scholar and expert, Professor Guha, so highly recommended…had turned out to be a frothing, blabbering fan."
There's a lesson there for all – some memories are best-kept to oneself.
The Commonwealth of Cricket is very much a personal look at the place of the Indian game. It follows his earlier works of renown, including A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002) that looked at the Indian history of the game. He also edited The Picador Book of Cricket (2001), a book highlighting his readership of the game's leading writers.
Especially intriguing is his writing about the spin bowlers of his era. Erapalli Prasanna and B.S. Chandrasekhar, who figured from his home area in his early cricket appreciation, and, then in later years, Bishan Bedi. But many other players feature including Gundappa Vishwanath, Rahul Dravid, Syed Kirmani, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath and Sunil Gavaskar.
Sachin Tendulkar is a player who has graced the world game, and Guha provides an interesting look at his career. Being so involved in the Indian game, he provides a perspective for those overseas unfamiliar with all the ins and outs of Indian cricket.
Having such a long career, Guha says there were two stages to Tendulkar's time at the top. For a decade, he was the dashing youngster capable of performing against any of the world's best attacks. He used journalist Suresh Menon's line to describe his quality: "Sachin is the one-stop shop of batsmanship. You would watch Sehwag for the straight drive, Dravid for the on-drive, Ganguly for the square cut, Laxman for the square drive, Dhoni for the lofted shots, and so on. Or you could go to Sachin for all of these."
Then, from about 2001 on, Tendulkar began to slow down, and Guha wrote at the time, 'the genius has become a grafter'. At the same time, he admitted that was no different to the experience of the advance of time felt by many other great batsmen through the years.
He believed Tendulkar was one of four cricketers whose skill had a social impact beyond the norm. W.G. Grace, Don Bradman and Gary Sobers were his predecessors. Yet Guha also had cause to regret that Tendulkar soured his last years in the game by selfish pursuit of records to the point of picking and choosing the circumstances under which he would attempt to achieve them.
While there are many other aspects of Guha's work not touched upon in this review, perhaps the most telling, especially for foreign minds, is his time as an administrator, albeit an accidental occurrence.
A critic of the influence of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), Guha has had plenty of material to dissect over the last 20 years. He was appointed by India's Supreme Court in 2017 to a Committee of Administrators. Their intended role was to sort out the administrative maelstrom Indian cricket had become.
This experience is probably the most fascinating in the book, and the level of acceptance of corruption portrayed is frightening. Conflicts of interest were rampant. Guha fought the good fight, but the regime they were supposed to be investigating was still able to manipulate events. After only four months and, with the Supreme Court changing its orientation on the issues, Guha resigned.
His conclusion to his experience said it all: "That Indian cricket administrators were venal and corrupt I knew beforehand. What surprised and shocked me was how amoral India's top cricketers were."
The qualities that for so long enhanced cricket as the game for gentlemen have been sullied around the world. But they seem so much more magnified in the game's greatest market. That is a shame because, as he argues, if cricket was better administered, the country with the greatest population base, the most first-class teams, would never be beaten.
India will be in the first world Test championship final, but will the team ever represent what Test cricket should stand for?
Guha's book reinforces the claims made by former New Zealand batsman Glenn Turner in his book Cricket's Global Warming and is evidence of a growing awareness that all is not well in the grand old game. Where will it all end?