Thread by @gauravsabnis

🧵 alert. Strap in.
A cricket chat brought back a cascade of memories about my Sabnis grandpa and I realized that omg Nana was a total "woke" dude in cricket matters and always calling out BS nostalgia and if he were still alive, he would be a hundred and loving my tweets.

First of all, how is my Sabnis grandpa (Dada in Hindi) my Nana, desis will wonder, cos Nana means maternal grandfather. That's cos he was Nana to everyone, even his wife. That was his nickname, like Vishwanath Patekar is Nana Patekar to everyone.

Nana is THE biggest cricket influence of my life and I might expand this thread into an essay.
Narayan Sabnis was the eldest son in a pretty privileged family in Indore. His father was the head accountant of the Holkar principality. Nana had a pretty chill childhood.

He loved cricket. He was great at cricket. The Sabnis family on the whole was and is really into cricket. One of my uncles played for Bombay with Sachin Tendulkar (you'll find a Sabnis in his ranji debut). My now mom of 2 kids aunt in L.A. was a fast bowler for M.P. women.

Nana moved from Indore to Pune after college and was very active in club cricket. In fact he played club cricket in Pune (with PYC iirc) until he was 60! Dude was scoring half centuries as a grandpa against 20 year olds! Nana was never first class cricket level good though.

And he was very honest about it. His own limitations. That's something I try to emulate. Honesty and self-awareness.
So anyway, Nana was a lifelong cricket player and fan and I was his first grandkid and so obviously he passed on a lot of himself to me. One was skepticism.

Nana was always skeptical about these default "humaare zamaaanein mein" nostalgia worshipping takes. And we Sabnis'er are a debate loving bunch. He was not shy about shutting down uncles who claimed "Sehwag is good but Durrani was better at sixes." Nana was like lolwut!

But the most memorable are his opinions about the religion based "Pentangulars".
This is one aspect of Indian cricket history that Indian cricket discourse just completely ignores. That first class cricket in India was originally religion based! Hindus vs Parsis vs Muslims etc.

There is an excellent book by Ram Guha about this era called A Corner of the Foreign Field that I recommend to any cricket fan.
But here's the Twitter summary. Until WW2, competitive cricket in India was explicitly aligned along religious lines.

For Nana and his generation in the 1920s and 1930s, it was like their IPL. Except the teams were literally "Hindus", "Muslims", "Europeans" etc. You could only play in the big leagues with your religion's team. I don't know if there's a parallel for this in sports history.

Now obviously as the 20th century progressed and humans got a bit more mature than before, a bunch of people said maybe having religion based sports leagues is not great, this is the 1930s not 1830s. Literal argument. Gandhi himself publicly bashed the Pentangulars.

Eventually Indian cricket killed the religion based leagues in favor of the Ranji Trophy, with geographical teams. As is the norm in any sport. So it was not Hindus vs Muslims but Bombay versus Baroda etc. Makes sense, right?

Nope, people back then called it "too PC".

Obviously, they didn't literally say PC but that was their point.
Why why why are you killing history and tradition etc. They argued, factually, (confirmed in the Guha book too) that there had never been an incident of religious conflict as a result of the Pentangulars.

So in nostalgic conversations abt cricket, other privileged old grandpas would be like "oh things were so much more better with the pentangulars than this boring ranji trophy."
And Nana was always the guy who was like "I was a pentangulars stan but come on, guys! It was creepy!"

And they were always like but there were no riots ever because of pentangulars. Sounds familiar? I hear such whines from people complaining about Cleveland's privately owned baseball team changing their name from Indians to Guardians. A bunch of folks are upset about it.

Nana's point was that of course I grew up being a total "Hindus" fan when I was young in the 20s but then came the 30s and then partition and everything and I don't know why y'all are being so nostalgic about what was clearly problematic and maybe increased divisions.

This is a perpetual debate about the pentangulars among a few desi cricket history nuts btw. Did they actually contribute to the Hindu Muslim antagonism in the early 20th century that eventually led to the partition or was it just a random sports event. We will never know.

But it's just plain objective fact that when my grandpa was growing up, if you were a sports fan, supporting a cricket team in India was the same as supporting your religion and/or race. The Bombay Pentangulars weren't THE only outlet but it was the one where you could make money

His peers had almost exactly the same kind of weird reasons about why they thought pentangulars were great as people who these days any kind of social or political change in professional sports.
They grew up with this and they don't think they are personally bigoted. Timeless!

So Nana told me how he went from being a total "Hindus" fan to, as he grew up, thinking, ugh, can I instead be an indore fan or Bombay fan instead? This religious thing is creepy AF. But his peers were still like "but history, nostalgia, no riots etc". He never shut up though.

Today it is unimaginable to have a religion or ethnicity based sports competition. My grandpa was the one dissenting voice in the room in days when dudes thought it was an attack on their "history" and "heritage" and all that.

Btw, in a Pune filled with sangh fans, Nana was always the standout. He literally grew up when Savarkar, Hedgewar, Moonje, Golwalkar, and all those bloodthirsty bigots were popular among his peers. He had nothing but disdain for them.

And as his oldest grandkid, I got to hear many of his anti sangh rants and was shaped by them. He especially loved citing that bit from Marathi humorist PuLa's Asami Asami that lampoons Savarkar and adds "kasla re Hindu baandhav? Bhondu baandhav sagLe."

The rhyming punch is lost in the translation but the best I can do, @cricketingview, is,
"Hindu brothers? More like stupid brothers!"

The reason I have such encyclopedic recollections of the ugly fascist origins of the sangh is Nana saying "that Savarkar was sold to us like some Bhagat Singh type. But he had no interest in fighting the British anymore when I was growing up. He just wanted us to hate Muslims."

His larger point which other grandpa's never got was that sure, no actual physical violence because of religious sports teams but can't you see that it hurt our country and possibly contributed to the horrible violence and partition? Nope, to them, it was Jinnah and Gandhi. 🙄

So yeah, I remember my 80 year old grandpa in year 200 arguing with other grandpas who claimed that getting rid of the religious cricket leagues was a surrender to whatever they then called wokeness.

Think, when you sneer at someone 'woke" about how your take will age.

Btw Nana was a religious man on a personal level but never imposed it on anyone. I remember feeling nervous telling him in my teen years that I'm an atheist and he was like "well duh, I've known you since you were a baby. What do you want to eat?" not "why aren't you like me".

He didn't say those exact words but that's what his point was. Like, yeah dude, I Know, but you do you.

Btw Nana looked and even sounded like President Biden.