I vividly remember when I first saw the official film for the 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup: It was a warm day in July. Tucked away in a corner booth in my office in Gurugram, I had quickly loaded up the video on YouTube, vibrating with excitement to finally have this first piece of the upcoming home World Cup in my hands. And yet, for a tournament as remarkable as this one, the film felt poignantly unremarkable. However, the one element that stayed with me was its tagline — ‘It Takes One Day’.
“In hindsight, there could not have been a better phrase to capture this World Cup,” feels journalist Aditya Iyer, whose book, Gully Gully: Travels Around India during the 2023 World Cup (Penguin) deep dives into India’s sensational run, which ended with heartbreak in Ahmedabad. “Knock after knock, match after match, India were perfect. Until that one day [in the final]. One day to sear this campaign into our bones (and phones), haunting us all in perpetuity.”
‘Cricket still unites us all… I wanted to explore what India looks like when a World Cup is on’
“In India, the cricket fan is utterly expendable,” feels Aditya Iyer Aditya Iyer
Iyer’s intention in writing a cricket travelogue — once a popular form of cricket storytelling that seems to be petering out — was to “use cricket as a vehicle to tell the story of something larger, to tell the story of the country that I live in”. Iyer chose cricket because “cricket still unites us all… I wanted to explore what India looks like when a World Cup is on. Is it a truly harmonious place or do we just sweep all our problems under the carpet?”
Spatiality is a central concern in Gully Gully. In every conversation and character, context is informed most heavily by places. And people. From kebab shop owners to Uber drivers, from hotel managers to college professors, from in-stadium screamers to Disney+ Hotstar obsessives, Gully Gully reshaped my conception of the Indian cricket fan, their love and labour.
The first thing that had intrigued me about Gully Gully was not its front cover, but its back. More specifically, Iyer’s claim that he sought to explore “not only what cricket means to India, but what Indians mean to cricket”. “In India, the cricket fan is utterly expendable. We queue up for hours before the game starts. Sometimes they take away our money, our coins, even our water. Who cares about the fans, right? They know we will show up, no matter what. But it bothers me that we are taken for granted… Why is cricket in India so big? It’s because of the fans. The game means a lot to us. That’s why I wanted to turn the lens on the fans in my book,” explains Iyer.
A literal collapse of the street and stadium, centre and periphery, fan and idol
Iyer deliberately wrote the book in the present tense to give a sense of immediacy to the narrative Getty Images
“‘Gully Gully’ is such a fabulous turn of phrase, you can suffix it with anything,” grins Iyer. He is right — I haven’t been able to stop humming ‘Gully Gully mein shor hai…’ But even if it wasn’t an instant earworm, ‘Gully Gully’ sits at ease with the book’s central thesis — the two-way relationship between fans and cricket. To exemplify this, nothing seems more fitting than this synchronous double use of ‘gully’, meaning lane and also a fielding position in cricket. A literal collapse of the street and stadium, centre and periphery, fan and idol.
Even though the title does not take after the painful end (Iyer’s original choice was Out of the Blue, but he was talked out of it by fellow cricket writer Rahul Bhattacharya), it does not mean that Gully Gully comforts the reader. Iyer writes in the book: “Rohit, Virat and Shami, Bumrah and Iyer, too. As something big and vivid, filling up the skies. They were indeed starlight, or something astral. Like a comet, dazzling then disappearing. The tears begin to flow just as a mongrel disturbed by the sounds emerges from a nearby gutter, circles a cozy spot on the service lane and lies down.”
Is it possible, though, to not remember this World Cup solely by its end? A tragedy is so because everything in the plot — the good and the glorious — culminates in that one final moment of devastation. And yet, before we had Pat Cummins silencing the Narendra Modi Stadium, we had the elation of Kohli surpassing Sachin Tendulkar’s record of ODI centuries. India beat New Zealand to get the monkey off our backs. Rohit bowled over everyone with his explosive starts, and Shami and Bumrah picked up wickets almost at will. There was so much happiness before November 19. Would it not have been kinder to give the reader this happily-ever-after? “It’s so well contained within itself, right? The readers aren’t fools, they know that we lost this World Cup, and yet they’re reliving the journey,” responds Iyer, who “deliberately wrote the book in the present tense”. This is why Iyer didn’t shy away from naming a chapter (something that I took offence to) as “Ee Sala World Cup Namde?”
‘Everyone moved on, you stayed there’
“I was that fellow who refused to move past the 2023 World Cup. It totally consumed me,” admits Iyer Getty Images
For all its pan-India appeal, Gully Gully is intensely local — showcasing each state and its fandom independently. From “Idol Worship” in Chennai to “Sachin, Shah Rukh, Shami” in Mumbai (which I first associated with Kolkata!), each chapter looks at the people and places as pieces of a greater whole. By immersing the readers into the gullies of these numerous cities, Iyer proves that the fabric of fandoms is not as even as outsiders presume.
“I wanted a person in each city/state to not only tell the story of cricket, but also of the place where they belong. For example, Saravanan Hari. He’s not just representative of cricket, but also the idol worship culture that exists in Tamil Nadu,” says Iyer. Reading about diehard fans like Hari, in such human detail capturing their desires and demands, was a revelation.
“I’m a big Shah Rukh Khan fan. In spite of being from Mumbai, I had never stood outside his home on his birthday. But that year, on November 1, 2023, I was there. I made it in time to catch a glimpse of SRK and the sheer fanaticism he generates. He might be the only man in India bigger than cricket. Even during the final match, in the second innings when everything looked lost, the stadium crowd only lifted twice — once when the Prime Minister was shown on screen, and once for SRK,” shares Iyer. I would be remiss here not to mention Iyer’s conversation with Rajkumar Sharma, Kohli’s childhood coach. As a lifelong Kohli enthusiast, this felt like the closest I have come to an inside scoop on Kohli.
“Everyone moved on, you stayed there,” I tell Iyer, after I have admitted to having timed my reading of his book to coincide with the first anniversary of India’s final loss against Australia. “I even spent the T20 World Cup living the 2023 ODI World Cup, because I was writing the end of my book at that point. I was that fellow who refused to move past the 2023 World Cup. It totally consumed me,” adds Iyer.
“Were you taking notes during all the matches?”
“Absolutely, and not just in the matches. The thing about writing a travelogue, and I learnt this from VS Naipual, is that everyone is a character with a story to tell. Cricket was the easier bit of it, since I could rely on replays and reviews. But in real life, there are no replays, right? You can never switch off.”
“Which was your favourite city to write about?”
“The ones I hadn’t visited before. I had a lot of fun writing about Lucknow.”
As someone who has lived in Delhi all her life, I am ashamed to admit that before picking up Gully Gully, I had no knowledge of Lajpat Market’s colloquial referent, ‘Afghani Market’. Which inevitably made me wonder: how many more secrets is this city hiding? And how many flavours am I missing out on, because of the lack of access to safe and stable stadium and on-ground experiences?
“Which was your favourite match to watch?”
“The first game in Chennai was sensational. How fabulous was that Kohli knock?! Pat Cummins kept saying, they were one wicket away from actually winning that game… Another one of my favourite match moments was whenever Shami had the ball. I remember in the semi-final, Karthik Krishnaswamy (from ESPN Cricinfo) and I were sitting in this stairwell around the press box, right behind Shami’s arm. And we were absolutely mesmerised.”
‘I carry my passion for Indian cricket everywhere I go’
Iyer wanted to capture the entire spectrum of the fan experience in his book Getty Images
Another aspect of Gully Gully that struck me was how it recounted the experience of the journalist and cricket writer. “In India, it takes so long to move from point A to point B to point C — not just for journalists not writing for the big dailies or magazines, but fans, too. When I had been working with The Indian Express or Hindustan Times, travelling wasn’t this tough. This time around, I felt much more like a travelling fan than a journalist, with low access and liberties,” narrates Iyer, before adding how this allowed him to “have some of my most fun conversations at stadiums, with fans. That’s where the game gets its noise, grammar and colourful chaos from”.
Iyer does not hesitate to show the dichotomy of fandom: “It was the fans who left the final halfway through. It was also the fans who, after the first Ahmedabad match [between India and Pakistan], showed up wearing Babar Azam jerseys to show their support for Pakistan. I wanted to showcase the whole spectrum,” says Iyer.
How challenging was it for Iyer to write this book, considering he is both an ardent fan and a senior journalist? How did he juggle between the two identities? “At the end of the day, we are all fans. That’s why we became cricket journalists and writers. When I was growing up in the ’90s, we weren’t this good. Most of my memories are of crying while watching matches. I carry my passion for Indian cricket everywhere I go. But when I open my laptop and start writing, I cannot be that kid crying in front of his TV because India lost. I cannot be that fan. I have to be someone the fans can trust,” concludes Iyer.
Anushka Bidani is a cultural strategist by day and a cricket enthusiast the rest of the time. You can find her on Instagram @anushkabidani
