Akash Deep's success captures the pulse of a rising Bharat

Indian Express

15 hours ago

In the closing minutes of the penultimate day of the second cricket test match between India and England, India's latest bowling hero, Akash Deep, bamboozled one of the greatest ever to play the game – Joe Root. Delivered from the edge of the popping crease, the ball angled in, opened Root's stance and then straightened to knock out the off stump. As the crestfallen England batter made his way back, Akash Deep pointed to the turf as if to say he could stamp his mark, even on the placid Edgbaston pitch where nearly 1,500 runs had been scored on four days.
In the absence of Jasprit Bumrah, not many had given the Indian team a chance. But the Indian bowlers, led by Akash Deep, had other ideas, most times taking out of the equation the pitch, where their English counterparts leaked more than 1,000 runs. Akash Deep seems to have made overcoming adversity his calling card. In the aftermath of his Edgbaston heroics, the story of the cricketer from Dehri in Bihar's Rohtas district overcoming socio-economic odds and defying parents and well-wishers who would constantly remind him that sport was a distraction has gone viral.
Much has also been written on the small-town cricketer, especially Mahendra Singh Dhoni's phenomenal career, rewriting the demographic of the Indian team. Akash Deep is all that and much more. If Dhoni, Harbhajan Singh, Praveen Kumar, Suresh Raina, Umesh Yadav, Jhulan Goswami, Harmanpreet Kaur, and even Bumrah came from places where the tide of economic liberalisation was just about beginning to lift boats, Akash Deep's exploits seem to have acquainted cricket lovers with Dehri's place on the map. His is a story of rising aspiration in places even more disadvantaged than the archetypal small town.
'Guys coming from small-time towns are generally mentally and physically tougher than those from the metros. Smaller towns lack the infrastructure and facilities. Players from there have to work harder,' Dhoni had said after leading India to victory in the inaugural T-20 World Cup in 2007. Akash Deep reportedly saw that victory on TV and was inspired. But aspirants in places such as Dehri have it even more difficult. Theirs is often also a story of sustaining the aspirational pull amidst substandard living conditions, precarious employment, and limited access to essential services.
In 2010, a little less than 20 years of liberalisation, 14-year-old Akash Deep had to migrate to West Bengal to look for opportunities after a paralytic attack left his father, the family's sole breadwinner, paralysed. The cricketer was to lose his parent in 2015 when he was just about finding a place in sports clubs in his newly adopted home. Six months later, a brother succumbed to an illness that could reportedly have been contained if he had received timely treatment. Akash Deep had to give up cricket for a few years to look after the family.
Akash Deep's teammate Yashaswi Jaiswal was 10 when he left home, in Bhadoi in eastern Uttar Pradesh, for Mumbai, more than 1,500 km away, to pursue his dream. There, he reportedly worked in shops and with street vendors and lived on a diet of glucose biscuits and the occasional free meal. Akash Deep's mentor in the Bengal team, Mohammad Shami, learnt the rudiments of the game from an elder brother – a thwarted cricketer who had tried to learn swing bowling by watching Wasim Akram on TV – and took the train from Amroha in UP to Kolkata because there was no place for him in the junior state team. Indian cricket's latest hero's other mentor, the former India opening batsman Arun Lal, has described the dormitory where the young bowler lived in his initial days in Kolkata as a 'hellhole'.
Cricket, sports sociologists say, mirrors the realities of Indian society. If the game now has a place for those from Tier-2 cities, the small-town and even areas that can be barely shoehorned into a definition of the urban, the country's political economy too is a site enlivened by the expressions of people from these areas. At the same time, the struggle and hard work of cricketers who have broken barriers are pointers to the harsh realities of people from not-so-privileged destinations. Like the liberalised economy of which it's a part, cricket represents the promise of upward mobility, even liberation from poverty and socio-economic stagnation. But talent and hard work are not always tickets to success. That's apparent to the youngsters sweating it out at the maidans as well as to those who take the grind of coaching classes, including hellholes in Kota, to give wings to their ambitions.
Cricket – and sport — it's true, today offers more opportunities than even a decade ago. In the wake of the success of Akash Deep — and others like him – people from places like Rohtas, Amroha, Bhadoi and, who knows, even from centres that are barely a dot on toposheets, will want to emulate their heroes. Former Indian opening batsman Akash Chopra has written that 'lack of opportunities, experience and confidence' continue to frustrate players from small towns. Isn't this in a similar vein to the lament of a section of economists that the labour market is not providing sufficient productive employment opportunities? Or, that of experts who have been talking about the lack of skill-development avenues outside elite institutions?
Whether in sport or the larger economy, young women and men without a privileged upbringing, hailing from what PM Modi has described as India's neo-middle class, are eager to make their mark. In enabling them to do so on the turf of their choice — thereby reaping the country's demographic dividend — lies the key for India to become a world beater in sports as well as a truly developed Viksit Bharat.
[e-mail]