Reknowned scholar and cricket-historian Ramachandra Guha writes in The HINDU Daily and tells us why "Beyond A Boundary" is often reputed as the best book written on sports if not cricket. Born in the Trinidadian village of Tunapuna in 1901 , C.L.R James was educated on the pitches of the Queen's Park Oval in Port of Spain and, more formally, in the Queen's Royal College. After school, he worked as a teacher and critic. In 1930 he travelled to England at the invitation of his friend Learie Constantine, then playing as a professional in the Lancashire Leagues. He was carrying with him the manuscript of his first book, The Case for West Indian Self-Government. The book was published in 1932 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. The next year appeared Constantine's autobiography, Cricket and I, a work that, if not exactly ghosted, was guided and put into proper shape by James.
At this time, James also worked as a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. In the winters he studied history and Marxism. These endeavours resulted, in 1938, in the publication of his book The Black Jacobins, a brilliant analysis of a successful slave revolt that took place in Haiti towards the end of the 18th Century. In the same year James went to the United States, where he organised Black workers and catalysed Marxist groups through his speaking and writing. In 1953, at the height of the McCarthyist "Red Scare", he was deported for his views, but appealed against the order. While the case was being heard he was in an internment camp on Ellis Island, working on a book on Hermann Melville.
James lost his case, and returned to England. He began watching and writing about cricket once more, and helped that other great West Indian cricketing pioneer, George Headley, to put together his memoirs. In 1958, James was called back to Trinidad. Here, as the editor of the The Nation newspaper, he played a critical role in the campaign to have Frank Worrell chosen as the first Black captain of the West Indies. The job done, he came back to England, where he was based until his death in 1989.James had been working on Beyond a Boundary all his life, but it was good that its eventual publication was delayed. For it finally came out in the summer of 1963, and was thus read and discussed in England at the same time as Frank Worrell's team was stylishly outplaying the home side in the Tests of that year. With justifiable pride, the author wrote to the West Indian manager that "as I see the book it is 12th man on your sides".
Beyond a Boundary is a work of history, a magisterial analysis of the role played by sport in the making of the modern world. It is also anthropology, an exploration of the impact of colour and class on the cricket field. It is comparative sociology, locating the West Indian experience in the light of Victorian England and the ancient Greeks. It is autobiography, an account of one man's lifelong engagement with the game of cricket. And it is literature, a piece of writing crafted with care and love, a work that captures with subtly all the moods of the human experience: happiness, humour, triumph, tragedy, and despair.
Like no other work I know, Beyond a Boundary beautifully brings together these different genres of literature and scholarship. I have read, and re-read, the book for its evocative portraits of West Indian cricketers, the immortals such as Headley and Constantine and the now forgotten local heroes such as George John and Wilton St. Hill. I have read it for its account of colonial cricket clubs obsessed with shades of white and black, for its analysis (still unequalled by any British writer) of what W. G. Grace meant to his Age, for its account of the Worrell campaign, and-not least-for its fine technical understanding of the game, its perfectly executed cameos of strokeful innings and hostile bowling spells.
Despite its periodic reprinting in the West, Beyond a Boundary remains a book difficult to get hold of. Not many copies, for good reason, get into the second-hand shops (who, having got one, would ever want to dispose of it?) The reader in search of a copy to own might try his luck on the Net.
http://www.thehindu.com/lr/2008/01/06/stories/2008010650030200.htm
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