Champion of the underdog

In a study of George Orwell, his friend George Woodcock wrote, “What made Orwell such an excellent journalist and often gave his books a touch of that reality that goes beyond mere verisimilitude was his intense interest in the concrete aspects of living, in ‘the surface of life,’ as he would say.”

It is a description that applies equally to Mike Marqusee, author, activist, poet, whose philosophy of humanism and support for the underdog was expressed through books as wide-ranging as studies of Muhammad Ali and Bob Dylan, cricket from the colonies to the corporates, Zionism, Neil Kinnock and the Labour party, William Blake, and finally, on living through cancer, to which he succumbed on January 13 aged only 61. 

Marqusee borrowed from Orwell the title of his classic on the 1996 World Cup in the subcontinent, War Minus the Shooting, one of his two contributions to the list of top cricket books. The other is Anyone But England. “Only an outsider who has come to the game late in life could articulate its peculiarities so well,” wrote a reviewer. Marqusee, born in New York, came to England at 18, and reopened debates in many areas thanks to his unique world view as he sieved the ordinary, the accepted, the taken-for-granted through his own experience, and gave us new ways of looking at them. 

Many saw Marqusee as the spiritual successor to CLR James, the Trinidadian Marxist who wrote Beyond a Boundary, and there is an argument there. But I always thought of Marqusee as a latter-day Orwell, both passionate and generous as well as objective and compassionate. Orwell had to deal with tuberculosis and Marqusee with cancer, both leading to premature deaths, Orwell’s at 46. 
 
Marqusee was a truth-teller and a disturber of the smug and unthinking. And even, as he demonstrated early in life, a questioner of other radicals’ long-held beliefs.
 
Marqusee described himself as a ‘deracinated Jew’, and in If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an anti-Zionist Jew, wrote about his father at the dinner table calling him a “self-hating Jew.”
 
It was 1967 and Marqusee was 14. Both his parents had been active in the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Jews were expected to celebrate Israel’s success in the Six-Day War, exult in the spoils of victory, the many square miles of land. Marqusee, who felt it was “wrong for one country to take over another by military force” offered the following analogy: “If the US was wrong in Vietnam — and that was a given around our dinner table — then Israel was wrong in taking over all that Arab land.” 

That was when Marqusee’s father made his remark and the boy “burning from head to toe, threw down knife and fork and left the table in a huff.” 
 
In adult life, Marqusee was able to rationalise: "If I am not for myself, then the Zionists will claim to be for me, will usurp my voice and my Jewishness.”
 
Jews can be anti-Zionists, just as Hindus can be anti-Hindutva, a connection Marqusee himself makes in a later chapter.
 
“In many respects,” he says, “Hindutva and Zionism are natural bedfellows. Both depict the entities they claim to represent as simultaneously national and religious, territorial and transcendent. Both claim to be the sole authentic spokespersons for these entities (Hindu and Jewish). Both share an ambivalent historic relationship with British colonialism. Both appeal to an affluent diaspora. And most important at the moment, both share a designated enemy ('Muslim terrorism').”
 
When he turned 60, I sent him a message. “Yes, I made it to 60,” he wrote back, “which was a little miracle, as when I was diagnosed (with multiple myeloma in 2007), I was given 3 to 4 years to live. Things are up and down, but I’m still here, still writing, still watching cricket (mainly on TV these days).” A few months later, we sat in his living room in North London, and talked cricket; he was working out a piece in his mind: Why cricket? It was the last essay he wrote; it was for the Wisden India Almanack, the tome I edit. 
 
“Cricket,” he wrote, “offers all the pleasures of sport in general, plus a highly distinctive appeal of its own, to which many elements contribute. One of the chief of these is the way it treats time and space… it keeps its own archaic kind of time….cricket is a game with a determined centre and an indeterminate periphery…”
 
That morning Marqusee made the coffee — his companion and fellow traveller Liz Davies had to leave for a meeting — and we also spoke of Chola bronzes, the Carnatic music season in Chennai, and his forthcoming book on Blake. 
 
He signed for me a copy of his poetry collection, Street Music. “In friendship,” he wrote, adding, “See page 80.”
 
On page 80 was this wonderful paean to an Opening Pair: “One of us drops anchor/ While the other gets off to a flyer./ It’s not because one is more impetuous/ Or cautious than the other./ The assault, like the defence, is calculated./ We play the same percentages/ to different rhythms, following/ our own sequence/ of stressed and unstressed beats,/ each of us fashioning/ our own departure from the norm.
After the crescendo, the rest,/ after the rest, the crescendo./ One of us foil for the other, as it should be./ Personality will out./ We perform in our styles/ Because that is our function./ We never get in each other’s way./ We perform who we are/ Because that is what the situation demands –/ But at a pinch we can swap roles,/ One coming out of the shadow of the other.”
 
At the door, we shook hands in a formal goodbye — and then hugged. We performed who we were because that was what the situation demanded.
 
The author is Editor, Wisden India Almanack