Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka’s fictional debut, Chinaman: The Legend Of Pradeep Mathew is about a journalist’s obsession with a long-forgotten (but fictional) Sri Lankan cricketer, Pradeep Mathew. He tells DNA how his novel uses cricket as a vehicle to critique Sri Lankan society and culture.
Why did you choose to write a novel around Sri Lankan cricket, and not non-fiction?
Because there’s a lot of the latter and not very many of the former. What I wanted to do was use the game to talk about Sri Lanka and why it hasn’t achieved to its potential in anything except, of course, for cricket. And Pradeep Mathew, the forgotten genius, and WG Karunasena, the unfulfilled writer, seemed perfect vehicles for exploring this, among other things.
How much domain expertise do you have on cricket in Sri Lanka and how did you build this up?
Not much to begin with. I followed cricket eagerly in my youth, and like most Sri Lankans, obsessively post 1996. But after that bubble burst, I became a pretty casual fan. I’d watch the occasional match, but I was no Ari Byrd. When I had to write about these two old cricket maniacs, I had to become one. So I collected stats on the net, read every book with cricket in the title and watched as much as I could of Sri Lankan cricket from 1982 to 1999.
Man to man, how would you compare the current Sri Lankan team with the one that won the World Cup in 1996?
It’ll never be like ’96 again. With hindsight, we tend to romanticise it, but people forget that the ’96 team were a bunch of players who’d been thrashed for a decade by everyone in the world. By ’96 they were all at their peak and overflowing with experience. That batting line-up of Guru, Arjuna and Aravinda, backed by Hashan and Mahanama and led by Sanath and Kalu, was phenomenal. It didn’t matter that our bowling was pretty average, because, at least for a while we could chase anything down. Today, we’re much more professional and accepted as one of the big boys. I think our bowling is streets ahead of ’96, but our batting, even with class like Sangakkara, Mahela, Dilshan and Thilan is nowhere near ’96 standards.
Which are the areas in which the present team is stronger and in which areas are they weaker?
Better bowling, weaker middle order.
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