The photograph sealed it. Published in the Herald on Thursday, it shows an animated section of the crowd, all Indians, at the one-day game between India and Australia in Mumbai the day before.
Your eye is automatically drawn to a stocky-running-to-fat man near the centre of the frame. He is wearing a blue T-shirt with black sleeves. His cheeks are puffed out as he blows hard on - it seems - a whistle. His raised arms are bent at the elbows. His fingers are crooked, turned downward, somewhat like a fist held back from being clenched; his thumbs are splayed on either side. He has, it seems from the picture, put a lot of effort into his posture.
In the foreground is another man - younger, in a T-shirt, glasses and a baseball cap - who seems to have picked up the cue. He too has his arms bent at the elbow. His approximation of a monkey is not quite as mimetic as that of the man behind, but he is smiling and chanting. You cannot tell for sure from a photograph, but it is fair to guess that it is a monkey chant.
All of this is directed at the Australian cricketer Andrew Symonds (not in the frame but bearing this disgraceful insult with dignity and admirable self-restraint).
Pictures do not lie; the evidence is incontrovertible. Symonds was taunted by spectators during Australia 's tour of India.
We need to pick up the story where it started: in the small, western Indian town of Vadodara. On October 11, during a one-day match, a section of the crowd taunted Symonds with monkey chants.
The Australian team did not lodge a formal complaint. Ricky Ponting, the captain, said afterwards: "I know the match referee [Chris Broad of England] knows about this. He has got the chance to write about what happened on match day [in his report]. If the International Cricket Council gets it in his report, they have got something to do about it."
The Vadodara police denied that Symonds had been racially abused. They denied he had been abused at all. They said that the crowd was chanting hymns to the elephant-god Ganesha (whose festival, recently concluded, is the most protracted, popular, colourful and defining festival in western India). The police insisted that Symonds, because he could not understand what they were saying, thought it was abuse.
There has not been a more ridiculous explanation of anything this year, or in many years. Within a week came the incident in Mumbai, the cosmopolitan, contradictory and financial heart of India. Then came the picture. The picture told the story. And the story began to consume India in a way that it had not in the previous seven days.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India and Cricket Australia, both under fire for the manner in which they had handled the matter (India by being in denial; the Australians for not having reported the incident), came out with a joint statement.
"Players of all countries have a right to expect they will be treated with respect wherever they play in the world," the statement said. " … All cricket nations have to be on guard to ensure that the fun [of watching the game] does not cross the boundary into unacceptable behaviour. If it does, it is our expectation that the ICC Anti-Racism Code be enforced without fear or favour."
Yesterday the Hindustan Times, one of India's best-known English-language dailies with a circulation of over a million copies, ran the picture on its front page. The blogs were incandescent - with anger and with fear of reprisal when India travels to Australia for a cricket tour later this year.
The sense of outrage had taken a while to sink in. But now that it has, it is full-blown and spectacular.
India has traditionally had the worst crowds at cricket stadiums. They tend to turn hostile whenever things are not going too well for the home side. They can get ugly and violent and have been known to stop games, to set stadiums alight.
At Eden Gardens in Kolkata in February 1999 an India-Pakistan Test had to be played in front of near-empty stands because Pakistan players felt they had been in danger from a section of the audience, which had been hurling whatever they could find at hand - bottles, fruits, bits of broken concrete - as India faced defeat. It was shameful.
However, we were all implicated. I was not one of those who broke off and threw slabs of concrete onto the pitch. But that did not make things any better. As a matter of fact, it made it worse. I was there. I did not, so to speak, do anything. Not doing anything was tantamount to doing something; my passivity implicated me. There was no way in which I could shrug off the taint of that particular brotherhood.
I have been feeling like that ever since the Symonds incident.
But the people who do this sort of thing at cricket grounds are notrepresentative of India, a country where it is doubly crucial to be aware of - and steer clear of - stereotypes. Stereotypes about India not so much abound as multiply. In popular imagination, India has gone from being the land of exoticism and mysticism to the back office of the world to - most recently - the rising economic superpower whose dizzying rate of growth is second only to China's and which will redraw the geopolitical map of the world by the middle of the 21st century.
The ugly fan is another stereotype. And, like all stereotypes, he is not entirely representative of the reality.
India is not the only country that has ugly fans. In January 2004, when the Indian cricket team toured Australia, I was at the Sydney Cricket Ground for the final Test. I remember being hooted at and roughly pushed aside in the members' stand by a couple of beered-up, middle-aged Australians. I nearly fell, breaking the fall with my shin against a seat.
Why did they do it? Because I was standing in the wrong place? Because I looked smaller than them? Because I was not white? Because India seemed to running away with the match? I don't know. But no sooner than it happened, a couple of other Australians came to help and suggested that I give it back to my aggressors.
On the same tour, Sambit Bal, an Indian and the editor of cricnifo.com, was wandering around near the grassy hill at the Adelaide oval. Two men, drunk, threw him a chicken bone and called out: "Eat it, coolie."
I asked Bal what he remembered of the incident.
"They were obnoxious, they were drunk, and they were aberrations," he told me. "And they didn't reflect my experiences in Australia as a whole. On the whole, people were friendly and helpful. Why should I let two drunks colour my perception of a country?"
(Reports of this incident - and scathing indictments of racist Australian fans - appeared in the Australian papers at the time.)
The lunatic fringe that indulges in this sort of reprehensible behaviour is just that: the lunatic fringe. It should not define a country and its notions of and response to race, colour and common human decency.It is indisputable that the Indians who taunted Symonds did something disgraceful and unpardonable. But was it a racist taunt? Given that this is India, a diverse, non-white country fraught with an inimitable set of complexities, the dynamics at work are very different; the answer cannot be in either black or white.
The template of racism (and of racial abuse) in India is different from what it is in Australia - or the United Kingdom and United States. Indians have always had a weakness for fairness. But the festishisation of white skin in a predominantly brown-skinned country comes inextricably entwined with an irreconcilable sense of contradiction and an often-unconscious notion of self-loathing.
Creams and lotions that claim to lighten the tone of one's skin has become a multi-billion-rupee industry in India. A new cream launched last year - said to be made exclusively for men and guaranteeing that it would turn them fair - made $20 million for the company that produced it.
In India fair equates with pretty, handsome and attractive. People not seen to be fair have invited ridicule in charged moments - and not merely on a cricket field. "Kaaliya (blackie/darkie)," the chant goes. The South African cricketer Makhaya Ntini will know this. As will African students on the streets of Mumbai.
Very often, though, it is not so much a term of ridicule as a bald statement of fact. I grew up in a middle-class, educated Bengali household in Kolkata. No one thought much about describing my complexion in Bengali as Moila (literally translated as "dirty"); the term was uttered with unselfconsciousness, if with a bit of regret. With Symonds, though, it goes beyond that.
Besides, we are great ones for conformity. Bal remembers how Lasith Malinga, the Sri Lankan cricketer with streaked hair, a decided swagger and a sling-arm action, faced boorish behaviour when he played in India. And Symonds, with his braids and zinc cream, looks to the uninformed lunatic fringe to be not so much non-white as different. For their purposes, it did not help that he nearly single-handedly annihilated India in the one-day series.
So where do the monkey chants come in? They do not traditionally belong to the Indian sports fans' lexicon - or repository of abuse. Nor do such chants have the connotations that they would have for, say, a football fan in Europe. That is to say, they do not have the same resonance of racism. They exist as something that is meant to be derisive and contemptuous - and shockingly so. "Monkey" in any Indian language is a common term of abuse, suggesting annoying or stupid. I am not so sure it was a reference to Symonds's West Indian origins.
The man and his imitators in the picture, who riled Symonds with their ape-like gestures, and those in Vadodara from whom he might stupidly have picked it up, are contemptible, reprehensible, insensitive, uninformed and inexcusable.
They need to be told that. They ought to be outed. They must be punished.
The increased security and the closed-circuit cameras that will be trained on the crowd for today's Twenty20 match between India and Australia is a start. They'll be seen behaving incorrigibly - if they do. And there should be no pardon. But India as a country tends to pretend that they are not worth making a fuss about - that this is not worth making a fuss about. That must change. For India's own good, and for that of those who come to visit us. The new, globalised world order demands it. Hard soul-searching, unforgiving self-introspection and that natural accommodation of difference is what we cannot afford to do without.
Otherwise, the stereotype of India as a superpower that alters the geopolitical map of the world in the 21st century will remain merely that: a stereotype. And not entirely representative of reality.
