Kanika Datta shares a frugal tea break with the writer, whose recent book has attracted wide acclaim

Ramachandra Guha is patiently listening to me rattling on about the bizarre manner in which Inzamam ul-Haq got himself out in a recent one-dayer against South Africa in Morocco — he hits a six, then treads back on his wicket. Before that, Guha has had to suffer my theories on cricket as a business.

Obviously, I'm not supposed to be doing the talking here, but the fact that I am actually says much more about this writer of the widely-praised book on the social history of Indian cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field.

In my hierarchy of sports passions, cricket comes second and even that fidelity was sorely tested after Hansie-gate. The thing is, Guha's unaffected enthusiasm for the game is highly contagious.

We had just come to the end of a tea that was not without its contretemps for me, principally because it consisted of just that — tea. It turned out that that delightful glass-roofed verandah at The Imperial follows some strange rules.

Guha requests Marie biscuits. The waiter tells us cookies and biscuits (what's the difference?) were "not allowed". Thinking the request too simple, I suggest plain cake or something from a tantalising display just a yard away. It turns out all that food can be served on the verandah only after six o'clock, an hour later.

So there we were, nursing pots of tepid Darjeeling tea drunk at a very British hour, giving me no opportunity to tell readers anything about the writer's culinary preferences (except that he has distinctly Bengali tastes in biscuits). Luckily there was plenty else to talk about since Guha is something of a rara avis in India — a full-time writer.

Guha says he's "just a fan". That's one way of putting it. It's the day after India had inflicted a stunning innings defeat on England, and the Bangalore-based writer is exulting over the fact that its architects, man of the the match Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble, were from his adopted state of Karnataka.

He'd been dreaming, he says, of the Kumble leg-break that dismissed Alec Stewart. "Did you see how it turned?" he exclaims, indicating the breadth of spin with his hands.

I open the innings by asking him what he made of the players' stand-off with the BCCI. Now, just about everyone in India has opinions — and strong ones at that — on the issue. Guha is surprisingly un-judgmental. "I haven't been following it closely. My sympathies are with the players. They should be adequately rewarded — after all, I write about how C K Nayudu didn't even have enough money to get his younger daughters married," he says.

I pointed out that his book ended on a somewhat pessimistic note when he writes about the animosities between India and Pakistan that are spilling on to the cricket pitch. Did he think nationalism would overwhelm subcontinental cricket in the long run?

He thinks a second, before he replies: "I'm a historian, so my book is not prescriptive." But he tries to answer the question by pointing to three broad aspects in the development of cricket in India over the past 30 or 40 years, which his book deals with.

One is democratisation — the fact that instead of (predominantly) Mumbai and other big cities, new talent is emerging from smaller towns like Cuttack, Ghaziabad and so on.

The second significant change is the spread of viewership through television, which has taken cricket out of its urban confines to the villages and small towns. This is where nationalism ties in. "Cricket has become a vehicle for the playing out of nationalist feeling. We are looking to redeem our failures in other spheres, our loss of status in the world, through cricket."

The third is the commercialisation — the issue that is currently exercising Messrs Dalmiya, Speed and other cricket administrators.

"If you look at all three, democratisation is largely to the good. I think it will continue. The other day in a TV discussion, Raju Mukherjee [a former captain of Bengal] pointed out that we still haven't had a cricketer from the north-east in the national team. Nationalism has largely had a negative effect. I mean, how could you not admire Hussain's innings even if you're Indian?" he says, referring to the England captain's stoic 110 in the second innings of the just-concluded Test.

What about commercialisation? Does he think, like many Indians did, that cricketers today were wickedly over-paid? "No, on the whole, I think we should welcome commercialisation. But there has to be a balance and I think cricket is tilting on the side of greed. There are too many international matches these days, and as for the money, how is it being used? I do think the Board should put some of its resources into restoring our domestic cricket, and our national team players should play more domestic matches."

Guha also suggests that players need to be balanced about their sponsorship deals. "I read somewhere that in the deal Tendulkar signed with Mark Mascarenhas's outfit, he has to commit himself to 50 days of shooting. That's almost two months! When will he get the time?"

Guha's own lack of commercial focus comes as a sharp contrast to all this when I ask him about the writing of his book. Ten years in the making, it grew out of an initial intention to write a book on Palwankar Baloo, the Dalit left-arm spin bowler whose talent triumphed over ingrained caste prejudice. In many ways, Baloo is the hero of this latest book.

Guha says his book was largely self-financed with travel for research fitted in with other assignments. How much did he spend? "Oh, it doesn't matter, I enjoyed writing it," he replies. His own cricketing talents, he admits, were limited.

He bowled off-breaks for St Stephen's, and his team contained some prominent names of the future — Kirti Azad, Arun Lal and Piyush Pandey, the current creative hotshot of the advertising world. We digressed a bit to chat about how Pandey had originally come to Kolkata as a player-executive with a tea company called TM&MC before hitting big time in Mumbai's ad world.

I ask Guha why he hadn't thought of playing at a higher level. "I wasn't good enough," he replies candidly, adding with a grin, "At best I could have played for Assam or Tripura. The other day Tom [Alter, the actor] and I were talking about how we could play for Uttaranchal since he's from Mussoorie and I'm from Dehra Dun."

Not playing Ranji wasn't such a disappointment. "Actually, it's quite self serving because I think the best cricket writers are usually not great cricketers. But having played to some level, they are in a position to appreciate the game much more. I mean, how can someone like Viv Richards truly appreciate a cover drive from Lara?"

Guha's cricket writing — which include two earlier books, an edited anthology and an enjoyable column in The Hindu — may have catapulted him to national attention, but he has an equally respected reputation as an environmental historian. He wrote his PhD thesis on the Chipko movement — from IIM, Joka, of all places ("I must have been the first and last student of their sociology department") — and authored a book on Verrier Elwin, that unsung champion of tribal rights, among other books.

So what is his first love, cricket or ecology? I thought I knew that answer already but I was wrong. "My first love is historical research. I get itchy if I don't get to look at old manuscripts."

Given that, the next book he is writing should suit him him to a T: it's a political history of India after independence (to be published by Picador), which is due out in two or three years.

Naturally, I have to ask him about the near-unplayable googly he bowled to that iconic writer, Arundhati Roy, about two years ago in a coruscating comment on her stand on the Narmada dam in The Hindu. The burden of Guha's criticism then was that her involvement was ill-conceived and did the movement more harm than good.

Guha displays no defensiveness. "I have basically criticised the quality of her non-fiction writing. It's the same with what she wrote about the Bomb. I think her opinions lacks coherence. I mean, in her book on Narmada, she purports to speak for the displaced tribals but you never hear a tribal speak through her."

He thinks the outcome of the issue, in which the Narmada Bachao Andolan lost its case in the Supreme Court, proved another point — that celebrities are detrimental to causes such as this. "I admire her courage and her generosity in contributing towards the movement. I think she's brave but foolish and her lack of judgement irritates me."

That's clearly not the end of this particular innings. A piece on Roy is due out in a second volume of essays, the first being An Anthropologist among the Marxists and other Essays (published by Permanent Black).

I was interested to know: was he pro-Big Dam or anti? Neither. "I'm an empirical scholar so I prefer a negotiated compromise. I wish somebody would go through the Supreme Court proceedings on Narmada. I think the petitioners lacked the spirit of compromise. The Gujarat government was insisting on the height of the dam being 460 feet or so and the others were insisting it should be lower. Yet there are first-rate engineers who have suggested that the height can be 370 or 360 feet and displacement will drop by 70 per cent. But no one was willing to budge."

His bigger point is that the question is not whether we should have big dams or not but that any expenditure of this kind should be open to independent scrutiny. "After all, India is a poor country, and we can't just spend crores of rupees on large projects without some kind of accountability."

I ask him how a Tam-Brahm acquired a Bengali surname. It was all to do with living in the north. His father was named after Guhak, the hunter in the Ramayana who helps transport Ram to Lanka. "His full name was Subramaniam Ramadas Guha. If we were to follow the Tamilian style, I should have been G Ramachandra, but since we lived in north India, the names were reversed."

We are through the second pot of tea so I ask Guha a final question. If he were able to watch a cricket match again, which one would he like to see most? He thinks. "First, it will have to be a match in which India is playing." He thinks some more and chooses the 1949 Test between India and West Indies, played at the Brabourne Stadium in Bombay.

"That was when Hazare got a century. India needed six runs to win and there were two wickets standing when time was called. I later discovered that there was actually a minute to go on the clock." With reminiscences like this, can you blame my subsequent garrulity?