Virat Kohli: A cricketer for our times

Kohli is the most powerful Indian cricketer — primarily because of his batting genius and partially because of his dominant personality — in the most powerful era of Indian cricket. The BCCI had been the wealthiest cricketing governing body since the late last century, but its emergence as a monarch of the cricketing empire, more so after the launch of the Indian Premier League, runs parallel to the rise of Kohli. The board’s wealth runs into two billion pounds, Kohli is the most followed Indian on Instagram (183 million followers and swelling), and behind only Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo as the most followed sportsperson in the world.

It might have been a coincidence — or destiny, the word the country is obsessed with — but the commonness of the definitive virtues of Kohli and the board is irrepressible. Kohli and his traits would have been slightly out of sync in a different era — for instance, the 90s. He would not have been the metaphor of those times, despite his gift of bending narratives.

Swaggering and aggressive, ruthless and fearless, Kohli strode out onto the field like the way the board functioned. Until the first fissures between them emerged openly some six months ago, he was the batsman-leader forged in the ideals and image of the board, just as his team was morphed in the spirit and convictions of the captain. And a delicious irony it was that Kohli took on the mighty board that could end careers, as only he could have, just as the board took on the mighty Kohli — he who could change perceptions with a hashtag – only as the Indian cricket board could have.

In essence, thus, Kohli is an atypical Indian sporting idol. The archetypal hero — sensibilities shaped perhaps from epics and folklore — was monkish, selfless and sacrificing, taking arrows on his chest and hiding the pain beneath a stoic face. Tendulkar was almost detached in his devotion to his art, an ascetic wedded to his dharma, pouring few emotions on the field. His great contemporaries, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman, too were sculpted in the Ramayana-Mahabharata ideals of heroism. Even Virender Sehwag, temperamentally so different to them, was a little Buddha with the wood when he batted in that impenetrable trance of his.

Kohli swaggers onto the field like a commander with his fleet. He is fazed neither by the occasion nor the arena and isn’t daunted either by the bowlers or the hostile crowd.

His batting captures his assertiveness. No stroke absorbs this spirit to the fullest as his cover drive. At his hands, it is not merely a stroke, but a tool of domination. The front foot striding out, the eyes hooked on the hurtling sphere of leather, the body following in balletic harmony, the bat bristling out and tracing the most symmetrical parabola, and ball crackling into the distance, fleecing the grass. Not the most picture-book cover-drive, but a shuddering punch on the face of the bowler. Viv Richards found his spiritual successor in him, just as The Don had Tendulkar.

He evokes different emotions from the audience. Tendulkar made the audience traverse a wide spectrum of emotions, from hope and joy to agony and anguish, Sehwag brought about a surge in adrenaline and Laxman’s batting was about peace. But Kohli was a hero from a film rather than an epic or a novel. He provokes rage, a happy rage. When he fumes, we fume as well. He doesn’t transport us to a different world or offer an escape from it. They infuse self-belief. His hundreds and double hundreds have not exhausted us, on the contrary, they have energised us. Few Indian batsmen have exuded a raw, transmittable energy as Kohli, and few have unfurled orthodox shots with a bat that seemed to be exhilaratingly alive. Even a defensive stroke is seldom a shot of passive resistance.

Kohli might embody all the brashness of the IPL generation, but he has also told the generation that cross-format mastery is achievable. His recent form in red-ball cricket might have slumped, but he has still performed at an all-format plateau beyond the reach of any other player in the current era.

Thus, he has changed the concept of an Indian batting hero. They are no longer cast in the Gavaskar-Tendulkar-Laxman-Dravid mould of monkish and selfless heroes. Like him, the generation-in-waiting has inked tattoos on their body, flaunt neatly-manicured beards, chisel their abs and pecs, exude an irresistible fearlessness, and want to attain cross-format mastery. Ganguly’s was a brave new India; Kohli’s a brash new India.

While Kohli belongs to the IPL generation, his devotion to Test cricket has helped sustain the format’s superiority in the T20 era. Thus, there is no better metaphor of the cricketing milieu, or the power invested in the hands of the Indian cricket board, than Kohli.

sandip.gopal@expressindia.com