Why cricket in India is a true wonder of the world

In Bhopal a fortnight ago two boys, Vishal and Rishabh, broke into the house of an acquaintance of theirs named Deepesh. They had come carrying sticks, and with the aim of settling an argument. Deepesh had a sword, and he killed them both. What caused the fight? A game of cricket. All three had been playing in a friendly match that afternoon. Rishabh's team had lost, and Deepesh had slapped him during a row about the result. In Lucknow last December an umpire was shot in the chest after he refused to reverse a contentious lbw decision that he had just given against a local hoodlum. In Ghaziabad last April a student at KN Modi Inter College was arrested after he beat a fellow pupil to death with his bat after a scuffle during a district match.

There is no great principle to be extracted from these three ugly stories. In no way are they typical of the vibrant, passionate love for the sport that so many people here feel. But they are a stark reminder that in India, cricket can be a different beast altogether from the game played in other parts of the world. In the departures lounge at Nagpur airport last Sunday I stumbled into a thick, swirling crowd of men with their mobile phones out, filming and snapping pictures, as well as brandishing pens and pieces of scrap paper. In the middle of this throng, I found once I had fought my way through it, were Simon Doull and Pommie Mbangwa.

Only in India, a country where the police believe that the only way to control crowds trying to get their hands on match tickets is by beating them into a queue with bamboo lathis, an inclination wittily parodied in one of the many home-made banners on display at the VCA Stadium in Nagpur last Saturday.

In its intensity, its passion and its sheer scale, Indian cricket is unsurpassed by any sport I've covered. A colleague who has been in this line of work longer than I have tells me that the only time and place he has heard anything to match the noise made in an Indian ground when Sachin Tendulkar is batting well is at the Old Firm derby. And just like the Old Firm, Indian cricket has sectarian roots. Before the regionally-based Ranji Trophy, cricket in the country was all about the Bombay Quadrangular, played in a Gymkhana outside the city walls between teams representing the English, the Parsees, the Hindus and the Muslims. Those divides are long since forgotten, subsumed beneath a more unifying nationalistic desire to see team India win, but the strength of feeling those matches provoked seems to linger still among a committed minority.

Late last Saturday night I stood in the dust outside the VCA Stadium after India's defeat, chewing the cud with a few Indian journalists while the paan stalls and chai vendors packed up for the night. We eyed the line of traffic trying to escape the ground, blocked up bumper-to-bumper along the highway back into the city centre, and someone floated the idea that it looked likely India would be playing Pakistan in the quarter-final in Ahmedabad. "Wow," I said, savouring the idea. "No," one of them replied, rolling his eyes at the prospect of what such a match would mean.

For my colleague David Hopps even the Old Firm pales in comparison to those matches, made to look like a "WI coffee morning", as he once wrote, a line that Ramachandra Guha liked so much he used it to end his superb history of Indian cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field. (That reminds me, I must ask Hoppsy which he is more familiar with, WI meetings or Old Firm fixtures.) When Pakistan lost to India in the quarter-finals of 1996 World Cup, two Pakistani fans died during the game, one had a heart attack and the other committed suicide, turning his gun on himself after shooting out his TV screen. Again, you have to be careful not to extrapolate conclusions from such incidental and anecdotal evidence, but the stories still serve to exemplify the strength of feeling some followers feel.

"That was some of the noisiest cricket I have ever played," said a shell-shocked Graeme Smith after South Africa's win last weekend. He was looking back on those first 15 overs when, as he admitted, his team were on the "back end of a massive beating" from Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag. AB de Villiers said the next morning that his ears were still roaring. Smith actually called a referral for an lbw decision that was plainly never going to be overturned – the ball was missing leg by a mile – just so he could call his team into a huddle and talk to them. "It was really to bring the guys in together. The way Sachin and Viru were playing, it was difficult to connect and regroup." The glass in the press box rattled with the hum of 50,000 fans, the sound as unceasing as that of the sea, only rising and falling with the boundaries and wickets like waves breaking on the beach. As Smith said, nothing else in cricket comes close.

Of course what happens at the ground is only a tiny part of the whole. The World Cup is really being played out on TV sets across the subcontinent. The TV advertising revenue generated by cricket in India this year alone is expected to amount to over £246m. It is no surprise, therefore, that the tournament is designed primarily to cater to Indian TV audiences. Coming here to watch cricket you realise just how complete India's control of the sport is. Such are the sums involved that it is a wonder the World Cup is ever held anywhere else. The laws may stay the same, but financially and socially, cricket in India is a whole different ball game.