Where is Geoffrey Boycott these days? Any prolonged spell of absence on the Yorkshireman's part induces an odd kind of hunger - a hunger for Boycott, for that stream of admonishments emanating from the side of the mouth. Never has a Yorkshire accent sounded better - especially in its ability to metamorphose a limited English vocabulary into a credo. Is there a likeness, you wonder, of Boycott at Madame Tussaud's, commemorating the blue eyes and the angle of the mouth? Those who had been missing him for too long might, if they were passing through London, stop to hover around his replica in Baker Street. But they may not find it there; Boycott, after all, is an Indian invention. While the public, in this country, has bestowed a knighthood upon Boycott - it is not unusual to hear him referred to as 'Sir Geoffrey' in India - in England he is, at the very least, unpopular, and at best a figure of fun. For Rory Bremner, the impressionist, both Geoffrey Boycott talking about cricket and Prince Charles conversing with his plants are soft targets. Doing Charles, he conjures up a faraway loquaciousness befitting an heir apparent who will seemingly never ascend the throne; doing Boycott, he invokes a scowl of earnest disdain. We know why Charles has few friends; but why does Boycott not have more? There are reasons. For one thing, Boycott's dogged and meticulous way of hoarding runs never endeared him to his contemporaries. There is the rumour, too, that Boycott's best friend was his mother; in the eyes of the English, a cardinal sin. Then there is the conjecture, untrue but plausible, that he used to sleep with his bat. Indeed, there was an uncomfortable air of homoerotic concealment about him that did not quite fit in with the vigorously heterosexual and matey ethos of the team-sport he was a participant in. Whatever doubts one might have had about his sexuality were dispelled, in a regrettably unambiguous way, with his girlfriend taking him to court for assaulting her. In response to his evident misogyny (in spite of his not very convincing protestations of innocence), the British press turned upon him with headlines that sounded like tautologies: 'Ban Boycott'. But bad behaviour has never been allowed to come between the British public and its heroes; if that were so, Botham, guilty of adultery and other deadly sins, would not be Britain's most popular sporting icon. Both 'high' art (for example, Paradise Lost) and the popular imagination are, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, at least agreed on this: the glamour of badness and the dullness of virtue. No, Boycott's deadly sin, which makes him such a gauche figure in British society, is his lack of irony, his fundamental seriousness. Everyone else, though they may be from divergent social backgrounds - as are Botham and Gower - is playing the game, whether on the field or off it. In contrast, Boycott, as a commentator, is as unflinching in his pursuit of 'truth' as he once was in amassing runs, as if he had some special access to it that others did not; this makes him an irritant and a source of discomfort to his colleagues. Tom Paulin, the Irish poet and critic, a maverick who now teaches, slightly uneasily, at Oxford, told me not long ago that the way British committees deal with crises and unpleasant problems is 'containment': evade and smooth over the issue if you can, rather than confront it. Boycott, unlike his colleagues on the commentary team, is a bad committee member; his impulse is to confront an issue and hammer at it, rather than come to some implicit agreement over it, as the others do. To them, he is, one senses, an embarrassment. Left to Britain, and to the Anglo-Saxon cricketing world, Boycott would have continued to be an embarrassment, a minor figure of ridicule in the annals of the game. Thank god for the Indian subcontinent, for it has allowed us to discover the marvellous tonic and breath of fresh air that Boycott really is. Indian cricket, and the commentary that has become an all-important part of it, would be a moribund affair were it not for Boycott. Cricket in India, like every other walk of life here, revolves around egos, factions and politics; it is a sphere where, too familiarly, achievement is outdone by desire, perceptiveness by self-delusion. If one were to expect that the commentary team would be a disinterested observer of the scene, one would be mistaken; it brings to the scene the half-truths, evasions and factional loyalties that are already endemic to it. The non-Indian commentators - for instance, Tony Greig, Ian Chappell, Barry Richards - are no better, and are probably worse, quick to sniff out the local rivalries and play up to them, as the colonials once did, and, with the air of foreigners plunging into a necessary and ancient ritual, join enthusiastically in the monotonous and sycophantic chorus of praise for Sachin Tendulkar. At the same time, they can be unashamedly partisan, though the white man has another name for partisanship, 'objectivity'; Botham, especially, exemplifies again and again that the English are wonderful sports in victory, and ungenerous in defeat. Gone are the days when commentaries were merely descriptive; these days, they are prescriptive - the most boring thing about them is not the way the commentators, mostly former captains, reel out statistics, but how they, both Indian and non-Indian, sit in judgement of the players, tell them how to sit, run and eat, and continually give both them and, really, us, the spectators or viewers, the benefit of their ideas on moral and physical self-improvement. In this regard, Ian Chappell has always a homily to offer, the homily of a hardened, unappeasable committee man speaking in polite but unforgiving committee language. The Indian commentators, like Ravi Shastri, utter slightly vacuous platitudes, while offering solemn obeisance to Tendulkar - an obeisance that, like all forms of obeisance, has a violent undertone to it, suggesting implicitly that anyone who disagrees must face the consequences. Indeed, the whole tone of these discussions has the air of an eschatological meeting between established clerics. In the midst of all this, the awkward, loud-voiced Yorkshireman, Boycott, is the one redeeming figure. He has little time for the English team; he is not shy of criticizing Tendulkar. While the others damn with faint praise, he either damns or praises. In his excessive championing of the Prince of Calcutta, he has been an embarrassment to his colleagues. It isn't, thus, as if he doesn't have advice or praise to give; but that he seems to give it to all the wrong people. But, for his independent-mindedness and his instinctive dislike of bullshit ('Roobish', as he musically calls it), the Indian public has turned to him with love and gratitude; neglected and parodied in his own country, in India he has become a postcolonial hero. Without Boycott, Indian cricket would be intolerable; without India, Boycott would not be the contemporary classic he is. It is as if two singular and slightly disreputable entities had met, and succeeded in augmenting each other's mythologies.