LURU Editor’s Pick: Sharda Ugra’s “A View from the Stands”

The modern nation-state upended the old religious order and reinvented devotion, gathering colourful, pulsating swathes of humanity around new altars of worship. Nothing did the trick for India quite like cricket. The Indian cricket fan is that peerless paragon of piety—that true believer who turns up match after match, face painted, flag flying, body offered to the furnace of heat and humidity, chanting slogans for the home team.

Earlier this year, on 4 June 2025, the blood of believers was spilled on sacred ground. At Chinnaswamy Stadium, in the unbounded euphoria that followed the Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s historic IPL win, 11 fans were trampled to death. In the months that have passed since, we saw hand-wringing and finger-pointing from organisers and officials, along with the usual news reports calling for heads to roll. The wound on the stadium, on the city, on the ground—was left open.

Grief—after a desecration—is where veteran sports writer Sharda Ugra begins her conversations with architects, cricketers, lawyers, and fans about what to do with Chinnaswamy in Issue #3 of LURU. A stadium, like any place of public gathering, is built on invisible foundations of trust, safety, and belonging, and so, the deaths cannot be written off as an accident—11 lives were lost, and the city broke a promise to its citizens. She writes:

On 4 June 2025, this much-loved, mood-accommodating cricket space—with its half-hourly flips of conviviality, delirium, release—became a metaphor for grief. Six months on, it still sits heavy in the pit of our cricket. The desolation is even greater in the homes and hearts of the Eleven who paid the heaviest price for their beloved Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s IPL title victory on their eighteenth try.

Until the next cricket match of public notice at the Chinnaswamy, our city has an opportunity to accept what needs to be changed inside the stadium and what needs to be affixed irrevocably as remembrance.

I reached out to more than 20 Bangaloreans—citizens, cricket fans, players, architects, designers—to imagine a renaissance for the Chinnaswamy Stadium following that awful day. Not reboot, reset, reinstall, but renaissance in its fullest sense. At this point in its eventful, memorable, 51-year life, the Chinnaswamy calls out for more than a renovation, reconstruction, or refabrication featuring bulldozers, cranes, and scaffolding.

It needs a restoration—a renewal of the ethos behind its construction half a century ago, an internal healing of a place flocked to and venerated, which, in India’s most devastating sports tragedy, brutally damaged those who loved it most.

Developers and planners have suggested abandoning Chinnaswamy and erecting a new place to play cricket at the edge of the city. To Sharda, that would be unthinkable. She considers what the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre called the “social production of public space,” arguing that Chinnaswamy is not just its beams and barriers, but a living Bangalorean entity that belongs at the city’s centre, along with the fans, the players, the legends, and the memories:

This notion—activity, energy, and togetherness around cricket—drove the very creation of the stadium itself. The ground’s origins have an uncanny timestamp coinciding with the creation of Karnataka state, with its new capital housed in Bangalore—a breakaway from the influence of Mysore, both state and royal house.[...]

The man who made it happen, Mangalam Chinnaswamy Mudaliar, should at least have his own mini-series because the delightful stories around his love for cricket and Karnataka continue to be told—about how he rostered friends, family, and acquaintances, like SA Srinivasan and KC Thimappiah, in his mission to build a ground for cricket. Following multiple visits to Delhi, he was finally offered plots of land in Bengaluru. Journalist Ravi Sharma’s essay on Chinnaswamy in Playback: Sports Legends of Bangalore reveals that the first plot was near the Krishna Flour Mill at Seshadripuram and the second at what is today the Subhash Nagar Bus Station. Chinnaswamy refused both.

The third plot sat on what was considered “the imaginary line” that divided Bengaluru into the western city/“pete” and the eastern Cantt. Sharma writes that if built there, the stadium “would serve to unite the two halves and become, in the years to come, the centre of Bangalore….

To each of these 20-plus Bangaloreans [to whom I spoke], the talk of moving—to a larger stadium, as rumoured—feels like something between farce, nightmare, and construction scam. K Srinath puts it best: it will “[take] the sheen away from everything,” like moving Tirupati. “[If] somebody says tomorrow that we have a problem, we have to move the hillock out of its place into Mumbai.” It’s like insisting that what gives Tirupati its aura can be transported by “relocating to a new hillock.” Cricket is a religion in India not just because of fan rituals and beliefs in “cricket gods,” but also because there are shrines. And decent people don’t move those.

Along with Chinnaswamy’s future, Sharda reminds us, the soul of the city is at stake. Questions of the soul are quite often to do with justice, and with that in mind, Sharda filters discordant ideas for stadium repairs and renovations through the mesh of moral decency. She opens the conversation on behalf of the city’s fans—on how those in charge must go about making amends after what may have been criminal neglect or mismanagement. She takes these questions to architects, cricketers, lawyers, and fans, gathering ideas both architectural and philosophical, in a city-wide negotiation of our public space. The essay she has produced is a clamorous act of collective authorship over the future of that consecrated ground—a vision for a new Chinnaswamy, as imagined by people who love cricket.

You can read Sharda’s story, “A View from the Stands,” and others in Issue #3 of LURU, themed “The Games We Play.” Each print issue of LURU takes a single theme and examines it through the kaleidoscope of plural storytelling. Issue #3 includes translated short fiction from Jayant Kaikini and Jo Gi; an illustrated comic co-authored by Bhavani Kumar and behavioural scientist Nikhil Ravichandar; and personal essays from Bhairavi Shibulal and Paul Dharamraj.

This is an excerpt of a non-fiction feature from Issue #3 of LURU. Get your copy here.