Yesterday I received an e-mail from a dear friend of mine, an Old Etonian in Edinburgh with free time on his hands. “Hello Monkey Boy,” it began, charmingly, “Tell me - does this recent spat between Australia and India mean that I am no longer allowed to address you as ‘monkey'?”

Since not everyone spends every waking hour bent double over the sports pages of newspapers, I should point out that this seemingly puerile note drew its inspiration from an incident that is alleged to have occurred in Sydney last week in the course of the second cricket Test match between Australia and India. Harbhajan Singh, the Indian spinner for whom the sportswriter's default adjective is “feisty” - when, in truth, “boorish” might be more appropriate - was found guilty by the match referee of having called Andrew Symonds (an equally feisty/boorish Australian cricketer of Afro-Caribbean descent) a “monkey.”

As you can imagine, it was quite an eventful Test - and that includes the cricket. As for the simian episode: in a nutshell, on the Test's second day, Harbhajan tapped the bowler Brett Lee on the buttocks with his bat. It would appear to have been done playfully, for Lee did not

object. Symonds, however, disliked what he saw and, in his own words, “had a crack at” Harbhajan for dissing his mate. We do not know what he said, but since he - like any Australian cricketer - is no shrinking violet, it can hardly have been a rundown of the local weather.

Harbhajan, it is alleged, responded by calling Symonds a “monkey”. The ref, not a very cerebral man but in his day a dazzling South African cricketer, adjudged the Indian culpable and banned him for three Tests. Since there isn't an on-field recording of the incident, it was a case of Harbhajan's word (and that of his batting partner, the highly respected Sachin Tendulkar) versus that of Symonds and Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain. In other words, the referee chose to believe the Australian accusation, and to disbelieve the Indian denial, on little more than the say-so of the two parties involved.

The referee's ruling would appear to be of a philosophical pattern, at least in this game, if not in modern cricket history. Neutral umpires and other officials tend to trust teams from the Indian sub-continent much less than they do Australia and England. The cultural mythology of cricket (into which umpires have always bought, as have match referees) holds that the Aussies play hard but fair, and that theirs is a muscular but fundamentally honest game, reflective of their society and culture. So when a catch is taken in the slips off the edge of an Indian bat - as happened in the second innings of this Test - the umpire was satisfied that it was taken cleanly (even though it looked dodgy to the naked eye) simply because the Australians said they caught it.

The Indians, and, more commonly, the Pakistanis, are seen as people with fewer principles who cut corners and play footsie with the truth. Their respective societies are precisely like that, so why should their cricketers be any different? If they're appealing for a catch - the umpires' thinking goes - it is just to see what they can get out of the man in the white coat. It's all rather like the first price quoted by a rug salesman at a bazaar. When the Indian slip cordon goes up in unison, screaming “Howzaaat?”, the umpire may have visions of the man trying to fleece him at a market in Jaipur: “Two thousand rupees, sir. Very good price.” Not out! The Australians' word means something to the umpires; the Indian word means very little.

Of course, even teams such as England - cut from the same “honest” cloth as the Aussies - have found that neutral umpires can tend to favour the Aussies disproportionately when it comes to borderline decisions.

Here, there is a different dynamic at work, one that comes into play whenever the indomitable Australians play another team at cricket. Neutral umpires are impelled by the momentum generated by a seeming Australian invincibility - an invincibility that must not be disturbed.

Australian dominance is now so much a part of cricket's natural order that umpires are lulled into believing that defeat for the Aussies is unthinkable - unnatural. So they have, subconsciously, become conservationists of the natural order (a tendency common to all enforcers of rules, in all spheres).

Thus Indians regard themselves as particularly hard done by in the Sydney Test because the match officials delivered a cultural double whammy: important appeals were turned down, some of them obvious dismissals, on account of the umpires fearing to disturb the natural order; and their word was regarded as having a value inferior to that of the Australians'. This isn't cricket, they're thinking, as they fume over the outcome. This is monkey business.

Tunku Varadarajan is a professor at New York University's Stern School and a Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

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