Cricket Country- An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

The first time a book entitled Cricket Country appeared in print was in T the spring of 1944 Its author was the distinguished English poet Edmund Blunden. Published in the midst of a global conflagration, this was an elegiac account of a boyhood spent playing and watching cricket in the Kent countryside. Blunden, as George Orwell noted, wistfully recalled a golden age that had been shattered forever by the First World War. Ostensibly a memoir about cricket, the real subject of the book was England and Englishness. Cricket, for the poet, was an organic expression of a primeval landscape and the rites of male camaraderie that had governed its rural communities from time immemorial. In celebrating this lost pastoral idyll, Blunden reaffirmed the deeply entrenched view that cricket was truly authentic when it was inviolately English. Tellingly, his book had no subtitle: there could only be one Cricket Country.

Blunden was drawing on a national tradition that had long regarded cricket as uniquely English. "The game of cricket, intoned the Reverend James Pycroft in the mid-nineteenth century, 'is a standing panegyric on the English character: none but an orderly and sensible race of people would so amuse themselves. Naturally, in this view, it followed that foreigners could not fathom a sport that was 'essentially Anglo-Saxon'.' 'Other nations not obsessed by sport are able to hold their own with us at tennis, golf, football, but cricket is incomprehensible to them, a possession or mystery of a clan, a tribal rite, declared Neville Cardus, a contemporary of Blunden and the most famous representative of this particular literary tradition.

Today even the most ardent English nationalist would concede that there is a new claimant to the title of Blunden's book. 'Cricket, it has famously been said, 'is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English." By a curious historical twist, a sport that defined the identity of the former colonizers is now the ruling passion of the country that they conquered. "To outsiders, the magnitude of Indians' love for cricket is as incomprehensible as its feverish intensity, writes a bemused columnist in The Economist. 'What was once an English summer game has become in India a celebrity-infused, highly politicised, billion-dollar industry."

Few would contest that cricket has become an integral part of India's raucous public culture, a unifying force in a land riven by myriad cleavages and conflicts. Indeed, for many Indians, their cricket team is the nation. They celebrate its victories as national triumphs, mourn its defeats as national dis- asters. They regard the Indian team as a symbol of national unity, its social composition as a reflection of the country's cultural diversity. "In this last decade, the respected former cricketer Rahul Dravid noted in a public lecture in 2011, 'the Indian team represents, more than ever before, the country we come from of people from vastly different cultures, who speak different languages, follow different religions, belong to different classes."

This book would not have been possible without the help of a number T of individuals and institutions. My biggest debt is to Ramachandra Guha, who first suggested the project, and has been an unwavering source of support and encouragement ever since. His pioneering writings on the social history of Indian cricket are an important point of departure for this study.

The award of a fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust enabled me to under- take the substantive research for the book. This work was carried out in a number of archives and libraries both in the United Kingdom and India. I am grateful to the staff at the following institutions for facilitating my research and permitting me to quote from the records in their possession: the British Library, London; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge; SOAS University of London; the University of Leicester; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, the National Archives of India, New Delhi, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai, the Marathi Grantha Sangrahalaya, Mumbai; the Library of the University of Mumbai; the Asiatic Society of Mumbai; and the K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai.

Two institutions are indispensable for researching the history of imperial and Indian cricket: the archive and library of the Marylebone Cricket Club, London, and the Anandji Dossa Collection at the Cricket Club of India (CCI), Mumbai. Neil Robinson, the Library and Research Manager at Lord's, dealt patiently with my queries and tracked down rare primary sources. At the CCI, Prakash Dahatonde guided me through that institution's rich holdings of newspaper clippings, books, and journals.