Cricket in Colonial India, 1780-1947: From Village Greens to Corporate Capitalism (Sport in the Global Society)

This work is a social history of Indian cricket between 1780 and 2003. It considers cricket as a derivative sport, creatively and imaginatively adapted to suit modern Indian socio-cultural needs, fulfil political imperatives and satisfy economic aspirations. It is concerned with the appropriation, assimilation and subversion of cricketing ideals in colonial and post-colonial India for nationalist ends. In short, it is a story rooted in the contingencies of the colonial and post-colonial context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India.
Cricket, to put it simply, is much more than a game for Indians. This study describes how the genealogy of their intense engagement with cricket stretches back over a century. It is not a straightforward narrative of Indian cricket, removed from colonial Indias socio-economic and political experience. It is concerned with much more: with the beginning of the end of cricket as a mere sport, with the beginning of Indian crickets commercial revolution in the 1930s, with ideals and idealism and their relative unimportance, with the decline of morality for reasons of realpolitik, and with the denunciation, once and for all, of the view that sport and politics do not mix.
This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.