Cricket ki shuruaat kab aur kaise Hui

 Introduction:

Is cricket a sport or a pastime?’, asked an advertisement of the Central Tea Board in 

1951.1 The copywriter certainly knew his cricket; it is hard to find a pithier one line 

summary of cricket’s chequered public history in India. A sport is by definition a 

structured, goal-oriented, competitive activity, whereas a pastime is freewheeling 

indulgence, presumably devoid of conflict, politics, and struggle.2 It would be sheer

naiveté to think of cricket in India as either a pastime or a sport, on account of the 

multiple meanings the sport has gone on gathering since its introduction in 1721 by 

British sailors. Over the next three centuries or so, cricket in India has built up a nationwide spread and mobilized an immensely large and diverse popular following, finally 

emerging as a network of meaning, crisscrossing the dynamics and domains of 

colonialism, nationalism, communalism, race, caste, economy and culture. Yet, 

cricket’s historicality is remarkably fragmented, especially in the postcolonial context,

due largely to a paucity of engaged academic research.3 This thesis addresses that

lacuna by exploring the web of mediated relationships – constituted by the mass media, 

readers, and spectators – to uncover the various modes through which the public were 

moulded as consumers of this leisure regime in Calcutta between 1934 and 1999.

When a letter-writer introduced the India-MCC Test match in 1972-73 as the 

battle between the bat and the ball which had solved all of Bengal’s socio-political 

problems, he did not come across as sarcastic but rather entranced by the impact only a 

million cricket followers could have over a state of 45 million people.4 Even if cricket 

does not deliver radical social change or produce a sense of ethnic cultural affiliation, 

the identities built around it in Calcutta have generated intense public conversations in 

the society. Cricket becomes a rubric in the moment of convergence among the three, 

 

 A history from middle:

A letter written by the schoolteacher O.H.T. Dudley to The Times in 1932 shows that 

Indians might have started to think of cricket as a way of life, more than a pastime, 

probably at the turn of the twentieth century. In the letter, Dudley wrote, ‘Twenty-five 

years ago I went out to India to teach English. I have come back with a rich reward in 

the following sentence from an Indian schoolboy’s essay on cricket:-- “Cricket is a very 

comfortable game: in it we disremember all our condition”.9 Cricket has since become 

much more constitutive of the Indian life world. The journalist and author Khushwant

Singh wrote in 1973 that the Indian’s obsession with cricket needed to be psychoanalysed, adding that the cricket pitch had become the paradise of millions of Indians.

10

The journalist Soumya Bhattacharya recalled that cricket was a ‘surefire conversational

opener’ during his student years in England in the 1990s. ‘If you’re Indian, you must 

be crazy about cricket’, so went the assumption.

11 Reflecting on the attachment of 

Indians to cricket, Jonathan Rice, author and editor of a number of cricket books, 

unreservedly assumed in 2011 that cricket sat next to god and family for Indians.

12 He 

speculated that the future of this sport, in which 106 countries then participated, would 

be determined by events and decisions made in India.13 The cricket author Gideon 

Haigh invoked the former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s epigram about his country 

– ‘the fat boy in the canoe’ – to describe the global clout of Indian cricket: ‘when it 

moves, everyone must adjust’.