Breaking down racial barriers? The Maharaja of Patiala’s 1935 Australian cricket tour of India

Abstract

To a great extent, popular representations of Indo–Australian relations have been viewed through the lens of cricket – the national game in both countries. Despite a proliferation of writing on colonial Indian cricket, Australia’s contribution to it has been largely ignored. In October 1935, a team of cricketers embarked on the first Australian tour to the subcontinent.¹ The tour was conceived and financed by the Maharaja of Patiala to assist preparation of an official Indian team to tour Britain in 1936. In this paper, I will draw upon primary sources and interviews to help articulate the complex colonial relationship between the East and the West, whilst locating the ambiguous position of Australia within this. Despite predominantly conforming to the Orientalist view that Westerners considered themselves a superior ‘race’, the Australian cricketers demonstrated an atypical cultural sensitivity to the Orient and the ‘Other’.

Keywords:

• colonial relations
• cricket
• Kipling
• Orientalism
• racism
• Said

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr Keir Reeves for invaluable advice on earlier drafts, to Dr Thomas Fletcher for editorial assistance, to Dr Boria Majumdar for his encouragement and to the anonymous referees for their astute comments. I would additionally like to acknowledge the A.G.L Shaw Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria (2013) and travel funding from the Australia India Council (2007).

Notes

1. This was not a sanctioned tour, however four ‘unofficial’ Tests were played which disallowed the participation of non-indigenous Indians. A further 19 games were played against regional teams.

2. All quotations are verbatim. I have included spelling and grammatical  errors to remain true to the journalism of the day.

3. In 2008, I located two unpublished manuscripts written by Hunter Hendry at the Bradman Museum, Bowral. These were undated and unpaginated. I estimate the first document was written in the late 1970s and the later version was written in the mid-1980s following the publication of A cameo from the past – the life and times of H.S.T.L Hendry by Ronald Caldwell in 1984. Hendry states his motivation to write the second draft was to correct the inaccuracies of Caldwell’s book. Hendry wrote ‘I really disown the book because it is full of errors, statistics and matches which were never mentioned in the 150 pages of foolscap’.

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Megan Ponsford

MEGAN PONSFORD is a PhD candidate at Federation University Australia.