With or without cricket? The two lives of the English game in a decolonizing India

Abstract

This article explores the contradictory responses to cricket in India from the perspective of transcultural encounters. Football and hockey lost their foreign character by the time of India’s independence in the mid-twentieth century, but cricket was not indigenized the same way and retained its Englishness. As a result, it was often considered as inimical to nation-building in the age of decolonization, leading to periodic calls for its boycott. Although cricket grew in popularity and gradually emerged as India’s favourite sport, its English origin and discourses are still criticized in the mass media and public sphere. The historiography of cricket in India has analysed the proliferation of cricket in India as an accomplishment of the state, corporate and private patronage networks, and the ‘games ethic’ as cultivated by cross-cultural interactions. It has focused on the diffusion and resistance models but has overlooked the complex entanglements of the bridges of transfer, the conflicts in the ideational space mediated by agents of transfer, and the hypertexts of transferred culture across social strata. This article offers a corrective to this methodological problem by analyzing the dilemma of cricket’s appropriation in the light of the ambiguities of cultural transfer. By linking the debates about cricket’s legitimacy as an Indian sport to the operations of political ideologies, it maps the history of cultural transfers in a postcolonial setting.

Notes

1. In a book that came out nearly half a century after Basu’s, Ferguson (2004, 14) mentions ‘the English language’, ‘team sports’, and ‘representative assemblies’ as three of the eight cornerstones of the British Empire.

2. Gangopadhyay (1969, 227–228) asked in his column why should hockey be India’s national sport instead of football or cricket? Why does the public’s concern with cricket’s Englishness not extend to hockey?

3. Ghosh (1992, 27) found out during his fieldwork in a remote Egyptian village that at least one village elder loathed football. Abu-Ali would scream in anger from time to time, ‘Isn’t there work to do? Allah! Is the world going to live on soccer? What’s going to become of …’.