A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport

"If I had to rank the books in this list by sheer quality, this book would be number one. Guha trained as a historical sociologist. He has had a very prominent career as a professional historian. Notably, he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian cricket and its history. If one were looking for an overview of the entire history of Indian cricket from its very beginnings to the present, this is the book. In a sense, you could say that Guha’s approach is a synthesis of Docker and Cashman. He is very keenly attuned to the politics of the sport. The book shows how politics and cricket repeatedly intersected in colonial and postcolonial India. But it is equally attentive to the sociology of Indian cricket. It strikes a very nice balance between these two aspects. It’s also organized in a thematic way. Guha shows how, from the very outset, cricket in the subcontinent was shaped by the fissures and fractures of the wider society. Race, caste, religion and nation are the principal themes that run through the book. You get a real sense of how cricket became Indianized, how it became politicized, and how it became this extraordinarily popular sport. It’s narrated in a very readable and subtle way. In my view, the most fascinating and pioneering part of the book is the story of Palwankar Baloo, the great Dalit bowler, who was unquestionably India’s first great cricketer (Ranji does not count as he saw himself as an ‘English’ cricketer). I would say that the British approach was something of a mixed bag. They did attempt to make cricket an important part of the educational curriculum. That was particularly true of the educational institutions that they ran for Indian princes, whom they wanted to train to play a role similar to the English gentry/aristocracy—a ruling class. It was assumed that if you played cricket you would be a good leader and that you would be imbued with the right values. For instance, Ranji went to one of these—Rajkumar College—before he went to Cambridge. “Guha shows how, from the very outset, cricket in the subcontinent was shaped by the fissures and fractures of the wider society” You also had English headmasters and teachers who came out to India. The Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh was a classic example of this and it figures prominently in my book because all the Muslim cricketers in the 1911 Indian team had been to that institution. Theodore Beck, its Cambridge-educated headmaster, made cricket a key part of the Aligarh curriculum. Equally, British officials interested in cricket could, by virtue of their public office, promote the game. Lord Harris, when he was Governor of Bombay between 1890 and 1895, made cricket a key part of his official responsibilities, about which he was quite proud. Many Oxbridge graduates who came out to India, either in political roles or as part of the civil service, were keen cricketers. Cricket was part of the official culture, but British officials they did not always promote it in an overt way. In fact, as I show in my book, at the outset in Bombay, when the English first took on the Parsis, there was a lot of ambivalence about the Parsis taking up the game. It was almost as if these ‘mimic men’ playing cricket was vaguely threatening."