Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire

"You don’t have to know a lot about cricket, or even be an enthusiast, to enjoy this book. Cricket is the game in India. I was in India a year ago and travelling through Delhi and other towns and every spare patch of ground, every park, was full of kids playing cricket. It’s a multi-millon pound business and the great cricketers are national heroes. Cricket Country is really a story of the beginnings of the Indian game. It’s focused on the first all-Indian cricket tour of Britain in 1911, but it’s not a sports history, it’s really social history. He uses a lot of archival material, and presents a lot of original research, but writes it in a very engaging way. There are quite lot of surprises. It was the Indian elite, the great maharajahs, who financed and put this tour together, but it was a multi-religious Indian team, and even included two so-called ‘untouchables.’ The book looks at the individual players, and how the tour was organized and financed. It has exciting accounts of the matches in England. It really does lift the lid on the surprising and engrossing origins of the Indian game, which has now come to play such a dominant part in Indian cultural and sporting life. Yes, and cricket has been a vehicle in India for upward social mobility. The maharajahs who put the team together, the selectors, were keen that the first Indian team to tour Britain and play cricket against the English sides should be representative. It was called an ‘all Indian tour’ so they had Muslims as well as Hindus and different castes were represented. It was very representative of Indian society in general. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. It’s a great shortlist this year. Part of our best books of 2020 series."