History of Indian Cricket

"Framjee Patel’s book tells the story of Indian cricket up to 1905. Docker’s book takes the story forward from the 1920s to the 1970s. He commenced work on this book shortly after India had famously secured, in quick succession, overseas victories against the West Indies and England in 1971. My reason for including this book is a personal one. It’s the first proper cricket book that I read and it made a deep impression on me. A History of Indian Cricket starts off with a very arresting account of a match that took place at the Bombay Gymkhana in December 1926. This contest was between Arthur Gilligan’s visiting MCC team and an All India team; interestingly, this was the first time after 1911 that a team representing ‘All India’ took to the field. The book opens with a riveting description of the astonishing innings played in this match by C K Nayudu, who went on to become one of the most popular Indian cricketers in the 1930s. In a little over two hours, Nayudu scored 153 against the visiting Englishmen, an innings studded with astonishing shots that repeatedly sailed over the boundary. If the innings was sensational, Docker’s narrative made it even more so in the imagination of a ten-year old reader. Although I did not understand much of Docker’s text, the description of that Nayudu knock, and its political symbolism, stayed with me for a long time. Docker’s book contains fascinating vignettes and lurid stories. It recounts in rich detail the intrigues and petty politics of Indian cricket. It doesn’t investigate the structural features and social context of the game. But the narrative is very racy. We get a vivid picture of individuals trying to outdo each other; it is a tale dominated by skulduggery, sharp elbows, personal animosities, and backstabbing. The book captures the flavour of the leading cricketing personalities of the time. It shows how, from the outset, Indian cricket was dominated by powerful individuals. In Docker’s account, the history of Indian cricket is essentially the story of these individuals and their changing fortunes. Moreover, this account is very much about India in the international (Test match) arena. Still, the book is based on considerable primary research, especially the use of contemporary newspapers. It’s written in very accessible prose, too, it’s a page-turner. That’s a very good question. I write about this in my book, but one of the reasons that the 1911 cricket team was so quickly forgotten about in subsequent decades is that it was an expression of empire loyalism. After 1918, the relations between India and Britain changed very dramatically. There were two reasons for this. First, imperial Britain disappointed Indian nationalists because it was reluctant to offer substantial concessions to Indian demands for self-representation. Indian nationalists felt that India had made a huge contribution to the war effort and hence their demands for greater representation demanded substantive reforms in the structure of colonial governance. Instead, the colonial authorities in India extended the wartime restrictions on civil liberties, in the form of the infamous ‘Rowlatt Act’. The protest that followed catapulted Mahatma Gandhi on to the stage of all India politics for the first time. In the spring of 1919, Gandhi spearheaded the all India protest movement against the Rowlatt Act. And it was during this protest movement that the notorious Jallianwala Bagh [Amritsar] Massacre took place. After this, there was a significant change in Indo-British relations. By the end of the 1920s, the anti-colonial mood was deeply entrenched. For the generation of ‘moderate’ nationalists before the First World War, it was possible to reconcile patriotism with empire loyalism. Many of them would have been happy to describe themselves as ‘British Indians’. By 1930, most Indian nationalists could no longer reconcile empire and nation as focal points of political loyalty. And, of course, that had consequences on the cricket pitch. Now cricket matches between European teams and Indian teams came to acquire a political edge. By the 1930s, there were overt expressions of anti-colonial nationalist sentiment on the cricket pitch. There was also a growing sense that Indians should embrace indigenous sporting traditions—it was rather like Irish cultural nationalism in this regard. In India, these ideas became significant in the 1890s, especially in Bengal and Maharashtra. There were attempts to revive traditional sports, like folk wrestling, for example. This tradition continued even after independence. But as cricket grew in popularity after 1947, those voices fell on deaf ears. You’d imagine that indigenous sport would get a fillip in independent India—and some did get government support—but cricket continued to be the de facto national sport. Those who wanted to reject cricket were vastly outnumbered by those who embraced it. As far as sports introduced from outside India are concerned, football is very popular in Bengal, the northeastern states, Kerala and Goa. Football has become more popular recently. But hockey was the most popular sport after cricket until the 1980s. Badminton and tennis are both quite popular, although they are both largely played by the middle classes. As for indigenous sports, it has to be wrestling. And then there is kabaddi , which is also popular."