Patrons, Players, and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket

"I mentioned that Docker’s book was very much about the politics of Indian cricket, but quite weak on the sociological and cultural dimensions of the sport, especially its popular dynamics. Cashman’s book is the exact opposite. He focuses on the structures of Indian cricket, especially the sociology and the culture of the game as it evolved in the subcontinent. Cashman looks at patronage and the role of money in the sport, how it works, who encouraged and supported the game in colonial and postcolonial India and their reasons for doing so. When he looks at players, he’s interested in their sociological backgrounds, not their cricketing performances. He provides details on the class and caste profile of Indian cricketers. He examines the nature of cricket crowds and their behaviour. It’s the first proper historical sociology of Indian cricket. At the outset, I said that there were two ways of looking at the history of Indian cricket—from above and from below. Cashman’s book is simultaneously a history from above and below. It allows you to look at all the structural dynamics of Indian cricket. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Cashman was a trained historian. He worked on western India before he came to work on Indian cricket. He has subsequently gone on to write on other aspects of sport, especially sport in Australia. This book really captures the complexity of Indian cricket’s sociology and cultural formation. Its strength is its deep empirical research. He uses all kinds of primary sources. The book can appear slightly dated today, largely because the game has changed beyond recognition over the four decades since it was published, but because of its empirical findings and insights into the sociology of Indian cricket, it remains one of the best books on the subject. A striking feature of Cashman’s book is the subtle way it charts shifts that have happened over time. So, for example, when he’s writing about patronage, he shows how, initially, the princes played a key role but were increasingly supplanted, after 1947, by secular, modern institutions, commercial firms and the public sector. It is these institutions that provided cricketers with a livelihood in post-independence India. He charts how the nature of patronage changes from the feudal to more modern, secular forms. That’s one theme. When he focuses on the social background of players, he emphasizes the intersection of caste and class. Cashman notes the interesting phenomenon that there are very few players from the lowest classes who have played for India, very few from the Dalit communities. It’s a book full of rich and subtle sociological insights. He’s very good on crowds, especially the rituals of the Indian cricket crowd, its distinctive forms of collective behaviour and how it differs from crowds elsewhere. He’s good, too, on the way the game has been imagined and ‘Indianized’. The book also shows how the vocabularies of the game have been ‘Indianized’. It’s a very sophisticated analysis of how cricket has been transformed into an Indian game. Governments get involved in cricket when it comes to the organization of international tours and tournaments. Also, when stadiums have to be built, the government has to get involved in dealing with the issues pertaining to land allocation. And, of course, until the era of liberalization in the early 1990s, cricket commentary was through All India Radio and on TV it was broadcast on the Indian national channel, Doordarshan. But it is hard to discern a substantive and coherent official policy towards cricket. Cricket’s popularity ensured that it would be the dominant sport, but that was not because of official patronage. If we broaden the lens and think of this issue not in terms of government, but in terms of politics and politicians, cricket in India has served as a vehicle for political self-advancement and a source of prestige and power. Prominent politicians have tended to control cricketing associations in the provinces. The Board of Control for Cricket in India has continuously been dominated by politicians. In the early years of the Board, it was the princes who tended to dominate. Now, it’s professional politicians. Politicians have found in cricket rich pickings, both as a conduit to elevated political status and, increasingly over the last twenty years, to substantive monetary resources. That’s why the relationship between cricket and politics is significant."