According to Ashis Nandy, an Indian political psychologist, “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British”. In a 2018 survey, the International Cricket Council (ICC) said as much, estimating that more than 90% of the world’s one billion cricket fans live on the Indian subcontinent.
The first appearance of cricket in India dates back to 1721 with a match between English sailors in the port of Cambay, or perhaps further south, at Tankari Bandar, on the soggy banks of the River Vishwamitri, where the currents would have forced one of Her Gracious Majesty’s ships to wait a fortnight for the tide to rise. Regardless of the exact location, the consensus is that to kill time, the crew played cricket under the eyes of intrigued and attentive locals. “I read about it in the paper, and my father and grandfather told me about it. As a child, I knew that the British had played cricket down by the river in 1721. Cricket was born in Tankari Bandar,” says village chief Ranjit Sikh with aplomb.
Although it seems that the British had no intention of teaching the laws of the subtle game to the natives, during the 19th century cricket was played only by the Indian elite, anxious to curry favour with the colonisers. This patrician adoption of the game helped it to spread throughout the country, as well as raising its profile. By the end of the 19th century, the sport’s status as the preserve of the upper classes was fading as players from lower castes and disadvantaged communities began to play and make their mark.
One such player was Palwankar Baloo, a Dalit from the Chamaar caste of tanners, at the bottom of the Hindu social hierarchy. He was the first star of Indian cricket, and is now considered a legend – but throughout his career, which began in 1896, he was never seen as an equal and faced a great deal of discrimination. For example, at the Pune ground where he made his debut, at tea time he was brought his beverage in a disposable cup, which he could not drink with the other players in the pavilion. His lunch was served at a separate table. If he wanted to wash his face, a lower-caste assistant would bring him water from the side. At the end of his career, he became close to Dr Ambedkar, the main drafter of the Constitution and revered leader of the untouchables. Portraits of the latter hang on the walls of SG (Sanspareils Greenlands), a giant cricket goods manufacturer in the town of Meerut. The workers, most of whom are from the lower classes, are a reminder that cricket and social aspiration are hardly strangers to each other.
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Workers sew gloves in the factory of Sanspareils Greenlands (SG), which is India’s largest manufacturer and exporter of cricket equipment. With 3,000 employees, SG is based in Meerut, a town in Uttar Pradesh, nicknamed the city of sport because more than 3,000 equipment manufacturers of all sizes are based there.
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A worker checks the cork spheres that are the heart of cricket balls. Dense and elastic, cork ensures the best possible combination of bounce and durability, two essential qualities of cricket balls; The famous red cricket balls, reserved for international Test matches and first-class matches, that are used in India are produced exclusively by SG.
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A worker assembles the different parts of the handle of a cricket bat, made up of sections of cane wood sawn lengthways and then glued back together; Cork and/or rubber are glued between the different slices to absorb the shock of the bats, workers polish cricket bats with sand paper, the final touch in the manufacturing process (above); Workers affix the brand’s SG stickers to the body of finished bats before they are packed for shipment to Mumbai, throughout India and abroad (below).
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In New Ahmedabad Sports, Mumbai’s most renowned sports and cricket supply shop with over 85 years’ experience, two brothers are examining bats. The prices of bats start at INR 5,000 (£47) and can go up to INR 200,000 (£1,897), depending on the quality of the wood and the style.
But show cricket is not just for the elite. From its very beginnings in Mumbai (then Bombay), it was popular. Huge crowds turned out to see the first Parsi and Hindu teams take on their so-called colonial ‘masters,’ and each other. This reflected the time and place: the rapid growth of Bombay’s textile factories gave rise to a new class of organised workers with a minimum of free time and money. Perhaps it also reflects the hierarchical nature of traditional Indian society …
Over time, cricket infused the fabric of India’s cultural mosaic, to the point of escaping the British Empire by becoming a tool in the struggle against colonial domination. The pitch was both a theatre of imperial power and a showcase for Indian resistance. In the context of ‘peaceful’ decolonisation, cricket became the symbolic arena for independence aspirations, with matches organised against the occupying power serving to stir up a feeling of unity. In 1947, when independence was proclaimed, some Anglophobic nationalists called for the disappearance of the game in the wake of the departure of its promoters. The British did indeed leave, but cricket remained firmly rooted.
In the early days, a cricket match was played for an unlimited time, then for five days until the 1970s. In 1975, the first one-day World Cup was held in England. In 1983, India’s victory triggered an explosion of fervour across the sub-continent that has never abated since.
In the early 2000s, England and Wales introduced a new form of match, shorter and more rhythmic, to match the duration of other team sports such as football: Twenty20 (T20), which lasts around three hours. Thanks to this new format, global cricket enjoyed a fantastic boom. Riding the T20 wave, the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI), cricket’s governing body, invented the Indian Premier League in 2008, creating eight teams in the form of franchises sold to the highest bidder. Since then, 10 teams based in major cities have been vying for the title.
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A group of players warming up at the Vasoo Paranjape Cricket Academy, where they train for an hour and a half from Monday to Friday. There are many academies in Mumbai, run by local coaches and also by many former players, but those with their own grounds and adequate facilities are in the minority; the others are all set up on the maidans.
And so, in an irony of history and a keen sense of business, a sport that was once the exclusive preserve of the colonial elite is now the national passion of the formerly colonised, enabling India to become the world’s superpower, with two world titles to its name in 1983 and 2011. It is a passion, an obsession even, that has its roots in a desire for cohesion. “In India, there are different sects, different communities, different language barriers. But cricket is a game that unites everyone to a certain extent, when it is played together,” explains P S Chari, director of the theatre in Vadodara, a town in Gujarat.
The geographical origins of Indian cricket lie in the once vast expanse of green land at the southern tip of Mumbai. All that remains of the area, which was once ready for use to fire cannons at the French if they attacked Bombay during the colonial race, are a few maidans – open spaces used as parade grounds or for events – surrounded by urban development. On a daily basis, these pitches are the breeding ground for the talents of tomorrow.
“The fact that many of India’s great cricketers come from Mumbai is due to the tradition of passing on the baton between us, the old players, and the new generation that we support. It is common to see coaches on the training grounds and in the academies teaching their technique, giving advice, revealing their secrets and sharing their experience with the youngsters,” says the coach Ramesh Vazge, who officiates on the New Hind at Gymkhana Matunga. A sacred den, a maidan is entered with devotion. Before they reach adulthood, most players bow to touch the pitch as a sign of respect after passing through the gate. “In India, cricket is a veritable religion. One person in two plays. In this country, it’s more than just a sport,” laughs Khanjan, a young player.
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Batters practice at 8am at Cross Maidan in the historic Churchgate district of south Mumbai, protected by nets set up at dawn by paid employees who sleep there. When entering the maidan, players usually touch the ground as a sign of respect. This gesture is practised systematically by young players, and takes on less visible forms as the players become adults. A young player perfects his batting technique under the watchful eye of his personal coach, at Cross Maidan.
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A player shouts encouragement to his team, batting during a match in the MI Junior inter-school tournament on Azad Maidan in Mumbai. The aim of MI Junior is to enable budding cricketers (boys and girls) from schools in Mumbai and other cities in Maharashtra to discover and experience competitive cricket. Azad Maidan is a triangular-shaped sports ground that regularly hosts inter-school cricket matches, and hosted the first cricket Test match in India’s history on 15 December 1933. Temporary stands were erected to accommodate a record crowd of 50,000, with tickets selling for five times the usual price.
Cricket is the only sport born in the west whose centre has moved to the Indian subcontinent. This made the home defeat to Australia in the World Cup final on 19 November 2023, watched by more than 300 million people, all the more bitter. Fair play to India’s true fans, who recognise that the performance of the “Men in Blue” (the nickname of the national team) was not up to the standard they had set themselves.
The defeat deprived one spectator of a moment of hubris: the prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose party, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), uses the sport “as a vehicle for muscular nationalism”, according to Sharda Ugra, a journalist with ESPNcricinfo. “Control is exercised not only through senior officials linked to the ruling party, but also through the use of Indian cricket to spread their political message,” she explains. While Modi’s government is not the first to use the sport for political purposes, his populist party has forged closer links with the governing body.
Beyond the national horizon, the Olympic Games. In October 2023, at a meeting in Mumbai, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) approved the inclusion of cricket in the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. The organisers proposed a six-team event, but no decision was made on the final number or qualification arrangements. In fact, it’s not so much the competition itself that counts, as the hope of helping the Games reach the three-billion viewer mark. “People don’t really watch the Olympics in South Asia. They know Usain Bolt and that’s it,” says Yash, a 22-year-old player at England’s famous Slough Cricket Club, who lived in India until he was 18. “Only well-to-do families watch them, not villagers. But now that cricket has taken off, 100% of people will start watching them.”
The love of the game has already digested the hangover from the lost final. Enthusiasts, children, teenagers and adults turn up at the crack of dawn on the maidans, on Juhu beach and in the parks, tirelessly re-enacting what Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “the indigenisation of cricket”, and recounting how this sport, a vehicle for the great Victorian values such as loyalty, fair play and self-control, ended up being totally reappropriated culturally, becoming the herald of Indian values.
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Oval Maidan is a large, popular recreation ground in the Churchgate district of South Mumbai where political gatherings and religious functions are prohibited and informal cricket matches are organised by groups of friends.