CRICKET AND THE IDEA OF INDIA

‘Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English’, it has famously been said. Today, the Indian cricket team is a powerful national symbol, a unifying force in a country riven by conflicts. But India was represented by a cricket team long before it became an independent nation.

My lecture tells the extraordinary story of how the ‘idea of India’ emerged on the cricket field in the high noon of empire. Conceived by an unlikely coalition of colonial and local elites, it took twelve years and three failed attempts before a representative Indian cricket team made its debut on the playing fields of imperial Britain in 1911.

This historic tour, which took place against the backdrop of revolutionary protest in the Edwardian era, featured an improbable cast of characters. The team’s young captain was Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, the embattled ruler of Patiala. The other cricketers were chosen on the basis of their religious identity. Remarkably, for the day, two of the players belonged to a community denigrated as ‘Untouchable’.

Over the course of a blazing Coronation summer, these long-forgotten Indian heroes participated in a collective enterprise that epitomizes how sport— and above all cricket—helped fashion the imagined communities of both empire and nation.