Sport in South Asian Society

Past and Present

Boria Majumdar, J A Mangan, Boria Majumdar, J A Mangan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317998938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

A detailed study of sports' arrival, spread and advance in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. A selection of articles addresses critical issues of nationalism, communalism, commercialism and gender through the lens of sport.

This book makes the point that the social histories of South Asian sport cannot be understood by simply looking at the history of the game in one province or region. Furthermore, it demonstrates that it would be wrong to understand sport in terms of the exigencies of the colonial state.

Drawing inspiration from C.L.R. James' well-known epigram, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' the findings suggest that South Asian sport makes sense only when it is placed within the broader colonial and post-colonial context. The book demonstrates that sport not only influences politics and vice versa, but that the two are inseparable. Sport is not only political, it is politics, intrigue, culture and art. To deny this is to denigrate the position of sport in modern South Asian society.

This volume was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

Raj and Post Raj Identities: Sport & South Asia

The Early Cricketing Tours: Imperial Provenance and Radical Potential

PROJIT B. MUKHARJI

Travelling across the country as a British medical officer, as a member of the forces that were to quell the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857, Dr James Wise mentions a cricket match played in Bithoor, the seat of Maratha power during the war, the very next day after the stronghold fell to the British forces. Though succinct and candid, the mention of the match between ‘Lancers’ and the ‘Artillery’ on 16 December 1857, right in the middle of the war and at a time when the British Imperial confidence was arguably at its lowest ebb, in a factual journal that is mostly a laundry list of military engagements; underlines perhaps the centrality of cricket in the Anglo-Indian consciousness. It also points perhaps to the implication of cricket in the imperial project. It served as a metaphor for the distance that separated British India from the native population. In fact, the history of British military teams playing cricket after signal military victories is a long one.¹ As early as 1721, some 36 years before Plassey, we find Downing writing in his Compendious History of the Indian Wars: ‘When my boat was lying somewhere in gulf of Cenley, though the country was inhabited by the Cooleys, in everyday we diverted ourselves in playing cricket and other Exercises, which they would come and be spectators of.’ Even more prominently perhaps, a cricket match is mentioned as having been played between two Army teams in 1799 in Seringapatnam, days after the defeat of Sultan Tipu there. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Revd James Pycroft informs us that ‘Our soldiers, by order of the Horse Guards (the War Office) are provided with cricket grounds adjoining their barracks…. Hence its has come to pass that, wherever Her Majesty's servants have “carried their victorious arms” and legs — wind and weather permitting — cricket has been played.’²

I

Nearly half a century later, another imperial mission calls on cricket. Once again, it is clearly implicated in the imperial project. The cricket tour of the Oxford Authentics, to commemorate the Coronation Durbar, clearly deployed cricket in the economy of imperial identity politics in the ‘contact zone’.³ This was the third full tour by an English cricket team after G.F. Vernon's in 1889/90 and Lord Hawke's in 1892. Cecil Headlam, a member of the touring party and the author of the book that textualized the encounter, seems acutely aware of the implication of cricket in the imperial project, for we find him writing: ‘First the hunter, the missionary, and the merchant, next the soldier, and then the politician, and then the cricketer — that is the history of British colonization.’⁴ Yet the point that I seek to make, or at least insinuate, in the absence of further research is that, as both a genre as well as an ideology of the ‘contact zone’, cricket is not a static institution, but much rather a site for complex negotiations of selfhood.

I hope to be able to depict cricket as an ideology that is constantly reworked within the imperial imaginary. Further I would attempt to argue that cricket helps us see the shifting contours of the imperial project itself in ways quite distinct from the view that emerges from studies of politics, economics and even textual culture for that matter.

There are three distinct trajectories that I shall try to sketch in the cricketing encounters at the head of the twentieth century. First, I shall propose that cricket served not only as a site where the mirror-dance of the colonial politics of selfhood played out but also often as an instigation to critique the dominant tropes of imperial social organization. Second, despite its overwhelmingly masculinized context, cricket renegotiated novel ways of imagining gender politics, which were not always symmetrical with imperial imperatives. Finally, I would argue that unlike its usual depictions, cricket was from pretty early on in its career not as exclusively elite a preoccupation as it is believed to have been.

By 1875, Henry S. Maine's influential book⁵ on India had established the Indians as sharing a common ‘Aryan’ past with the British/ Europeans; but whereas Europe had evolved along the path of progress, Indians, owing to their intermarrying with the non-Aryan indigenes, had fallen away into a fossilized anachronism. Under Curzon, this trope of Indians being the fallen cousins reached its administrative zenith. Curzon's obsession with the preservation of Indian archaeological treasures, along with his disdainful treatment of contemporary India, were two sides of the same coin. The contradiction that this entailed — i.e. the possibility of the ruler and ruled being alike and yet not quite — marks the discourse on cricket as well.

Narrating the match against the Aligarh Muslim University, Headlam writes that ‘cricket and purdah ladies, education and Mohammedanism — do not these suggest somehow that eternal contrast and communion between East and West which is the very flavour of modern India?’⁶ The attempt to transform the East into the mirror image of the West was to admit, at least in theory, the potential of transformation, and thus a latent similarity. Yet the project of imperialism was premised on the denial of this possibility. Cricket embodies, at the turn of the last century, both this hope as well as this denial. Thus Headlam, building further on his metonymic depiction of the story of British colonization, iterates: ‘The hunter may exterminate deserving species, the missionary may cause quarrels, the soldier may hector, the politician blunder — but cricket unites, as in India, the ruler and the ruled.’ Though the union of ruler and the ruled may be possible in theory, it is always bound to remain a deferred union.

After losing two of their first three matches played in Bombay, the Oxford Authentics put their defeat down to travel fatigue rather than to the superior performance of the Parsees and the Bombay Presidency teams — despite the fact that both these teams were comprised of amateurs, none of whom were professional cricketers, whereas the Authentics had quite a few professionals on their roster. It is also noteworthy in this context that the Parsees had defeated the English teams of both Vernon and Hawke that had toured before the Authentics. Later, when the match against Aligarh was drawn, though one meets with praise for the occasional individual performances, the inferiority of native cricket is taken for granted. Not once does Headlam feel it important to take note of the organizational differences that allowed the British cricketers to play far more cricket and to devote far more time to their cricketing activities than their Indian competitors. Not once is it mentioned that unlike the county teams in England, India lacked any national tournament till as late as 1934, when the Ranji Trophy was instituted. In fact, at the time when the Authentics toured, even the Bombay Pentangular, that proud progenitor of the Ranji Trophy, was also a distant dream⁷ and the only formal annual fixture was the Parsees playing the Bombay Presidency; as we know, even with this limited exposure to formal cricket both these teams defeated the Authentics. It is as if Indian cricket was almost tautologically supposed to be notch below British cricket. Even the Parsees, who had in point of fact defeated the tourists comprehensively, are compared only to the lower echelons of the ‘second division’ in England. This despite the fact that Lord Hawke in 1894 had cancelled a proposed second tour of India, believing that the team he could muster was not strong enough for the Indian teams, and hence went to the West Indies! It is this very matrix of imperial ideology that I am trying to underline, which instigates the reading of real incidents in a particular way rather than other different and equally or perhaps even more strongly justified ways of reading them.

Yet my point is not to underline the tropology of imperial identities that fashioned the discourse on cricket, but rather to outline the ways in which, despite its implication in the imperial project, cricket succeeded in launching a critique of imperial social organization. Right at the very outset, in identifying the Authentics, Headlam writes:

Some twenty years ago, not for the first or the last time, the honour of representing the Varsity on the cricket-field fell into the hands of a clique. Just as literary men in London run, like baby-linen, in sets, so at the Varsity it was not enough to be a good cricketer to be given a trial for your Blue. It was necessary to belong to a certain set or to have been at a certain public school. The result was an inferior eleven and repeated disasters at Lord's. Now in those days there came on a visit to Oxford one Everard Britten Holmes, an enthusiast for cricket. And he being much struck by the number of good cricketers who were never tried in the Parks, jestingly undertook to get together an ‘Authentic’ Oxford team, which should beat the side chosen to give battle to Cambridge.

From that jest sprang the Club of Oxford Un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Fall and Rise of Indian Sports History
• Prologue: Stepping Stones Across a Stream
• Raj and Post Raj Identities: Sport & South Asia
• Narrative Histories: Sport in Colonial and Post Colonial South Asia
• Marginal Voices: Women's Sport in Colonial and Post Colonial South Asia
• Lagaan — Undertones and Overtones: South Asian Sport, Culture, Society
• Cementing Ties: Sport in South Asian Diplomacy
• Cross Cutting Identities: Sport and the South Asian Diaspora
• Index