Cricket, Public Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Calcutta

This book expands our historical understanding of postcolonial India by examining how cricket has shaped Indian society and politics.

Souvik Naha (Author)

9781108494588, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 February 2023

302 pages
23.7 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.55 kg

'Souvik Naha's insightful, carefully researched and elegantly written monograph on the public perceptions of cricket in postcolonial Calcutta is a timely and highly welcome addition to both the social and cultural history of modern South Asia as well as to the global history of sport.' Harald Fischer-Tiné, ETH Zurich

What prompts common people to kill a guard and rob an office they thought had some tickets for a Test match? Why does a scholar of medieval Bengali literature remark, 'Had life been a sport, it would be cricket'? Who do journalists vindicate by promoting cricket, the imperial game par excellence, as the lifeforce of the ordinary Indian? This book pursues these threads of the people's uncanny attachment to cricket, seeking to understand the sport's role in the making of a postcolonial society. With a focus on Calcutta, it unpacks the various connotations of international cricket that have produced a postcolonial community and public culture. Cricket, it shows, gave the people a tool to understand and form themselves as a cultural community. More than the outcomes of matches, the beliefs, attitudes and actions the sport generated had an immense bearing on emerging social relationships.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Cricket, syndicated Englishness, and postcoloniality
2. Narratives of cricket and collective history
3. The making of a city of cricket
4. Politicians, patronage, and centre-state relations
5. Spectators, gender, and public space
6. The moral economy of violent 'gentlemen'
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Cricket [WSJC], Society & culture: general [JF], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History [HB]