Cricket, Public Culture and Postcolonial Society in India

Why did cricket become so popular in twentieth-century India? Why have Indians followed cricket in the way they have done? What role have journalists, radio/television commentators, and politicians played in popularizing an ‘imperial’ sport in a postcolonial nation? To what extent has cricket become a site of an embodied history of the nation? Most of all, what made possible this transformation of cricket into a public obsession? This book attempts to answer these questions, offering fascinating insight into the making of cricket as a public culture. Rather than charting cricket’s historical development, it focusses on cricket’s representations and the political and social issues it has generated. In so doing, it explores how cricket has both articulated and shaped specific forms of national consciousness and everyday practices of class, community, gender, and aesthetics.