History of Indian cricket - Part I

The cultivation of masculine strength by participating
in indigenous sports like wrestling and body-building soon came to be
regarded as insufficient to counter the politics of the colonial
state. Drawing upon the political controversies of the 1880s it is
clear that the charge of effeteness levelled against the Indian male
remained rampant well into the late 19th century.39

It was precisely this failure to secure acceptance in European eyes
that led the patrons of sport, who had hitherto taken the lead in
acquiring physical prowess, to shift their focus to European sports
like cricket and football. The importance of European sports in the
closing decades of the 19th century is also evident from the numerous
advertisements published in the newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s.40
Marketing and promotional strategies were made full use of
demonstrating the element of competitiveness among the various
concerns.41 Indian enterprise in this field may be dated back to 1895
with Saradaranjan Ray establishing ‘S Ray and Co’.

This turn to ‘European sport’ came at a very difficult moment in the
post-mutiny period when Indian military initiatives were crushed and
most of the wars of annexation had been won by the Raj, which was more
secure than ever in its paramountcy. This was no time for the disarmed
and defeated subject population to flaunt its armed strength. It was a
time to propagate ‘charitrabal’ (strength of character) rather than
‘bahubal’ (physical might). The Indians, barred from staging violent
demonstrations or other acts that would physically challenge British
superiority naturally looked upon ‘leisure’ pursuits with new eyes.
This factor clearly distinguishes Indian sports from their English
counterparts. Colonialism and the realities of being a subject
population were the conditions that made possible the origins of
Indian cricket and informed its development and evolution

....'By the 1890s it was felt that mastery in the manly (manly by
European standards) sports could be an effective reply to colonial
exploitation. This veiled political motive lay at the root of the
flourishing of Indian cricket in the late 19th century. It was
believed that a display of talent in English games like cricket would
infuse in the Indians a sense of pride and purpose, helping in
articulating the desperation in the Indian soul.

Even children imbibed this feeling of superiority that came from
victory in competitions against the coloniser. A passage from the
contemporary Bengali journal Sakha is redolent with these sentiments:
The editor recalls a conversation he had one evening with a ‘young
friend’ who reported with glee that he had successfully beaten the
‘sahib’ in a game of ‘bat-ball’:

“I wondered”, he writes, “what is so great about defeating the sahibs?
Boys of all nations indulge in play. So what is it that has marked out
English boys as superior to their young counterparts especially the
Bengalis?”

“The answer lies in the fact that while the sahibs play these manly
games almost regularly, Bengalis are averse to any form of physical
exhaustion. Since the sahibs practice athletics, cricket, etc, their
bodies are strong and they acquire skills which cannot be matched by
the natives. Manly sports are therefore an exclusive English preserve.
It is precisely the act of having defeated the overlord on his own
ground that filled his young friend with such glee.”43

From this account it is evident that the act of defeating the sahibs
at their own game was considered no mean achievement, and had already
filtered down to the Bengalis by the mid-1880s.

While cricket in Bombay was organised along communal lines, Bengal
cricket was never organised on such lines, a fact ignored in existing
historiography. Existing studies ignore cricketing traditions in
Indian provinces other than Bombay, a fact that leads them to argue
that “in the mid-19th century, membership in religious communities
became the salient principle around which Indians banded together to
play cricket”. Such organisation was integral to Bombay cricket but
cricket in other parts of the country were organised on entirely
different lines.