Tag: social science

 The early history of Indian first class cricket, teams were not organised on geographical principles and it was not till 1932 that a national team was given the right to represent India in a Test match. Cricket in colonial India was organised on the principle of race and religion. 

 When the West Indies won its first Test series against England in 1950, it was celebrated as a national achievement, as a way of demonstrating that West Indians were the equals of white Englishmen. 

Len Hutton was an English Test cricketer, who played for Yorkshire County Cricket Club and England in the years around the Second World War as an opening batsman. He was described by Wisden Cricketer's Almanack as one of the greatest batsmen in the history of cricket.  It was not till the 1930s that the English Test team was led by a professional, the Yorkshire batsman, Len Hutton.

While British imperial officials brought the game to the colonies, they made little effort to spread the game, especially in colonial territories where the subjects of empire were mainly non-white, such as India and the West Indies. The Afro-Caribbean population was discouraged from participating in organised club cricket, which remained dominated by white plantation owners and their servants. 

The first record we have of cricket being played in India is from 1721, an account of recreational cricket played by English sailors in Cambay.  The first Indian club, the Calcutta Cricket Club, was established in 1792. Through the eighteenth century, cricket in India was almost wholly a sport played by British military men and civil servants in all-white clubs and gymkhanas. 

 The first Indian community to start playing the game was the small community of Zoroastrians, the Parsis. They came in close contact with the British because of their interest in trade. Also, Parsis were the first ones to westernise themselves. The Parsis founded the first Indian cricket club, the Oriental Cricket Club in Bombay in 1848.

 In these colonies, cricket was established as a popular sport either by white settlers (as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies and Kenya) or by local elites who wanted to copy the habits of their colonial masters, as in India.

Having been played by the gardeners of rich aristocratic families at the end of the 19th century - at which time Vienna Cricket and Football Club was founded, cricket disappeared in Austria until after the Second World War, when it was played by British occupying troops on a recreational basis.

India entered the world of Test cricket in 1932, a decade and a half before it became an independent nation. This was possible because Test cricket from its origins in 1877 was organised as a contest between different parts of the British empire, not sovereign nations.