Cricket Country by Prashant Kidambi
This is a
deserving companion volume to Guha’s book (A Corner of a Foreign Field). These
two books supposedly on Cricket, are much more than that. They recount the
interesting History and Sociology of the period they cover. Guha’s book has a
wider sweep, in that it covers the entire period of India’s freedom struggle.
The reader gets the impression that but for Cricket, India would not have
gained independence. There is no trickery in engendering this impression. It is
the power of narration, finding those intimate connections between the defining
events of the freedom struggle, and the development of the game in India.
Kidambi’s focus is at once narrower, and also wider. It is narrow, as it
concerns the first ‘official’ tour of an all-India team to Britain and ends
about the year 1912. It is wider as this tour is brilliantly described in the
context of the socio-political developments in the Britain of that period. The
year of the tour, 1911 was a landmark by many standards. It is the sixtieth
anniversary of ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’
(Kohinoor, Dalrymple and Anand), the first of a series of similar exhibitions
of the Victorian age. 1911 was host to another such exhibition. It was also the
year of the massive general strike. A team of wrestlers (the pioneers of
freestyle wrestling) from India was also visiting. Forces that precipitated the
Great War were in full flow, and in hindsight, it is incredible that a cricket
team from India should play a series of matches in England, Scotland, Wales and
Ireland- and this in the midst of the agitation for the Irish home rule, the
birth of the Labour Party, the showdown with the House of Lords and so on. The
extensive Notes and Citations provided are a delight in themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment