{"id":1373,"date":"2020-02-27T09:02:40","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T14:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/?p=1373"},"modified":"2020-02-27T09:25:29","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T14:25:29","slug":"how-india-came-to-love-cricket-favored-sport-of-its-colonial-british-rulers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/2020\/02\/27\/how-india-came-to-love-cricket-favored-sport-of-its-colonial-british-rulers\/","title":{"rendered":"How India Came to Love Cricket, Favored Sport of its Colonial British Rulers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"US<\/a>
U.S. President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrive for a “Namaste Trump,” event in Ahmedabad, India. (AP Photo\/Alex Brandon)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After emphasizing that \u201cAmerica loves India\u201d during the \u201cNamaste Trump\u201d event, President Donald Trump opened his address with several references to India\u2019s most popular sport, cricket. A crowd of\u00a0more than 100,000<\/a>\u00a0responded with cheers.<\/p>\n

\u201cFive months ago, the United States welcomed your great prime minister at a giant football stadium in Texas,\u201d\u00a0Trump noted<\/a>\u00a0on Feb. 24. \u201cAnd today India welcomes us at the world\u2019s largest cricket stadium in Ahmedabad.\u201d Next, Trump mentioned Indian cricket stars Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli, although he mispronounced the names and was called out by social media users,\u00a0including<\/a>\u00a0the sport\u2019s governing body, the International Cricket Council.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Like many Americans, Trump likely knows little about the history or the significance of cricket in India. As scholars who\u00a0study the social and cultural significance<\/a>\u00a0of sports and\u00a0their globalization<\/a>, we understand how this 18th-century colonial import grew into a revered \u2013 and lucrative \u2013 cultural institution in India.<\/p>\n

A British colonial legacy<\/h2>\n

Originating in England<\/a>, cricket came to India with the East India Company \u2013 an English company formed to develop trade in Asia.<\/p>\n

According to British sailor Clement Downing\u2019s \u201cA History of the Indian Wars<\/a>,\u201d written in 1737, the first cricket match in India was played between sailors like him in 1721 in Khambhat, near India\u2019s western seaboard, only 55 miles from the stadium where Trump gave his speech.<\/p>\n

The introduction of English traditions and sports helped the colonizers affirm their supposed cultural superiority and\u00a0justify their rule<\/a>. Some Indians, however, were actively involved in making the foreign sport their own.<\/p>\n

The Parsis<\/a>, an ethnic minority, who were enterprising traders with close ties to the British, for example, were\u00a0particularly enthusiastic<\/a>\u00a0about the sport. By the mid-1800s, they had formed their own cricket teams.<\/p>\n

Thereafter, English sports began to surpass traditional Indian games in popularity, such as local forms of wrestling. Other pastimes, such as \u201cKabaddi<\/a>\u201d \u2013 a team sport involving chasing and tagging opponents \u2013 started to be organized like English sports in the 1920s with rules, formal competitions and federations.<\/p>\n

However, leading up to India\u2019s independence in 1947, fierce debates raged over this British influence.\u00a0Student protesters<\/a>\u00a0saw the cricket contests between different Indian groups as \u201ca slow poison given to the rising Indian generation and blockading the path to independence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cricket fans, however, continued to\u00a0flock to local contests<\/a>, including the Bombay Pentangular, an annual tournament between teams consisting of Europeans, Parsis, Hindus, Muslims and other minority faiths.<\/p>\n

From colonialism to commerce<\/h2>\n

A major stepping stone in cricket\u2019s rise to a national sport was\u00a0India\u2019s 1971 triumph in England<\/a>. The Indian cricket team defeated the former colonizers at their own game, on their own turf.<\/p>\n

Then again, in 1983, India\u00a0won the cricket World Cup<\/a>\u00a0at\u00a0Lord\u2019s Cricket Ground<\/a>\u00a0in London \u2013 the original\u00a0home of the sport<\/a>, once\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0the \u201ccathedral of cricket.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to its success in international competition, India has also turned cricket into a multi-billion-dollar\u00a0industry<\/a>. The\u00a0Indian Premier League<\/a>, inaugurated in 2008, features a fast-paced variety of cricket known as Twenty20. As opposed to traditional \u201ctest matches\u201d between national teams that last up to five days, Twenty20 matches are typically completed in three hours and encourage aggressive, offensive play.<\/p>\n

David Richardson, the chief executive officer of the International Cricket Council, said in March 2019 that the Indian Premier League\u00a0had helped locate<\/a> India at the center of the cricketing world.<\/p>\n

When President Trump delivered his remarks at the new stadium, located in Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s home state of Gujarat, the venue served as more than just a convenient space to accommodate a large crowd. It symbolized the evolution of a sport with a political history. Or, as historian\u00a0Boria Majumdar<\/a>\u00a0notes, a sport that is like \u201creligion at home<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lars Dzikus<\/a> and Adam Love<\/a> are associate professors in the Department of Kinesiology, Recreation, and Sport Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They recently authored a chapter on the globalization of U.S. sport in the book, <\/strong><\/em>Teaching U.S. History through Sports<\/a> (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\"The<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After emphasizing that \u201cAmerica loves India\u201d during the \u201cNamaste Trump\u201d event, President Donald Trump opened his address with several references to India\u2019s most popular sport, cricket. A crowd of\u00a0more than 100,000\u00a0responded with cheers. \u201cFive months ago, the United States welcomed your great prime minister at a giant football stadium in Texas,\u201d\u00a0Trump noted\u00a0on Feb. 24. \u201cAnd […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2075,"featured_media":1374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[285],"tags":[226,36391,95,126591],"class_list":["post-1373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-raceethnicity","tag-colonialism","tag-donald-trump","tag-india","tag-narendra-modi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/files\/2020\/02\/Cricket-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1753&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8iFlL-m9","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2075"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1373"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1377,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions\/1377"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}