Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket (review)

Cricket is India’s de facto national game, if not its only secular religion of late. Indians, it is often suggested, like talking, reading, and writing on cricket. Indians love to watch their national cricket team play and worship their cricketing icons. They also invest safely in the “cricket industry.” Thanks to such preeminence of cricket in Indian life, books on Indian cricket are being published at a rapid pace. Boria Majumdar’s Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket is the most significant recent addition to this rich corpus of cricket writing. The work, commissioned by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), is a fruit of eclectic doctoral research, at once original and illuminating. It hits home a variety of themes, related and unrelated, uniquely illustrating a blend of conceptual, empirical, and analytical subtleties, which makes it a fascinating read. Invaluable for future sports historians and an asset to cricket aficionados, persons uninterested in sport as such but interested in broader themes of South Asian history also will find the book interesting as it outlines the processes by which phenomena such as colonialism, nationalism, communalism, regionalism, commercialism, and globalization are articulated through cricket in India. Unlike earlier attempts, it “aims to show how south Asian history and society have transformed cricket in the region while the game has simultaneously shaped the history and society of India, both before and after 1947” (16). More important, the work makes an invaluable contribution at a crucial juncture of the game’s history in a global context. To reproduce the author’s remark, “Cricket is the only realm where Indians can flex their muscle; it is India’s only crack at world domination” (2). (Re)reading the “lost” histories of the Indian game against the broader cultural life of the nation, Majumdar claims to introduce into the study of Indian history “the whole question of the relationship between leisure and national identity, one that continues to animate Indian society to this day” (15).

The first two sections of the book, where the author charts the diverse trajectories of the evolution of cricket in colonial India, reflect an exercise in authoritative academic rigor. In the first part, he unmasks the complex reasons behind princely investment in cricket. These included, apart from the usual explanation of princely quest for social mobility, a variety of factors like peer rivalries (as between the maharaja of Cooch Behar and the maharaja of Natore), self-aggrandizement (Ranji), or regional ascendancy (between Bengal and Mumbai). Contrary to the dominant argument that posits the historical irreconcilability of the princes and the educated middle classes, he thus comes to an unorthodox conclusion that the maharajas often joined hands with the nationalists, if only to fulfill personal ambitions. The other two chapters of part 1 trace the evolution in the nature of Indian cricket from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. While cricket was primarily an upper-class/caste preserve until the 1880s, the underprivileged and lower castes began to make their mark as well from the late nineteenth century. The Indian cricket pitch, which remained a more or less representative playing field until independence, however, contrary to common expectations, became largely a preserve of the social elite in postcolonial India. The ice of this restrictive preserve was broken to pieces overnight when India won the Prudential Cup on 25 June 1983. The victory not only fired the imagination of the masses, who henceforth began to perceive cricketers as national icons, but transformed Indian cricket from an elite indulgence into a lucrative career option. Majumdar of course gives the BCCI its much-deserved credit in this evolution of postcolonial Indian cricket into a meritocracy of sorts...