2009
It is Our Turn
Eighty eight years after India first participated at the Olympic Games in Antwerp in 1920, shooting prodigy Abhinav Bindra finally found the Holy Grail in the 2008 Beijing Games. As the Indian tricolour was hoisted in Beijing, the poise and pride on the bespectacled shooter’s visage spoke to a billion Indians, becoming a leit motif […..]
Eye on India
The BBC’s John Simpson once wrote deprecatingly about the worst kept secret in foreign reporting: the propensity of some overseas correspondents to read the local newspapers and then to pass off the second-hand news as their own to unsuspecting editors back home. The omnipotent tentacles of the internet have put paid to such lazy luxuries. […..]
Batting for the flag: cricket, television and globalization in India
Abstract Much of the existing literature on Indian cricket identifies the game’s inherently political dimension and attributes the pre-eminence of cricket in the Indian imagination to a set of complex and contradictory processes that parallel the emergence of an ‘Indian’ nation. Yet until the early 1980s, while cricket was popular, hockey was the ‘national game’ […..]
Bombay Sport Exchange: cricket, globalization and the future
Abstract Cricket’s imperial lineage continues to define its meaning in parts of the erstwhile British Empire. Simultaneously, the game is now a metaphor for the forces of globalization and a vehicle for asserting new post-colonial identities. The creation of the lucrative Indian Premier League and India’s rise as the financial epicentre of the game is […..]
Washed out
It is official. Initial reports indicate that IPL 2 is not as hot as the first edition. The television rating meters have spoken and the first day ratings are down by nearly 30 per cent from last year. Now, television ratings are the fuzziest of categories, but in an industry which lives and dies by […..]
Cricket and modernity: international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of the Imperial Game
Abstract This introductory essay seeks to contextualize the contributions in this journal special issue on cricket by comparing and contrasting cricket with other sports. Though not wishing to portray cricket in essentialist terms, or as temporally fixed or uncontested, the essay suggests that cricket has certain peculiar features which are not only celebrated by cricket […..]
Cricket can’t exist in la-la land
Lord Harris, governor general of colonial Bombay (1890-1895) and co-founder of what was then the Imperial Cricket Council, captured for posterity the centrality of cricket in the British Empire when he declared that to play “cricket is more remote than anything sordid, anything dishonourable than any game in the world. To play it… is a […..]
