“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” Ever since CLR James wrote these lines in Beyond a Boundary (1963) cricket has come to be understood as a sophisticated cultural lens to view the sociological development of colonial and post-colonial societies. Presaging the rise of modern Sport History and Sociology, Beyond a Boundary stressed on how cricket either helped to form or supplemented social practices based on intersecting lines of colour and class which, in the Caribbean, produced an infinitely graded and persistent social hierarchy. It initiated the study of sport as a relational idiom (to borrow Ramachandra Guha’s phrase), as a magnifying glass amplifying the values, symbols, fissures and tensions of a society. Indian cricket literature in the past decade has taken this line of enquiry and the works of Ramachandra Guha (Corner of a Foreign Field, The Indian History of a British Sport, 2002) and Boria Majumdar (22 Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket, 2004), among others, have provided us valuable insights into the history of modern India through the game of cricket.
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Nalin Mehta
Professor Nalin Mehta is Dean, School of Modern Media, UPES; Advisor, Global University Systems and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University Singapore. He is an award-winning social scientist, journalist and author who has held senior leadership positions in major Indian media companies; international financing institutions like the Global Fund in Geneva, Switzerland; taught and held research positions at universities and institutions in Australia (ANU, La Trobe University), Singapore (NUS), Switzerland (International Olympic Museum) and India (IIM Bangalore, Shiv Nadar University).