“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.
Walking on history’s pitch
By Nalin Mehta
Nalin Mehta
Nalin Mehta is Managing Editor, Moneycontrol, Chief AI Officer - Editorial Operations, Network18 and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He is an award-winning Indian journalist, political scientist and author who has held senior leadership positions in major media companies and educational institutions; served as an international civil servant with the UN and the Global Fund in Geneva, Switzerland; taught and held research positions at universities and institutions in Australia (La Trobe University, ANU), Singapore (NUS), Switzerland (International Olympic Museum) and India (Shiv Nadar University, IIM Bangalore). Most recently, he has been Dean and Professor at School of Modern Media, UPES University. He has previously been Group Consulting Editor, Network18; Executive Editor, The Times of India-Online, Managing Editor, India Today (TV channel) and Consulting Editor, The Times of India. Mehta is the author of several best-selling and critically acclaimed books, including The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party (hailed as a ‘seminal’ work, No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller lists for 26 consecutive weeks in 2022, and republished worldwide in several languages); India’s Techade: Digital Revolution and Change in the World’s Largest Democracy, India on Television (Asian Publishing Award for Best Book on Asian Media, 2009), Behind a Billion Screens (Longlisted as Business Book of the Year, Tata Literature Live, 2015) and Dreams of a Billion (2022 Ekamra Sports Book of the Year Award, co-authored). His edited books include Gujarat Beyond Gandhi (co-editor), Television in India and The Changing Face of Cricket (co-editor). Mehta is a DFID-Commonwealth scholar with a Ph.D in Political Science from Trobe University, Melbourne; M.A. International Relations from University of East Anglia, UK; and B.A. Journalism (Honours) from University of Delhi.
