What prompts common people to kill a guard and rob an office they thought had some tickets for a Test match? Why does a scholar of medieval Bengali literature remark, 'Had life been a sport, it would be cricket'? Who do journalists vindicate by promoting cricket, the imperial game par excellence, as the lifeforce of the ordinary Indian? This book pursues these threads of the people's uncanny attachment to cricket, seeking to understand the sport's role in the making of a postcolonial society. With a focus on Calcutta, it unpacks the various connotations of international cricket that have produced a postcolonial community and public culture. Cricket, it shows, gave the people a tool to understand and form themselves as a cultural community. More than the outcomes of matches, the beliefs, attitudes and actions the sport generated had an immense bearing on emerging social relationships.

‘Imaginative, well-researched, and well-argued, Naha’s book makes an original contribution to the burgeoning field of sports history in South Asia and to cultural criticism in general. His deliberate eschewal of methodological nationalism and his skillful exploration of the “public culture” produced in Calcutta around the game of cricket - by media reports, sports commentaries, literary writings, gendered spectatorship, and policing and political practices - offer insights that will stay with all students of postcolonial histories. A remarkable achievement.’

Dipesh Chakrabarty - The University of Chicago, Illinois

‘This fascinating cultural history of cricket in post-colonial Calcutta breaks new ground both in the depth of its research and in the subtlety of its analysis. Souvik Naha uses an array of literary and periodical sources (many in Bengali) to portray a vivid picture of the dimensions of spectatorship, the role of the media, the influence of politics, and the divisions of gender and of class. This fine book shall garner a wide readership within and beyond the academy.’

Ramachandra Guha - Author of A Corner of a Foreign Field and The Commonwealth of Cricket

‘Souvik Naha’s insightful, carefully researched and elegantly written monograph on the public perceptions of cricket in postcolonial Calcutta is a timely and highly welcome addition to both the social and cultural history of modern South Asia as well as to the global history of sport.’

Harald Fischer-Tiné - ETH Zurich