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Cricket in colonial Bengal (1880–1947): A lost history of nationalism

2006; Routledge; Volume: 23; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09523360600802562

1743-9035

Sports, Gender, and Society

Abstract Bengal cricket has hardly been given due importance in Indian history. This study traces the evolution of the cricket in Bengal, locating it in the politico-economic context of the 1880s and 1890s. After the mutiny of 1857 was crushed, the Indians felt the need to look at alternate modes of resistance. The sporting field helped provide an exciting imaginary where a certain role reversal from real life occurred – the imitation of real life encounters between the colonizer and colonized, but minus the attendant dangers which would otherwise characterize such situations. Period vernacular tracts commented on the virtues of colonial sports, i.e. cricket and football, claiming that prowess in these ‘British sports’ would help the Bengali middle class counter the colonial charge of inferiority. Notes [1] Mandle, ‘Cricket and Australian Nationalism’, 1. [2] Political and economic histories of Bengal abound. These studies have looked at Bengal as a nationalist stronghold, a cauldron of communal politics, at the trajectory of industrialization in the region, conditions prevailing in the industrial sector and related subjects. There is, however, no historical work that tries to analyse the role of sport in shaping the face of urban, colonial Bengal. [3] The 1880s that saw the formation of sporting clubs, the organization of the first international cricket match and the beginning of school and college tournaments in Bengal. [4] After partition, East Bengal became East Pakistan. Any analysis of cricket in East Pakistan has to take into account the hatred the East Pakistanis have/had for their West Pakistani counterparts. Oral interviews with senior sports journalists of Bangladesh, erstwhile East Pakistan, show that they blame West Pakistani ruling circles for their country's decline in cricket. In the period between 1947 and 1971, sport in East Pakistan was not allowed to blossom and talented players were unjustly kept out of national sides: interviews with Qamuzzaman in the Dhaka Press Club, 7 Sept. 2001 and with Prof. Muntasir Mamoon, Dhaka, 5 Sept. 2001. [5] The historical data provided by scholars such as S.N. Mukherjee and John McGuire provide room for the argument that the category bhadralok refers to both a class of aristocratic Bengali Hindus, and those of more humble origin. While some of them had made their fortunes through service to the Mughals, most of them ‘rose from poverty to wealth’ in businesses and occupations as varied as shipping, indigo plantation, banyans to the British, purchasing zamindaris and flour mills. Below this group were the large shopkeepers, small landholders and white-collar workers in commercial and government houses, teachers, ‘native doctors’, journalists and writers. This group was referred to as the madhyabit in early nineteenth-century Calcutta: Mukherjee, Calcutta; John McGuire, The Making of a Colonial Mind. By the late nineteenth century the term bhadralok was used widely in Bengal to refer to a city-based, educated, though not always affluent, upper and middling stratum of society. [6] In most works on the history of Indian cricket there is little mention of any cricketing tradition in Bengal, except that the Calcutta Cricket Club had been founded in 1792. Even this is incorrect, as has been demonstrated in this study. Guha, ‘Cricket and Politics in Colonial India’, 158; Docker, History of Indian Cricket; Cashman, Patrons, Players and the Crowd; Appadurai, ‘Playing with Modernity’; Bamzai, Guts and Glory. [7] Mitra, ‘Babu at Play’. [8] Downing, A Compendious History of the Indian Wars, 229; Bengal Past and Present 34 (1927): 68–9. [9] The Madras Courier of 22–23 Dec. 1792 carries the report that on both these days the Calcutta Cricket Club played competitive cricket against the Gentlemen of Barrackpore and Dumdum. This entry in the Madras Courier has hitherto been identified as the date when the Calcutta Cricket Club was founded. [10] Bengal Gazette, 16 Dec. 1780; Hobbes, John Barley Corn Bahadur, 436–7. The Bengal Gazette entry indicates the world's first cricket club was started in Bengal, the MCC being founded in 1787. [11] Ganguly, Calcutta Cricket Club; Rebeiro, 433; Calcutta Monthly Journal, 1836: 71. [12] ‘The enterprising Parsis led the way for the development of cricket in Bombay. If the sub-continent has become the epicentere of global cricket, then some of the credit must go to the Parsis who passionately took to the game over 120 years ago. Pertinently, it was football that played an important part asserting their nationalistic aspirations on the Eastern seaboard in Calcutta. As far back on June 29, 1911 against the backdrop of Fort William, Mohun Bagan played the East Yorkshire Regiment in the Indian Football Association Shield final, barefoot Indians taking on arrogant and pugnacious Englishmen. Mohun Bagan won that game 2–1 and in many ways dented the British psyche. The Bengalis scored brownie points, but it is the Parsis who stood out with their exemplary work in cricket's propagation, supported and encouraged as they were by the ruling elite’: Bamzai, Guts and Glory, 100. This description is representative of dominant view in existing studies of Indian cricket. [13] Guha, ‘Cricket and Politics in Colonial India’; Docker, History of Indian Cricket; Cashman, Patrons, Players and the Crowd; Mario Rodrigues, The Statesman, 1 Nov. 1997. [14] Cf. Patel, A History of Parsi Cricket. [15] Nandy, The Tao of Cricket, 53; For similar views, see Mukherjee, Between Indian Wickets; Patel, Stray Thoughts on Indian Cricket; Patel, A History of Parsi Cricket. [16] Mangan, Pleasure Profit Proselytism; Mangan, The Cultural Bond. [17] For an analysis of how and why the game's ethic was subverted in the colonies, see Cashman, ‘Cricket and Colonialism’, 259–60. [18] Generally accepted as the world's oldest cricket club, founded in 1787, framing the rules of the game and formulating the most widely accepted coaching manual. [19] Cooper, ‘Canadians Declare’, Journal of Sport History (Spring 1999): 52–53. [20] Appadurai, ‘Playing with Modernity’, 26–7. [21] Cashman, Patrons, Players and the Crowd, 22–3. [22] Most of the vernacular journals published in Bengal carried detailed accounts of cricket. This trend may be traced back to the 1890s. Journals such as Mukul, Sakha, Pradip, Manasi, Manasi o Marmabani, Tarpani and Sandesh, edited and published by leading Bengali intellectuals, published accounts of cricket matches. Tarpan had dedicated a whole issue to Saradaranjan Ray, hailed as the father of Bengal cricket, after his demise in 1925. [23] Docker, History of Indian Cricket, 8–9. For similar views see Appadurai, ‘Playing with Modernity’. [24] This fact hardly finds mention in existing works on Indian cricket, which equates the early phase of Indian cricket with a phase of princely patronage. It is erroneously thought that ‘cricket, as an elite sport, required the sort of time and money not available to the bourgeois elites of colonial India’: Appadurai, ‘Playing with Modernity’, 29; Mannathukaren, ‘Subalterns, Cricket and the “Nation”’. [25] Such understanding has led scholars to challenge claims that an Indian identity was fostered on the sporting field in the late nineteenth century (Appadurai, ‘Playing with Modernity’; Mannathukaren, ‘Subalterns, Cricket and the “Nation”’). Arguing that the communal structure of cricket in India was dismantled only in the 1930s, scholars have asked whether it is pertinent to claim that an ‘Indian’ identity in cricket existed in the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, it needs to be remembered that unlike Bombay cricket, Bengal cricket was never organized on communal lines. Existing studies ignore cricketing traditions in regions other than Bombay when making declarations such as ‘in the mid nineteenth century, membership in religious communities became the salient principle around which Indians banded together to play cricket’. The only other kind of loyalty accepted to have been fostered by cricket was loyalty to the empire. Such reading has fostered arguments, such as ‘no matter how much wants to read into the setting up of sporting clubs by “nationalistic” minded Indians from the 1880s, it cannot be denied that major patronage for cricket until such time as independence was attained came from the princely states’. It is assumed that (all) princes saw cricket as a means to link themselves to the English aristocracy, and evidences of princes determined to set up cricket teams comprising of Indians only, arguing that this was the only means of challenging the colonizer, have been ignored. See detailed descriptions on the involvement of the Maharaja of Natore in promoting the game in Bengal: Manasi o Marmabani (BS 1332–3). [26] Johnson, Three Years in Calcutta, 60–3. [27] Quoted in Ganguly, Calcutta Cricket Club, 1–12. [28] Bengal Quarterly Sporting Magazine 1, no. 4 (1844); India Sporting Review (Calcutta) 1845. [29] Bengal Quarterly Sporting Magazine (1844): 436. [30] India Sporting Review (1845). [31] Calcutta Monthly Journal (1836): 71. [32] Ghosh, Byame Bangali, 100. [33] They were men renowned for their physical strength. The stories of these men taking on the might of their foes are part of Bengali folklore. For a large number of such stories celebrating the feats of leading Bengali byambirs, see Ghosh, Byame Bangali. [34] It has been argued that the mutiny of 1857 was the first major nationalist upsurge in India. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the East India Company's government. [35] Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 21; For a discussion on the Bengali efforts at emasculation, also see Roselli, ‘The Self Image of Effeteness’. [36] Ghosh, Krida Samrat, 180–1. [37] Nandy, ‘Sports in Calcutta’, 328. [38] Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 5. [39] Ibid., 21. [40] Sakha 12 (Dec. 1883). Also see Sakha, Feb. 1891. [41] Ibid. [42] Bengalis took similar pride in the achievements of their Parsee counterparts. Commenting on the Parsee victory against the touring English side led by G.F. Vernon, the Bengali journal Sakha urged the Bengalis to take pride from the Parsee victory and motivate themselves to achieve similar feats on the sporting field. The notion that defeating the English at their own game was no mean achievement was not unique to Bengal. Rather, as W.H. Mandle has argued, citing the case of Australia, ‘The drawing of parallels from the example of manly sports, especially from cricket, was an Anglo-Saxon habit in the nineteenth century, and the assertion that ability at cricket indicated national superiority was commonplace. Some examples of the English variety of chauvinism may serve to demonstrate the nature of the weight placed upon cricket as an indicator of national strength and moral cricket. The Quarterly Review of October 1857 favourably compared games-playing English public school boy with the “pale faced student of Germany, or the over taught pupil of the French polytechnique”. The Englishman had nothing to fear from them, games had given him pluck, blood, and bottom’. Mandle, ‘Cricket and Australian Nationalism’. [43] Mohun Bagan Platinum Jubilee Souvenir, 4. [44] Perera, The Janashakthi Book of Sri Lanka Cricket, 50. [45] Ghosh, Krida Samrat, 125–126. [46] Ibid. This is a startling fact since established history considers the Parsees to be the first Indians to have played an international match during their tour of England in 1886: Raiji, India's Hambledon Men; Rodrigues, The Statesman, 1 Nov. 1997; Bose, History of Indian Cricket. [47] Ghosh, Krida Samrat, 124. [48] Ibid., 126. [49] Ibid., 128. [50] Mamoon, ‘Dhakar Cricket’. Played in the purana paltan area, this match had started at 3.00 in the afternoon. The Bengal Times described the match thus: ‘England expected every man to do his duty, and nobly did those who had the least pretension to the name of Englishman respond to their country's call’. Mr Loyal, the highest scorer, who got 69, was ousted thus: ‘A cautious fieldsman standing almost under his nose, and who had escaped the batter's observation in the heat of excitement, bided his time, and the best player of the day was destined to fall an easy prey to a miserable catch right into his opponent's hand’. Regarding the performance of the natives, it was asserted: ‘Poor fellows! They were always wrong, expecting the slow for the quick and vice-versa’. [51] Ibid. [52] Ibid. For other details on Bangladesh cricket also see Boria Majumdar, ‘Cricket O Bangladesh’, Anandabazar Patrika, 28 May 2000. [53] S. Sarbadhikary, ‘Bengali Cricket in Calcutta’, Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Jan. 1934. [54] Ibid. [55] Ray and Ray, Tarpan: Saradaranjan Sankhya. [56] Mohun Bagan Platinum Jubilee Souvenir, 131. [57] The Xaverian (Calcutta): 10. [58] Ibid. [59] Ibid., 11. [60] Sakha, Feb. 1890: 25; Sandesh, Nov. 1925: 293. [61] Presidency College Register (1927), 28–29. [62] Sakha, Feb. 1890: 24. Cricket enthusiasts and statisticians have hitherto acknowledged the Harris Shield as the oldest school cricket tournament in India. [63] Ibid.. [64] Sakha, Feb. 1891: 24; Sandesh, Nov. 1925: 292. [65] These details are mentioned in most existing works on Indian cricket. [66] Reports of the match were published in The Statesman, 4 Jan. 1899. [67] The Statesman, Amrita Bazar Patrika and The Englishman carry numerous advertisements for sports equipment and gear from the 1880s. These advertisements point to the prominence of sport in social life, a fact also attested by the proliferation of sports goods shops in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. [68] The Statesman, 22 Jan. 1901. The text of the advertisement reads: ‘CRICKET BATS, Ours are the cheapest, because they are priced the lowest and last the longest and because with every bat above 10 we give a superfine quality extra stout rubber bat handle free. S.Ray & Co, 62, Bowbazar Street, Calcutta, Patronised by the Calcutta Cricket Club’. [69] Ray, ‘Cricket khela’. [70] Ibid. [71] Ibid., 131–2. [72] Ahmad, Dhaka. [73] Bagchi, ‘Wealth and Work in Calcutta’. [74] Mohun Bagan, Sovabazar, Kumartuli and other sporting clubs were all located in north Calcutta, in the areas newly added to the city's municipality. [75] Sinha, ‘Calcutta and the Currents of History’. [76] Located in central Calcutta, this playground is one of the most important venues for local league encounters. School and college matches are also played on these grounds. In the absence of proper playgrounds, Calcutta has its own form of locality cricket, popularly known as para cricket. These matches are commonly played in narrow lanes of the para or locality and generate intense excitement. In recent years, multinational companies have sponsored many such matches, greatly increasing their popularity. These are mostly played on Sundays and holidays when there is less traffic on the roads. [77] Deshbandhu Park is located in North Calcutta, the Park Circus maidan in Central Calcutta and Deshapriya Park in South Calcutta. The locations of these parks reveal that they were set up with the idea of providing sites for leisure activity across the city. [78] The most significant among these were Presidency, St Xavier's, Vidyasagar and BE College Shibpur. Among the schools, of note were St Xavier's, Lamartiniere, Scottish Church and Metropolitan. [79] For the role played by the royal house of Cooch Behar in sports promotion, see Begg, Cricket and Cricketers in India; for an analysis of the role played by the royal house of Natore see Manasi and Marmabani (BS 1332–33). [80] Sailaja Roy on the activities of the Bengal Gymkhana in the Cricket Association of Bengal Silver Jubilee Souvenir. [81] Detailed reports of matches played by these colleges are to be found in the publications brought out by these institutions. Each year's magazine contained reports of that year's sporting activities under separate headings such as ‘Soccer’, ‘Cricket’, ‘Hockey’ and so on. [82] For a detailed report of these tours see Antia, Elphinstone College Tours. [83] Vidyasagar College Magazine, 1925–26. [84] Ibid. [85] St Xavier's College Magazine, 1909–10. [86] Ibid. [87] The Vernacular Press Act, passed in 1878 by Lord Lytton, was one in a series of oppressive acts passed by the colonial state to curb nationalist tendencies among the Indians. [88] Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. Also see Roselli, ‘The Self Image of Effeteness’. [89] Presidency College Register, 27. [90] Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. [91] As a case study, see Presidency College Centenary Volume, 191–202; Presidency College Register, 27–32. [92] For details on the political climate of Bengal in the first decade of the twentieth century, see Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. [93] Presidency College Centenary Volume. [94] Ibid., 197. [95] Ibid. [96] Presidency College Magazine, 1914–15: 296. [97] Ibid. [98] Presidency College Magazine, 1928: 185. [99] Presidency College Magazine, 1929: 91. [100] Presidency College Magazine, 1934: 286. [101] The Sporting Union Club had done much to stimulate the development of the game in Bengal. The club once had in its ranks the likes of Sir Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe, when they visited India as guests of the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram in 1930–1. For details see Majumdar, ‘Believe It or Not’, Times of India, 19 Jan. 2002. [102] Maharaja Nripendra Narayan Bhup Bahadur of Cooch Behar was one of the leading patrons of the game. Following his untimely death in 1911, cricket patronage by this royal house suffered a temporary setback, to be partially revived in the 1930s. [103] Sen, Bichitra Keladhular Kahini, 7. [104] Lee, Forty Years of English Cricket, 44–51. [105] Langrana, ‘I Gaze into the Fire’. [106] Mukherjee, ‘Bengali Cricket and Cricketers’. [107] Arguably the best Bengali batsman of his age. His century against the fancied Calcutta Cricket Club in 1908 was widely commended. [108] He was the groundsman of the CCC. It was during practice sessions that his great skill with the ball surfaced. [109] This was the first occasion when a representative Indian side under the Maharaja of Patiala toured England. On earlier occasions the Parsees had toured England in 1886 and 1888. [110] Thacker's Spink India Directories. [111] Report on Public Instruction in Bengal (1912–13), IOLR V/24/985. The report for the year 1913–14 mentions that physical culture continued to receive considerable attention. While football and cricket were popular in the colleges and secondary schools, country games were popular in primary schools. [112] After this tour, India was made a part of the Imperial Cricket Conference (ICC), cricket's apex body. Murray Robertson and William Currie, who represented India at the ICC meetings in 1926, were members of the Calcutta Cricket Club. The two meetings held on 31 May and 28 June 1926 paved the way for India's entry into the ICC. [113] P.C. Mukherjee, ‘Cricket in Calcutta: Its Growth and Development’, Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Nov. 1933: 93–105. [114] Interview with Dr Sharifuddin Ahmad, Bangladesh National Archives, Dhaka, 6 Sept. 2001. [115] Presidency College Magazine, 1916–1917: 294–6. [116] Ray, ‘Bengalis and Sahibs’, 2–3. [117] Cricket Association of Bengal Silver Jubilee Souvenir, 110–12. [118] Ibid. [119] Ibid. [120] Mason, ‘Football on the Maidan’. [121] Presidency College Magazine, 1913–14: 118–19. [122] Ibid. [123] Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony. [124] Bamzai, Guts and Glory, 101. [125] For an entirely different understanding of mimicry, see Bhabha, The Location of Culture. [126] The Vernacular Press Act under Lord Lytton in 1878 is a case in point.