ABSTRACT
An unlikely union The development of the formative years of Indian colonial cricket is partially attributed to a unique collaboration between Australian-born cricketer, all-rounder Frank Tarrant (1880-1951) and Maharaja Bhupinder Singh (1891-1938), the sovereign ruler of the wealthy princely state of Patiala in the Punjab. The success of the game in India is indebted to the financial patronage of the Maharaja and the ingenuity and tenacity of his able lieutenant, Tarrant. The relationship between the resolute and peripatetic Tarrant and the opportunistic Maharaja was mutually beneficial and contravened the imperial constraints of interracial collaborations. Flouting racial doctrines, Tarrant was employed as a facilitator for the autocrat. According to the West, the success of the Empire was dependent on preserving an irreconcilable distinction between the East and the West (Ferguson 2006). The relationship between Tarrant and Bhupinder will be interpreted through an Orientalist paradigm, initially devised by theorist Edward Said (1978). Said argued that the world was divided into two parts: the East and the West. Through this dichotomy, the East was portrayed as backward, uncivilized and inferior and the West was portrayed as unconditionally ‘superior’ in every facet (Said 1978, 7). Said’s principal argument in Orientalism was that the West ‘reconstructed’ an imaginary of the East to conform to how westerners desired the East to be and, through the process, dominated, restructured and held authority over the Orient (Said 1978, 3).
