ABSTRACT
In a now famous discussion of ‘culture’, A.L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn suggested that its core consisted of historically derived and selected ideas and their attached
values. Cultural systems, they added, were products of social action and determinants of further social action. In short, culture is essentially a set of potent and dynamic
normative ideas, beliefs and actions. [2] More recently, in the foreword to his innovatory series ‘Studies in Imperialism’,
John M. MacKenzie asserted that in the era of European world supremacy British imperialism was as much a dominant idea with intellectual, cultural and technical
facets as it was a set of economic, political and military imperatives. [3] And with equal relevance Patrick Brantlinger argued a little earlier that, just as it is impossible to write an adequate history of British culture without considering its social and
political ramifications in country and city, so it is impossible to understand that culture without embracing colony and dominion. [4]
It is time that it was more widely recognized that by the late nineteenth century sport lay close to the heart of Britain imperial culture. It formed a distinct, persistent
and significant cluster of cultural traits isolated in time and space, possessing a coherent structure and definite purpose. While it had many cultural functions, it had
certainly become a means of propagating imperial sentiments. [5] Arguably, the genus Britannicus, to differ slightly from C.L.R. James, was more than
a fine batsman; he was a committed sportsman. And more often than not his was a
moral commitment and an integral part of his imperial ‘civilizing’ purpose. Sport was the more pleasant part of this melioristic purpose and as real to him as a ‘civilizing’
medium as British law, religion and education. In his imperial role of man of firm duty, confident ambition, moral intention and applied athletics he might
appropriately be labelled homo ludens imperiosus! To a great extent, of course, the English games field had provided, through the medium of the public-school system
and ancient universities, ‘a meeting place for the moral outlook of the dissenting middle classes and the athletic instincts of the aristocracy’. [6] Much more than this,
however, the middle classes with a strong tendency to serious ethical commitment ‘colonized’ the upper classes. Late Victorian society witnessed in reverse a deliberate and purposeful hegemonic effort. Games, especially cricket, were elevated by the
middle classes to the status of a moral discipline. C.L.R. James is correct.
The Victorians did make the game compulsory for their children and all the evidence points to the fact that ‘they valued competence in it and respect for what it came to
signify more than they did intellectual accomplishment of any kind’. [7] Eventually cricket became the symbol par excellence of imperial solidarity and superiority,
epitomizing a set of consolidatory moral imperatives that both exemplified and explained imperial ambition and achievement. It became a political metaphor as
much as an imperial game:
