ABSTRACT
Cricket has an ambiguous presence in Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, an easterly state in India. The city’s international cricket stadium, Eden Gardens, is considered by many one of the most beautiful in the world. A section of the city’s cricket spectators holds silence to be heretical, making the stadium the ‘emotional headquarters’ of cricket in the country. In addition to partisan supporters, a public proud of its pedantic understanding of the sport and journalists intent on establishing cricket as a metonymy for life has created in the city a unique sporting culture – one founded largely upon authorship and spectatorship as the state’s representation in national teams has been sparse. Merely seven Bengali cricketers played for India, appearing in 11 Test and 10 ODI matches between themselves, in the period between the more successful Pankaj Roy’s retirement in 1960 and Sourav Ganguly’s debut in 1992. Three others to have made the national team from the state – Dilip Doshi, Ashok Malhotra and Arun Lal – were not ethnic Bengalis. The state’s passion for watching cricket but not trying hard to master the game has been a national joke since before India’s independence. On the contrary, the non-selection of the state’s cricketers in the national team was widely perceived and presented in the local press as part of the envious nation’s epidemic discrimination against the culturally superior Bengalis.
