ABSTRACT
Financier Maharaja Bhupinder Singh and tour manager Frank Tarrant are the two key protagonists of the inaugural Australian cricket tour to India in 1935/36 and the historical figures in this article. Their culturally atypical relationship was anomalous to the conventional imperialist paradigm and openly defied racist notions of Western supremacy and cultural incompatibility that informed and underpinned the initial expectations of the touring party. Despite their relationship being primarily driven by mutually beneficial professional and financial objectives, a genuine rapport that challenged the archetypal servant/master paradigm is evident. Press reportage from Australia, India and Britain supports the argument. The minute books of the Middlesex Cricket Club (1908–16) and the Melbourne Cricket Club (1907 and 1908) have been integral in locating information on Tarrant’s movements. Discovering the Tarrant scrapbooks (c.1918–51) at the Melbourne Cricket Club has answered many questions that have plagued previous research into the man who has remained an enigmatic mystery in cricket history. The post-colonial theories of Homi Bhabha (2012), specifically his analysis of mimicry, are employed to argue that the political agendas of the Indian royalty were evolving. Cricket, an English institution, was embraced and reconstructed by the Indian community. Indian society was rejecting the British template and opted to operate according to an increasingly nationalistic and indigenous ideology and through this process appropriated cricket, the bastion of Englishness, as its own. The Australians’ contribution to this process is interrogated, and the liberal influence of Tarrant and the Maharaja in minimizing the racial and social divide throughout the tour is evident.
