ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the effect on Indian cricket culture of the often ugly spiralling of the sentiments and the concomitant growth of India as a largely unfettered capitalist economy. When India received her independence from Britain, in August 1947, her incoming Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, educated at an English public school and Cambridge University and leader of the Indian Congress Party, addressed the new nation. ‘A moment comes’, he said, ‘which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance’. Most cricket writers are familiar with Ashis Nandy’s enigmatic declaration in 1989 that cricket ‘is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British’. The influence on the nation’s cricket culture of India’s embrace of capitalist globalisation and the rise of Hindu nationalism has been marked. The ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan was a spur to cricket commerce.
