Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors to this Volume
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Kalarippayattu is Eighty Percent Mental and Only the Remainder is Physical’: Power, Agency and Self in a South Asian Martial Art
- 2 Empowering Yourself: Sport, Sexuality and Autoeroticism in North Indian Jori Swinging
- 3 Indigenous Polo in Northern Pakistan: Game and Power on the Periphery
- 4 ‘The Moral that can be Safely Drawn from the Hindus' Magnificent Victory’: Cricket, Caste and the Palwankar Brothers
- 5 The Peasants are Revolting: Race, Culture and Ownership in Cricket
- 6 The Social History of the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, 1829–2003
- 7 Warrior Goddess Versus Bipedal Cow: Sport, Space, Performance and Planning in an Indian City
- 8 ‘Nupilal’: Women's War, Football and the History of Modern Manipur
- 9 ‘Playing for the Tibetan People’: Football and History in the High Himalayas
- 10 Community, Identity and Sport: Anglo-Indians in Colonial and Postcolonial India
- Notes
- Bibliography
5 - The Peasants are Revolting: Race, Culture and Ownership in Cricket
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors to this Volume
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Kalarippayattu is Eighty Percent Mental and Only the Remainder is Physical’: Power, Agency and Self in a South Asian Martial Art
- 2 Empowering Yourself: Sport, Sexuality and Autoeroticism in North Indian Jori Swinging
- 3 Indigenous Polo in Northern Pakistan: Game and Power on the Periphery
- 4 ‘The Moral that can be Safely Drawn from the Hindus' Magnificent Victory’: Cricket, Caste and the Palwankar Brothers
- 5 The Peasants are Revolting: Race, Culture and Ownership in Cricket
- 6 The Social History of the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, 1829–2003
- 7 Warrior Goddess Versus Bipedal Cow: Sport, Space, Performance and Planning in an Indian City
- 8 ‘Nupilal’: Women's War, Football and the History of Modern Manipur
- 9 ‘Playing for the Tibetan People’: Football and History in the High Himalayas
- 10 Community, Identity and Sport: Anglo-Indians in Colonial and Postcolonial India
- Notes
- Bibliography
Summary
Introduction: Centres and Subjects
Cricket is no longer England's national game. It might be argued that the sport now belongs to India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and to the South Asian diaspora in the Persian Gulf, Canada and elsewhere. England's status as a cricketing periphery has been accompanied by its fading reputation as a strong side and by its declining influence in regulatory bodies such as the International Cricket Council (ICC). Some observers have attributed this shift at the centre of the sport to the innate ‘Indian-ness’ of cricket (Nandy 1989). Whatever the merits of this supposition, international cricket today reflects a series of fundamental changes in the ability of old elites to claim and defend ‘their’ culture. As Appadurai (1996: 23–48) has noted, cricket in the decolonizing world provides marginal populations with the means of overcoming their marginality in global popular culture. What I intend to do in this essay is examine the tensions that are generated in the process of this reconfiguration of centre and margin and make a broad observation. The primary rivalry in cricket today is not between India and Pakistan or England and Australia. It is a moral, economic and political clash between the colony and the metropole both of which have outgrown those labels. The sport functions both as a mirror of the disjunctures between ‘how things stand’ and ‘how things should be’ and as an instrument that continuously widens the gap.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Subaltern SportsPolitics and Sport in South Asia, pp. 107 - 122Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2005