Cricket's New Imperialism: How an English colonial sport became India's political tool
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
For over 200 years, cricket was the English game but for the past 20, it has been the Indian one. No country can compete with its overwhelming passion for the sport, and no league can compete with the popularity or deep pockets of its Indian Premier League. Last year, the IPL was valued at $10bn, while the women’s IPL instantly became the second most valuable cricket league in the world on its launch two years ago.
India’s financial dominance – generating 80% of the game’s revenue – has turned it into cricket’s only superpower. The nation now shapes every element of the sport, from the scheduling of international and domestic fixtures around the world, to the levels of funding that competing countries receive, and in what form. Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi has made no secret of using cricket to promote his own agenda. The appointment of Jay Shah, the son of Modi’s Home Minister, as head of the International Cricket Council, the global governing body, has woven the country’s interests even more inexorably into the sport.
This event, presented by Guardian sportswriter Emma John and historian Dr Prashant Kidambi, will examine how a sport that was the exclusive preserve of England’s elite – run by the Marylebone Cricket Club from its private ground in north-west London, and used to educate and manipulate Britain’s colonies – has become geopolitical soft power in the hands of the formerly colonised. As The Hundred is privatised and sold off to IPL brands owned by Indian billionaires, how much of the English game will survive?
Speakers
- Emma John, Guardian columnist and sportswriter, has written on cricket for over 25 years and is the first ever woman to win a Sports Journalism Award. She is the author of three books, including Following On: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession and Terrible Cricket, which was 2014’s Wisden Book of the Year. She sits on the MCC’s main committee at Lord’s and is the first female chair of the MCC’s Heritage and Collections Committee. For the past two years she has been Birkbeck’s Royal Literary Fund fellow, mentoring students on their writing.
- Dr Prashant Kidambi is Professor of Colonial Urban History at the University of Leicester. After completing postgraduate degrees in history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a doctorate at the University of Oxford. Kidambi’s research explores how modern South Asia was shaped by empire and nation. He has written extensively on Indian cities, public culture, politics and sport. He is the author of Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire (2019) and the lead editor of Bombay Before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos (2019).
Contact name: Sean Hamil
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