Cricket, Public Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Calcutta
Souvik Naha
Feb 2023 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
186
Pages
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About this ebook
What prompts common people to kill a guard and rob an office they thought had some tickets for a Test match? Why does a scholar of medieval Bengali literature remark, 'Had life been a sport, it would be cricket'? Who do journalists vindicate by promoting cricket, the imperial game par excellence, as the lifeforce of the ordinary Indian? This book pursues these threads of the people's uncanny attachment to cricket, seeking to understand the sport's role in the making of a postcolonial society. With a focus on Calcutta, it unpacks the various connotations of international cricket that have produced a postcolonial community and public culture. Cricket, it shows, gave the people a tool to understand and form themselves as a cultural community. More than the outcomes of matches, the beliefs, attitudes and actions the sport generated had an immense bearing on emerging social relationships.
About the author
Souvik Naha is senior lecturer in imperial and post-colonial history at the University of Glasgow. Prior to joining Glasgow, he held the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship at Durham University. He has published extensively in colonial and postcolonial history and has co-edited several journal special issues including FIFA World Cup and Beyond: Sport, Culture, Media and Governance (2017), Global and Transnational Sport: Ambiguous Borders, Connected Domains (2017), Ethical Concerns in Sport Governance (2018), Moments, Metaphors, Memories: Defining Events in the History of Soccer (2019), and Cricket in the 21st Century (2021).
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