3 ideas
On India's 1936 tour of England, the captaincy went to the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, a weak cricketer who won the post largely through patronage and lobbying. He sent Lala Amarnath, the team's best all-rounder, home mid-tour for indiscipline after a dressing-room outburst. A later inquiry exposed factionalism and favouritism in the squad, making the episode the standard example of princely captaincy damaging Indian cricket.
Bombay's premier tournament grew by adding religious communities: Europeans against Parsis, then Hindus (Triangular), Muslims (Quadrangular), and 'The Rest' (Pentangular, 1937). Read as politics, the tournament shows a colonial society organising itself into religious blocs, not a nation. Rising nationalist criticism, including Gandhi's, and the pressures leading to Partition ended it in 1946.
The Parsis, a small mercantile community in Bombay closely tied to British commerce, were the first Indians to take up cricket, founding clubs from 1848 and touring England in 1886. Playing the rulers' game was a deliberate way to gain status and standing with the British. Cricket spread in India along lines of social ambition and collaboration with colonial elites before it became a mass or national sport.