4 ideas
In the coronation summer of 1911, a squad of Parsis, Hindus and Muslims, including the Dalit left-arm spinner Palwankar Baloo and his brother, toured Britain as 'All-India'. The side was captained by the Maharaja of Patiala and financed and brokered by princes, Bombay businessmen and British patrons. It lost most of its first-class matches, but Baloo took over 100 wickets on the tour and the team's existence mattered more than its results.
The 1911 team, an early public embodiment of 'India' as a single side, was put together not by anti-colonial nationalists but through imperial channels: princely money, colonial clubs and British cricket patrons. Kidambi shows the Indian elites behind it seeking imperial recognition and using the tour to demonstrate their loyalty, so this vision of 'India' took shape within the empire rather than against it.
Indian cricket was organised by religious community, as in the Bombay Presidency matches, so an 'All-India' side had to be negotiated as a balance of Parsi, Hindu and Muslim places rather than picked on merit alone. The national whole was constructed by aggregating and bargaining between pre-existing communal units. This builds the fault lines of the parts into the structure of the whole.
Sport can grant a stigmatised person inclusion on the field that the surrounding society denies off it, because winning creates a reason to tolerate him that hierarchy cannot easily override. Baloo, whose caste status barred him from social equality with teammates, became indispensable as a bowler. Watching who is needed on the field, and who is still excluded off it, shows where merit is actually bending an order and where it is not.