6 ideas
Cricket did not travel to India as a finished colonial tool that Indians passively absorbed. Indian groups took up the game for their own reasons, first to signal status and closeness to rulers and later to beat those rulers at their own game. The same imported institution could therefore serve collaboration and resistance at once, depending on who played it and to what end.
The Parsis of Bombay were the first Indian community to take up cricket seriously in the nineteenth century. They used it to display modernity and affinity with the British, organising tours of England and matches against European sides. Their wins over the Europeans then became a source of communal pride, showing how imitating the rulers could turn into competing with them.
Bombay's premier competition grew from Presidency matches into the Triangular, Quadrangular and finally the Pentangular. Its teams were organised by religious community: Europeans, Parsis, Hindus, Muslims and 'The Rest'. Because the format was so popular, crowds were rewarded for identifying with their community, and religious identity became a routine, commercially profitable spectacle.
In 1940 Gandhi publicly opposed cricket organised along communal lines. That prompted withdrawals and a fierce public debate over whether the Pentangular deepened religious division or merely reflected it. As communal tensions rose before Partition, the tournament ended in the mid-1940s and was replaced by a territorially organised competition, showing how national politics redrew the boundaries of sport.
Indian princes funded teams, tours and players to gain prestige with the Raj and leverage over the game's governance, not only out of love for sport. Seen this way, disputes such as the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram's captaincy of the 1936 England tour and Lala Amarnath being sent home read as patrons exercising power. They are not simply cricketing judgements.
From its founding in 1928, the Board of Control for Cricket in India was a site of competition among regional associations, princely patrons and urban elites for control of selection, venues and representation. Governing bodies in colonial sport reproduced the wider political struggles over who could speak for 'India'. Administrative history is therefore political history.