Experience The Future

South Asia has become the beating heart of cricket, with wild enthusiasm for the game at every level of society. Historian Prashant Kidambi—whose book, Cricket Country, was shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize—takes us through the history of cricket in India, from its traditional, colonial roots through to the colourful, frenetic national game of today.

One explanation is that cricket embodies many aspects of Indian society and culture, ideas of social distancing and hierarchy. For a long time, there was a deeply entrenched idea that the rhythms of the game—that it is slow, that the play unfolds at a leisurely pace, that it is suffused with a sense of the eternal—resonated with an ancient agrarian civilization. 

So, there’s an influential thesis that, although it was an English sport, cricket took off in India because its core values chimed perfectly with the values of traditional Indian society.