Cricketing past and the political present: sport and youth culture in a South Indian small town

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I enjoyed these seminars, and very much welcomed the opportunity they provided to feel part of a community while on research leave.
– Dr Emily Kate Price, Cambridge Early Career Fellow, Michaelmas Term 2020

This event is part of the CRASSH fellows work-in-progress seminar series. All are welcome but please register to book your place and to request readings.

Dr Ratheesh Kumar

Tellicherry, a British administrative small town in the erstwhile Malabar region’s shoreline of north Kerala, had experienced the excitement of cricket during the early decades of the 19^thcentury, when Lord Arthur Wellesley introduced the game to the local population. Lower caste communities like the Mukkuva (Fishermen) and Dobi (Washermen) were the major social groups actively involved in mastering the foreign game at that period. Tellicherry Cricket Club was one of the early cricket clubs in India. However, the longstanding ‘provincial’ past of a colonial game, of such fundamental social and cultural importance in the present times, finds little space in academic writings as well as in recorded histories of the game.

Sport history is crucial to make sense of not only the embryonic sporting heritage of a nation, but also to understand the politics of colonialism, nationalism, and the social relations that stem from this context. In India, sociological and anthropological explorations of sport have always been at the margins of scholarly efforts at understanding social life. Apart from limited instances, academic writings have tended to ignore the possibility of studying social formations through the lens of sport culture. Scholars of cricket history like Ramchandra Guha, Ashis Nandy and Boria Majumdar among others have scripted the history of Indian cricket primarily from the big cities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras.

This study is an attempt to trace the transitions of youth culture and identity formations in a colonial small town in South India through an exploration of its cricketing past and juxtaposing it with the political present. While attempting to write the social history of cricket from below, the research charts out the formation of caste and religious identities in the backdrop of sport culture and its colonial past. The present day social fabric, political life and youth culture in the small town have their roots in the colonial making of sporting traditions, attitudes and an accompanying physical culture; and the study also hopes to map those cultural underpinnings.