India on the field | Independence Day Special

Together, Indian cricket and its supporters tell us a lot about the journey our society has taken over the last hundred odd years. As Ramachandra Guha's and Prashant Kidambi's books on cricket history tell us, in the late 19th century, cricket was a scattered activity in different urban and mofussil pockets of pre-Partition India.

The first Indian clubs were formed in Bombay, Karachi, Madras and Calcutta and they played among themselves on inferior, bumpy maidans while the sahebs played in a parallel world, on the other side of the fence on their (somewhat) plush green grounds. Around the same time that various Indian political groups began to challenge the Empire's unquestioned hegemony, Indian teams began to have the occasional game against the goras.

At first the Indian teams usually lost, but gradually the outcomes began to be less predictable. These matches would have loud crowds of local janata