Empire Cricket Booklet

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INDIAN CRICKET IN NATAL

middle class and bourgeois took to sports like lawn tennis, cricket and rugby. According to Hobsbawm, the 'extraordinary speed with which all forms of organised sport conquered bourgeois society between 1870 and the early 1900s suggests that it filled a social need for considerably more that open-air exercise'. Sport was considered important in the formation of the governing class and hence introduced to public schools. 29 Cricket operated according to a Victorian model which worked to keep most people out of the game. Things like fair play, bravery and temperament made it a 'gentleman's' game. Large numbers were excluded for failing to demonstrate apposite qualities. Indian elites in Natal echoed many such sentiments.

for the passing excitement and intoxication of the thing, our playing fields must continue to be, not the school and the training ground to higher calls of life and duty, but scenes of our sure damage and loss. 27 Following the emancipation of slaves in the nine teenth century, cricket became an important new cultural institution by which England sought to socialise the populations in its colonies and reinforce hierarchies. According to Ashis Nandy, the nineteenth century was 'the period when the various post Utilitarian theories of progress began to be applied to the new colonies of Britain. The emerging culture

Sport in the early 1900s - 'race' did not always matter

At a farewell reception in his honour in 1914, Gandhi told the crowd, which included a large number of school children, that prize-giving had a 'demoralis ing' effect. Sport was only of benefit to children who competed to 'show that they had been endeavouring to keep the physical portion of their being in fit and proper state'. This would demonstrate the 'value of industry, the courage and the time that they put forth

of cricket came in handy to those using these theories to hierarchise the cultures, faiths and societies which were,onebyone, comingundercolonialdomination.' 28 In the years after 1870, sport became formalised in Britain and from here 'spread like wildfire to other countries'. Sport was initially connected to the middle classes, and from here made its way to the working classes. While the working classes played football, the