 "Cover of Cricket Country: The Untold History of the First All India Team. Credits: Amazon.in")
This book “charts how the idea of India took shape” on the manicured cricket pitches of Mumbai long before the country gained independence, and not so much on the muddy football maidans of Kolkata or the uneven hockey fields of Lahore and Amritsar.
Incidentally, undivided Bengal and Punjab were provinces that sent the most freedom fighters to the Cellular Jail in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Hockey and football were by far the more popular sports among the masses in northern and eastern regions of both undivided and independent India.
Cricket caught the popular imagination later, mostly after India’s 1983
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