Cricket history

4 MUST-READS

Modern bowlers would argue that things haven't changed much from the days when the British would get to do most of the batting, and their servants the bowling.

India's cricket literature is replete with vapid scorecard compendiums masquerading as books, as well as hagiographies of popular players directed at casual readers.

Those types of books represent, if you like, the fast-food, "one-day" version of cricket lit.

If you're looking for the richer, more satisfying Test match equivalent, there have been occasional attempts to study the larger picture: Jai Arjun Singh places the growth and development of Indian cricket against a socio-cultural/political backdrop.

Boria Majumdar's recently published Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom (2004, Penguin/Viking, Rs 595) is the latest in this genre.

Majumdar's thesis is that cricket was, from very early on, a means to cross class barriers (in this context, it's interesting to consider Irfan Pathan's rise in stature over the past year) and that it had a healthy following even outside the aristocracy and upper middle classes over a century ago.

The book highlights indigenous cricket traditions in Bengal and the South as well as in Mumbai, which was the centre of development of the game.

Majumdar's book comes shortly after the publication of Ramchandra Guha's very absorbing A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002, Picador India, Rs 395).

In an interview, Guha claimed that his meticulously researched work was more a social history than a sports book "" "I've used cricket as the vehicle to examine issues of race, religion and caste in 20th century India" "" and the book bears this out.

The most fascinating section deals with the career of the great slow bowler Palwankar Baloo (still a largely unknown name outside academic circles) and his struggle against caste discrimination.

Guha makes the hefty argument that Baloo was "the first great Indian cricketer as well as a pioneer in the emancipation of the Untouchables".

Preceding Guha and Majumdar by over a decade was Mihir Bose's comprehensive A History of Indian Cricket (1990), a revised and updated version of which was published in 2002.

Bose's work is marginally less scholarly in tone than the books mentioned above; it indulges the cricket fan's fascination with details of matches and the trajectory of players' careers.

But it's also a valuable account of how the sport developed in India, with an emphasis on international (Tests and later one-dayers) cricket, complete with a scorecard index (which most other books of this type don't usually bother with).

If you're not overly interested in the "big picture", you might want to try out Mario Rodrigues' Batting for the Empire (2003, Penguin Books India, Rs 299), which is a "political biography" of the legendary Ranji.

It looks at one of the most famous cricketers of Indian origin from another angle "" that of his career as an autocrat, as prince of the state of Nawanagar.

Rodrigues makes much of the supposed irony that the man after whom India's chief domestic tournament is named himself supported the British rule. But whether or not you agree with his thesis, this is a very well-researched political biography of the "first great cricketer of Indian origin".