![]() ![]() Prashant Kidambi traces the story with great detail, which will delight cricket enthusiasts." - Shompa Lahiri, BBC History Magazine " Cricket Country explores both the history of imperial British cricket in India and colonial Indian cricket in Britain, as well as cricket as a vehicle for nation-building, cultural diplomacy, imperial pedagogy and masculinity, but at its heart tells the tale of a group of men in search of sporting glory. Not that he pulls his punches." - Shomit Dutta, The Times Literary Supplement "Kidambi's forensic eye and vast array of sources make for a. It is a history book, not a cricket book, and all the better for it." - Theo Barclay, The Daily Telegraph The 1911 tour is used as a framing device through which the author explores the ties that bound the colony together and the slow beginnings of an Indian nationhood. "5* review: This book is an engagingly written and deeply researched social history of the last days of imperial Britain, and the first days of Modern India. ![]() Kidambi's achievement is to retrieve from obscurity the backbone of the team, including a Dalit, or low-caste, bowler Palwankar Baloo, and Muslim cricketers from the Islamic educational centre of Aligarh." - James Lamont, The Financial Times "Prashant Kidambi tells the intriguing story of the first "All-India", and largely forgotten, team to reach British shores. "Selected as a 2019 Sport Book of the Year in The Financial Times" "Shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize" For the philosophers of sport, this material should also prompt further reflection on the implications of spreading sports over large geographical areas while sticking to formally unified technical frameworks." - Jacob Kornbeck, The International Journal of the History of Sport "For scholars involved in the humanities and social sciences of sport, there is much to learn and use from the findings reported by Kidambi from his archival research. " Cricket Country marks a very significant departure from the conventional writings on Indian cricket in "setting its narrative within a transnational frame".It also significantly contributes to the genre of exploring neglected episodes of Indian sporting history and reconstructing the fascinating narratives of those episodes in the context of colonial and postcolonial India." - Kausik Bandyopadhyay, Journal of Modern History Shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Book Prize.Over the course of a historic tour in the blazing Coronation summer of 1911, these Indian cricketers participated in a collective enterprise that epitomizes the role played by sport in fashioning the imagined communities of both nation and empire.A tale with an improbable cast of characters, set against the backdrop of anti-colonial protest and revolutionary terrorism in the high noon of Edwardian imperialism, with an Indian team that included the young, newly enthroned, ruler of the most powerful Sikh state in India as its captain and, remarkably for the day, two Dalit cricketers as well.The extraordinary tale of how the idea of India took shape on the cricket pitch long before the country gained its political independence. ![]() Drawing on an unparalleled range of original archival sources, Cricket Country is the story of this first 'All India' national cricket tour of Great Britain and Ireland.The extraordinary story of the first 'All India' national cricket tour of Great Britain and Ireland - and how the idea of India as a nation took shape on the cricket pitch. ![]()
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