The first journal article helps rethink the history of Britain’s postcolonial political intervention in South Asia by arguing that Britain made a strong effort to pursue diplomacy through sport. It contends that cricket facilitated a dialogue between British and Indian political establishments and sport federations, and a study of their interaction deepens our understanding of the end of the British Empire in South Asia. Seeking to analyse cricket’s significance as a state-led policy, it makes two important contributions to the study of imperial and Commonwealth history. First, it suggests culture was an important arena of diplomatic negotiation between Britain and India that historians have largely overlooked, having been preoccupied with narratives to cooperation and conflict in politics and economy. It this provides fresh insights into late imperial and postimperial diplomacy in the context of South Asian decolonisation and Commonwealth politics. Second, it enhances our understanding of the importance of sport in Commonwealth relations and postcolonial cooperation. As the nucleus of the symbolic construction of postcolonial British and South Asian bilateral politics, cricket offers insights into post-war East-West international collaboration and the creation of a British sphere of influence. It also helps reconsider the process of decolonisation in a manner generalisable to the Commonwealth and the postcolonial world in the 1940s and 1950s. In this regard, the article discusses the use of cultural diplomacy as a means to shape a country’s international perception and enriches the historiography of state-led cultural missions, showing that far-reaching cultural institutions were not limited to, for example, the British Council or BBC World Service. In doing so, the article contributes to the still relatively under-researched domain of how imperial powers reshaped an old symbol of empire into a shared culture while seeking closer unions with decolonised territories.
The second journal article studies cricket writings to explore how colonial metanarratives of the Indian nature continue to inform representations of the country and generate symbolic meanings of Indianness. A rich historiography with a critical eye on the intrusive role of colonialism, science, anthropology and so on in the making of India as a discourse as well as the development of complex Indian self-identities has formed around contradictory assessments of Indian history. The Western perception of India’s environment and people as adverse to the health and long term inhabitation of Europeans in India has been one of the principal themes in this literature. This article responds to this literature through a study of cricket writings that were less imaginative, innovative, and sophisticated than ethnographic and literary works on India but powerful and unpretentious in their display of the visceral consequences of the orientalising process that had tremendous implications for British colonial power in India. It is based on a study of books and press articles by cricketers and cricket correspondents from Australia, England, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, and West Indies that were published in the twentieth century, mostly after 1945. Produced by people of various races, religions, and nationalities, including the formerly colonised and marginalised, these narratives go beyond neat coloniser-colonised, East-West, North-South dichotomies. The spatial metaphors and ideological burdens of these texts are invaluable registers for examining how non-Indian people questioned or sublimated the colonial representations of India’s difference in late colonial and postcolonial times. The evaluation of difference by a multiracial group of actors helps analyse outsider perception and belief as a historical problem.
