Question

Explain why cricket became popular in India and the West Indies. Can you give reasons why it did not become popular in countries in South America?

Answer 1

Hint: In 1611, The first reference to cricket being played as an adult sport took place and in the same year, a dictionary defined cricket as a boys' game.

Complete answer:
The reason behind cricket being treated like a religion and the players being worshipped like a God, lies in the historical roots when the Indian subcontinent was under the British Raj via East India Company.

In 1737, the sailors of the company played cricket near Baroda at Cambay. The Indian elites too adopted the game quickly, and Parsees of Bombay, an educated westernized community, were the first who started playing cricket, and gradually the game spread to other communities like Muslims and Hindus as well. The inception of the Parsee Gymkhana for cricket bears testimony to creation of play clubs on the basis of religion.

Some British cricketers used the sport as a vehicle for bridging the relation between them and their subjects while some used it to be hostile and look down upon the Indians as they saw India in terms of collection of race, caste and religious divisions. The teams who played in first-class cricket tournaments represented religions, not the teams or regions they played for. Even the British wanted to capitalize on the idea of an “Indian cricket team”, but it failed to owe to the divisions among different religious groups. Around 1947, Indian masses demanding for independence saw cricket as a slow poison used for dividing the masses.

Cricket as a sport is not prevalent and popular in South America because they were not dominated or under-colonial rule like Asia and Africa, since it was a British game they were not introduced to cricket in the early years of expansion of the game.

Note: In India, under British rule cricket as an English sport suppressed the traditional Indian games like kabaddi- a game of tagging and chasing the opposite team, or “kushti in akhadas ” i.e. wrestling in an arena.