Did you know that Lala Amarnath was once charged with accepting a purse of Rs. 5,000 from cricket enthusiasts in Calcutta for including a Bengali player in the Indian side? Or that an Indian side was forced to come back from the UK because they had no money to eat and live on? Or that match fixing was alive and well in India as early as 1948? These are some of the controversial moments in Indian cricket history which Boria Majumdar retrieves from the dusty shelves of archives for this delightful new volume. Extensively based on nearly forgotten and long out-of-print classic titles, old newspaper reports and official archives, this volume is an important addition to the steadily growing corpus of contemporary writing on the history of Indian cricket. Each chapter of the book presents a captivating story of intrigue and power-play. Through a look at controversies that have plagued Indian cricket over the years, this book draws attention to the fact that the country’s intense engagement with the game stretches back more than a century. In doing so the author brings to light the writings of those he calls the ‘day-do-day historians’ of cricket, like J.C. Maitra, Berry Sarbadhikary and J.M. Ganguly, who had written on the game for years in newspapers and journals, yet remain little known to even the most avid sports enthusiast in contemporary India. This volume, the first in a new series called Sport in south Asia, brings to life a cricketing past that is fast disappearing, whilst restoring lost pages of our cricket history, and resuscitating forgotten protagonists, both players and administrators. An engaging slice from the fascinating saga of Indian cricket, this book is as much a collector’s item for the sports enthusiast, as it is serious reading for the cultural historian.
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