History

A. Cricket, race and religion :
(i) Cricket in colonial India was organised on the principle of race and religion. The first record we have of cricket being played in India is from 1721, an account of recreational cricket played by English sailors in Cambay. The first Indian club, the Calcutta Cricket Club, was established in 1792. Through the eighteenth century, cricket in India was almost wholly a sport played by British military men and civil servants in all-white clubs and gymkhanas. Indians were considered to have no talent for the game and certainly not meant to play it. But they did.
(ii) The origins of Indian cricket, that is, cricket played by Indians are to be found in Bombay and the first Indian community to start playing the game was the small community of Zoroastrians, the Parsis. The Parsis founded the first Indian cricket club, the Oriental Cricket Club in Bombay in 1848. The white cricket elite in India offered no help to the enthusiastic Parsis. In fact, there was a quarrel between the Bombay Gymkhana, a whites-only club, and Parsi cricketers over the use of a public park. When it became clear that the colonial authorities were prejudiced in favour of their white compatriots, the Parsis built their own gymkhana to play cricket in.. A Parsi team beat the Bombay Gymkhana at cricket in 1889, just four years after the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885.
(iii) By the 1890s, Hindus and Muslims were busy gathering funds and support for a Hindu Gymkhana and an Islam Gymkhana. In the late nineteenth century, many Indian institutions and movements were organised around the idea of religious community because the colonial state encouraged these divisions and was quick to recognise communal institutions. Applications that used the communal categories favoured by the colonial state were, more likely to be approved.
(iv) This history of gymkhana cricket led to first-class cricket being organised on communal and racial lines. The tournament was initially called the Quadrangular, because it was played by four teams: the Europeans, the Parsis, the Hindus and the Muslims. It later became the Pentangular when a fifth team was added, namely, the Rest, which comprised all the communities left over, such as the Indian Christians.
(v) By the late 1930s and early 1940s, journalists, cricketers and political leaders had begun to criticize the racial and communal foundations of the Pentangular tournament. They condemned the pentangular as a communally divisive competition that was out of place in a time when nationalists were trying to unite India' diverse population. A rival first-class tournament on regional lines, the National Cricket Championship (later named the Ranji Trophy), was established but not untill independence did it properly replace the pentagular, Pentangular was a colonial tournament and it died with the Raj.
B. Mahatma Gandhi's views on cricket :
Mahatma Gandhi believed that sport was essential for creating a balance between the body and the mind. However , he often emphasised that games like cricket and hockey were imported into India by the British and were replacing traditional games. Such games as cricket, hockey, football and tennis were for the privileged, he believed. They showed a colonial mindset and were a less active education than the simple exercise of those who worked on the land.