Origin of Cricket in India: How the Game Arrived and Took Root

Cricket did not arrive in India as a gift. It arrived as freight, carried in the baggage of sailors, soldiers and company clerks who wanted something familiar to do on foreign ground. For most of the first century it stayed inside that world. The interesting part of the story is not the arrival. It is the long, uneven, occasionally hostile process by which Indians took a game played by the people governing them and made it their own, well before there was an Indian team, an Indian board, or an Indian Test match to talk about.

That process took roughly two hundred years. It ran through the docks of Cambay, the maidans of Bombay, the courts of princely states, the colleges of Madras and Lahore, and eventually the committee rooms where a national administration was assembled out of regional associations that did not much like each other. By the time India walked onto the field at Lord's in the summer of 1932, the groundwork had been laid by four generations of players whose names rarely survive outside specialist histories. What follows is that groundwork. The national team's own story picks up in our history of Indian cricket, and the wider set of national beginnings sits in our cricket history section.

The earliest recorded games on Indian soil

The first documented cricket in India was played by English sailors. A journal kept by a mariner records a game at Cambay, in Gujarat, in 1721, watched with some bemusement by locals who had no reason to know what they were looking at. It is a single reference, and it describes an isolated recreation rather than the start of anything. Nothing traceable follows it for decades.

What followed instead was garrison cricket. Wherever the East India Company established a settlement of any size, it eventually established a place to play. Calcutta had a cricket club by the closing years of the eighteenth century, and the Calcutta Cricket Club is generally counted among the oldest clubs anywhere outside Britain. Madras had one by the 1840s. Bombay had European clubs playing on the open ground beside the sea. These were closed institutions. Membership followed the lines of colonial society, which meant that for the better part of a hundred years cricket in India was a game Indians could watch but not join.

That is worth stating without softening it. The early clubs were not neutral sporting bodies that Indians happened not to have discovered. They were social institutions of an occupying commercial power, and exclusion was a design feature. The question of how the game escaped them is therefore the central question of Indian cricket's origins.

Why the game spread at all

Three things helped. The first was space. The maidans of Bombay and the open grounds of Calcutta and Madras were public in a way that pavilions were not, and a boy with a bat could not be kept off them. The second was mimicry, which is how most sport travels: children copy what they see adults doing, and there were adults doing it in plain view. The third was that cricket suited the climate and the available ground far better than most alternatives. It needed almost nothing except flat earth and daylight, both of which India had in quantity.

Parsi Bombay and the first Indian clubs

The community that took the game up first, and took it up seriously, was the Parsis of Bombay. There are practical reasons for this. The Parsis were a small, commercially successful, English-educated minority who traded closely with the British and were less bound than other communities by dietary and social rules that made mixing awkward. They were also, by the middle of the nineteenth century, physically concentrated in the very part of Bombay where cricket was being played in front of them every week.

Parsi boys began playing on the Esplanade in the 1830s and 1840s with improvised equipment. In 1848 a group of them founded the Oriental Cricket Club, which is conventionally treated as the first cricket club run by Indians. It did not last, but the pattern it set did. The Young Zoroastrian Club, founded around 1850, proved far more durable and survives to this day, which makes it one of the oldest continuously functioning Indian sporting institutions of any kind.

The fight over the maidan

Parsi cricket produced the first genuine confrontation between Indian players and the colonial establishment, and it was about ground rather than results. Parsi clubs pitched tents on the Bombay Esplanade to use as changing rooms and shelter. European residents objected, complaining that the tents obstructed their riding and polo. Petitions went back and forth to the authorities through the 1870s and 1880s.

The dispute reads as trivial and was not. It was the first time Indian cricketers organised themselves collectively to defend a claim to public space against European objection, and they largely got what they wanted. Anyone tracing the politics of Indian cricket back to its source finds it there, in an argument about tents.

The Parsi tours and the first win

Parsi teams toured England twice, in 1886 and again in 1888. The first tour was a heavy defeat and treated as a curiosity by the English press. The second was noticeably better. What mattered more was what happened at home shortly afterwards: in the 1889-90 season a Parsi side beat G. F. Vernon's touring English team in Bombay. It was the first victory by an Indian side over a visiting English team, and it changed the register of the conversation. The bowler Mehallasha Pavri, who did much of the damage, became the first Indian cricketer with a genuine public reputation.

The Quadrangular, the Pentangular, and cricket organised by community

Out of the Parsi-European rivalry grew the tournament structure that dominated Indian cricket for half a century. The annual Presidency Match between Parsis and Europeans in Bombay became a fixed point of the sporting calendar in the 1890s. A Hindu team joined in 1907, making it a Triangular. A Muslim team joined in 1912, making it a Quadrangular. A composite side called The Rest, taking in Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, Jews and anyone else outside the four named categories, joined in 1937, and the tournament became the Bombay Pentangular.

Stage	From	Teams
Presidency Match	1890s	Parsis, Europeans
Triangular	1907	Parsis, Europeans, Hindus
Quadrangular	1912	Parsis, Europeans, Hindus, Muslims
Pentangular	1937	The four above, plus The Rest

For decades this was the most important cricket played in India. It drew enormous crowds, it made reputations, and it gave players from every part of the country a stage. It also organised cricket explicitly along communal lines at exactly the moment when Indian politics was becoming dangerously organised along the same lines, and a good many people said so at the time.

The argument that ended it

Opposition to the Pentangular came from Indian nationalists rather than from the colonial administration. The objection was straightforward: a tournament that asked spectators to support a team because of their religion was a poor thing to run in a country trying to hold itself together. Mahatma Gandhi was asked for his view in 1940 and gave it plainly, saying he would like to see the communal tournament discontinued. Several prominent cricketers took the same position; others defended the tournament as the only thing keeping Indian cricket financially alive.

The Pentangular was played for the last time in the 1945-46 season. Its replacement was already in place, and the replacement was organised by region rather than by community. That shift is one of the quietly important decisions in the history of the Indian game.

Cricket beyond Bombay

Bombay dominates the origin story because Bombay generated the records, the newspapers and the tournaments. It was never the only place playing.

Calcutta had the older club and, for much of the nineteenth century, the more European game. Bengali cricket grew through schools and colleges rather than through a single community, and Eden Gardens was laid out as a ground long before it became the vast arena of the modern era. Madras built its cricket around clubs, colleges and the Presidency's civil service, and produced administrators as readily as players. In the Punjab, the game spread through cantonments, railway workshops and colleges, and Lahore in particular developed a strong cricketing culture that would later belong to a different country entirely.

Then there were the states. Holkar, Baroda, Hyderabad and Patiala all built sides of genuine first-class quality, staffed partly by imported talent and partly by local players who owed their livelihoods to the ruler. Central India produced cricketers who would have been lost entirely under a purely city-based structure.

Matting, turf and the shape of Indian pitches

Most early Indian cricket was played on matting laid over hard earth. Coir or jute matting gave a consistent, fast-ish surface that took spin sharply once it wore, and it required none of the water and groundsmanship that a turf square demands in a hot climate. Turf pitches arrived unevenly, city by city, over the first half of the twentieth century.

This has a bearing on what kind of cricketers India produced. Matting rewarded accuracy and bounce, and it made finger spin dangerous rather than merely economical. When Indian sides later became famous for spin, they were building on several generations of players who had learned the craft on surfaces that turned from the first over. The equipment position was similar: bats and balls were expensive imports for most of this period, and a great deal of learning happened with improvised gear on ground nobody had prepared.

Princes, patrons and the economics of playing

Nobody in India could live on cricket in this period. Players who were good enough to play a lot needed someone to pay them for doing something else, and the people who paid were the rulers of the princely states. Patiala, Baroda, Vizianagram, Natore, Holkar and others maintained teams, imported English professionals as coaches, and employed talented cricketers in nominal administrative posts so that they could be available for matches.

The system was self-serving and produced obvious absurdities, including princes selecting themselves to captain sides they were not good enough to play in. It also functioned. Without princely money, a generation of Indian cricketers would simply have had to stop playing in their twenties, and the tours that built Indian cricket's case for recognition would not have been financed at all.

Ranjitsinhji and Duleepsinhji

Two Indian cricketers became famous long before India had a team, and both played their international cricket for England. Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, of Nawanagar, went up to Cambridge, played for Sussex, and made his England debut in 1896. He was a batsman of genuinely original technique, credited with popularising the leg glance, and he was for a period among the most celebrated sportsmen in Britain. He never played for India, and by most accounts kept a careful distance from Indian cricket administration.

His nephew Kumar Shri Duleepsinhji followed the same route, Cambridge and Sussex, and played for England from 1929. Both men were extraordinary players, and both are a reminder of how the imperial system worked. Talent from India could be recognised at the highest level, provided it was routed through England. Something similar was true in reverse: the Nawab of Pataudi senior scored a century on his England debut in the 1932 Ashes, and later captained India. The England side's own beginnings are covered in our origin of cricket in England piece, and the fixture that defined it in our Ashes section and the accompanying history of the Ashes.

Who was allowed to play

The communal tournaments told spectators which team to support. They said nothing about who, within each community, was permitted to represent it, and that question produced the sharpest social conflicts in early Indian cricket.

The Hindu team in Bombay drew on a Hindu Gymkhana whose membership reflected the caste hierarchy of the city. When Palwankar Baloo became the best slow bowler in India, his selection was resisted, then grudgingly accepted, then defended by younger players who cared more about winning than about precedence. His brothers followed him into the side. In the early 1920s his brother Vithal captained the Hindus in the Quadrangular, which was a public repudiation of the argument that had been used against the family for twenty years. Baloo himself later took part in politics on the side of Dalit representation, in the era when B. R. Ambedkar was building that movement.

Access widened for less dramatic reasons too. Textile mills in Bombay ran teams for their workers. Railways ran teams across the whole subcontinent, and railway employment became one of the standard ways for a good cricketer without means to keep playing. Schools and colleges, particularly the mission colleges of Madras and the Punjab, produced players who had never been near a gymkhana. None of this made cricket egalitarian. It did make it much harder to keep it confined.

Building an administration

Indian cricket had players, crowds and money long before it had anyone who could speak for it. Regional associations existed and were jealous of each other. There was no single body that a touring team could negotiate with, and no single body that could put India's case to the sport's governing conference in London.

Two developments changed that. India was admitted to the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1926, alongside New Zealand and the West Indies, which created a seat that somebody had to occupy. In the same season an MCC side toured India under Arthur Gilligan, and Gilligan made it clear that a properly constituted national board would be looked on favourably. The Board of Control for Cricket in India was formed in December 1928, drawing together the regional associations under a single constitution.

The Ranji Trophy

The BCCI's most consequential early act was to create a national first-class championship. The competition began in the 1934-35 season and was named for Ranjitsinhji, who had died the previous year. Bombay won the inaugural title, which set a habit they kept for a very long time.

The Ranji Trophy did several things at once. It organised Indian cricket by geography rather than by religion, which was the direct answer to the Pentangular problem. It created a repeatable, season-long standard of first-class cricket against which selectors could actually judge players. And it gave cities and provinces without a Bombay-sized cricket culture a reason to build one. Almost every Indian Test cricketer for the next seventy years came through it, and the selection debates it generates still shape any argument about a national playing XI.

The road to Test status

By the late 1920s the case for India was becoming difficult to refuse. There was a board, a fixture list, a supply of high-quality players and a demonstrated ability to beat visiting English sides in individual matches. An All-India team toured England in 1911 under the Maharaja of Patiala, playing first-class matches without Test status. Further tours followed. Each one made the same argument in a different way.

The 1911 tour is worth pausing on. It was the first attempt at a team representing India as a whole rather than a single community, and assembling it exposed every problem the game had. Hindu, Muslim and Parsi players had to be persuaded into one dressing room. The finance came from a prince. The results were poor, in a wet English summer against county sides who took the fixtures more seriously than the tourists could cope with. The one player who emerged with a reputation was Palwankar Baloo, a slow left-armer from a Dalit family whose career had already forced Bombay cricket to confront caste directly, since teammates who would not eat with him were happy enough to field to his bowling. His story is one of the harder truths in this period and it belongs in any honest account of it.

There were further tours in the 1920s and early 1930s, and visiting English sides came the other way. Each trip produced the same conclusion in the reports that followed: India had batsmen and spinners of clear Test quality, an unreliable supporting cast, and an administration that had only just started to function. The Imperial Cricket Conference granted Test status regardless, on the reasonable view that the standard would not rise until the fixtures existed.

India played its first Test match in June 1932, at Lord's, a single three-day fixture against England. C. K. Nayudu captained. Nayudu had been the outstanding Indian batsman of the 1920s, a tall, aggressive hitter whose innings against Gilligan's MCC side in Bombay had entered folklore, and he was the natural choice in a squad where the captaincy had otherwise been a matter of princely politics. India lost, but not before the fast bowler Mohammad Nissar had knocked over the top of England's order in the first innings and given the small crowd something to think about.

That match is where this story stops and the national team's begins. Everything after it, the first Test win, the tours of 1971, the 1983 World Cup and the rest, is in our history of Indian cricket.

What the origin period left behind

Four inheritances from this era shaped everything that followed.

• Bombay as the centre of gravity. The city had the maidans, the clubs, the money and the tournaments. It dominated the Ranji Trophy for decades and supplied a disproportionate share of the national side, and the commercial weight of Indian cricket never really left it. Even in the Indian Premier League era, the Mumbai Indians inherited an audience that had been assembled over a century.
• Cricket as a public game. Because Indians learned it on open ground rather than in clubs, the maidan model of unsupervised, self-organised cricket became the default. It is still how most Indian cricketers start.
• A federal, association-based administration. The BCCI was built as a federation of regional bodies, and the internal politics of that arrangement have been a permanent feature of Indian cricket governance ever since.
• A domestic competition organised by place. Replacing communal teams with regional ones was a deliberate choice, and it held.

Cricket arrived in India as an imported recreation for people who were not Indian. It stayed that way for a century, then changed hands community by community, city by city, until the imported game had a national board, a national championship and a Test side. The comparable story elsewhere ran differently in each country: settlers took it up quickly in Australia, the plantation and garrison structure shaped it across the Caribbean, and in the territory that became Pakistan it grew out of the colleges and cantonments of Lahore and the port trade of Karachi. Sri Lanka's beginnings, traced in our origin of cricket in Sri Lanka piece, ran through the missionary schools of Colombo.

If you want to follow the individuals rather than the institutions, our player pages carry career records for the modern game, and our cricket quiz covers a fair amount of this early ground for anyone who wants to test what stuck.