Patrons, Players and Sports in the Princely States

This essay explores the history of princely patronage to sports in colonial India and argues that the sporting field allowed a hybrid princely culture to evolve. Scholarship on colonial sports has focused either on the diffusion of British principles of a racialised and classed order or the complicity of team sports in reproducing local caste and communal fissures. Ramachandra Guha explores this theme of sports articulating and even exacerbating political tensions in Indian society by looking at cricket as a site for the development of communalist (Hindu and Muslim) identities during the 1930s and 1940s.