Cricket, Public Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Calcutta

Souvik Naha is senior lecturer in imperial and post-colonial history at the University of Glasgow. Prior to joining Glasgow, he held the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship at Durham University. He has published extensively in colonial and postcolonial history and has co-edited several journal special issues including FIFA World Cup and Beyond: Sport, Culture, Media and Governance (2017), Global and Transnational Sport: Ambiguous Borders, Connected Domains (2017), Ethical Concerns in Sport Governance (2018), Moments, Metaphors, Memories: Defining Events in the History of Soccer (2019), and Cricket in the 21st Century (2021).

• Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Cricket, syndicated Englishness, and postcoloniality; 2. Narratives of cricket and collective history; 3. The making of a city of cricket; 4. Politicians, patronage, and centre-state relations; 5. Spectators, gender, and public space; 6. The moral economy of violent 'gentlemen'; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'Imaginative, well-researched, and well-argued, Naha's book makes an original contribution to the burgeoning field of sports history in South Asia and to cultural criticism in general. His deliberate eschewal of methodological nationalism and his skillful exploration of the “public culture” produced in Calcutta around the game of cricket - by media reports, sports commentaries, literary writings, gendered spectatorship, and policing and political practices - offer insights that will stay with all students of postcolonial histories. A remarkable achievement.' Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago, Illinois