Not that Brits should feel smug that they didn't have a monopoly on discrimination: when Indian teams started winning against white ones, there were rumblings about unfair home advantage and the like, at which point nationalists were able to turn the high-flown rhetoric of cricket back on their rulers a fascinating aspect of Guha's book is the story of the burgeoning independence movement - as well as its subsequent, fractured history. In spite of his talent, he was obliged to sit apart from his team-mates during the tea interval and drink from a disposable clay vessel while everyone else sipped from porcelain cups.
One contemporary puts it exquisitely: an over from Baloo contained "six deliveries - each a different menace and yet looking as harmless as the morning dew on a grass blade". As Guha points out, Baloo learned to work with leather in quite a different way. The first undisputably great Indian player, Palwankar Baloo, was a Chamaar, a caste loathed by others as they work with cattle hides. Would teams be composed along religious lines? How would Hindus react to the inclusion of Untouchables in the side? (The Untouchables were learning the game, their Raj employers not being sniffy about caste.)
The widening acceptance of the game threw all kinds of social and religious anxieties into the mix. They formed the splendidly named Young Zoroastrian Club in 1850, which is still going strong. The first Indian players of the game were Parsis, who were always more ready to accommodate the British. The memoirist may not have been looking in the right places, though. Yet there is a picture taken only 40 years later: a group of Himalayan villagers are playing the game in a rocky valley with bat and stumps carved straight from a nearby tree. An account of the game in the 1850s noted that Indians "were rather apt to look on a cricket match as proof of the lunatic propensities of their masters the sahibs, and to wonder what possible enjoyment they could find in running about in the sun all day after a leather ball".
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