National Conversations

Day Three of the Boxing Day Test, Australia vs India 2010

India and Australia – Cricket and Post-Colonialism:
A National Conversation with Boria Majumdar

Gideon Haigh and Professor Brian Stoddart

Venue: BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne
Date: 22 December 2011, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

This timely National Conversation conducted was conducted on the eve of India’s 2011-2012 Test series against Australia.

Australia and India were once both creatures of Empire.  Indian and Australian cricketers now inhabit a Post-Colonial world. This National Conversation asked how two very different cricketing nations have related on and beyond sporting ovals and how associated tensions manifested themselves on and off the cricket field?

Dr Boria Majumdar

India today is the game of cricket’s powerhouse. It has given the world Premier League and franchise cricket on a never before seen scale and controls world-wide deliberation of the game by the International Cricket Council (the ICC).  The game played by English gentlemen and raw colonial Australians has been transformed.  Five day Test cricket still thrives in Australia but in the rest of the world is giving way to shortened forms of the game. Cricket in India is grand spectacle with a turnover of millions. But it is a spectacle that unites a diverse nation. But has the game been transformed beyond recognition and what is its future? Are we witnessing a clash of cricketing cultures which will render traditional forms of the game redundant and lead ultimately to Mumbai becoming the determiner of cricketing business?

In this National Conversation on “Cricket and Post-colonialism”, Dr Boria Majumdar was  joined by leading Australian sports historian,  Professor Brian Stoddart, and The Australian’s acclaimed cricket correspondent, Gideon Haigh. In discussion they were joined by Melbourne Cricket Club Librarian and noted sports scholar Mr David Studham.

Taking the noted West Indian historian, critic and noted cricket writer C.L.R. James’ injunction to look at sport ‘beyond the boundary’ the panel discussed Indian cricket’s emergence from its colonial and communal origins through to its dominance as the game’s financial and political power, and the impact this has had on the ways in which the game is now played, administered and consumed worldwide.

Professor Brian Stoddart

Boria Majumdar was a Visiting Fellow with the National Centre for Australian Studies in 2011. He is a sports historian and one of the world’s leading commentators on contemporary cricket and South Asian sport. He is a graduate of Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Whilst at Monash he spoke to postgraduates and discussed research and book proposals with NCAS staff.  Whilst in Australia he appeared on ABC Radio, ABC Television and Radio Sport National.

Boria Majumdar is the author of the landmark social and cultural history of Indian cricket, Twenty-two Yards to Freedom (2004), Indian Cricket Through the Ages and many other books. He is a regular contributor to the Indian media and the press. He is a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Central Lancashire, Executive Academic Editor of the International Journal of the History of Sport and General Editor of the Routledge Series, Sport in the Global Society. He travels widely but lives in Calcutta, India where together with his wife Sharmistha Gooptu, who has a PhD in History from the University of Chicago and is a noted historian of Indian film, he directs the South Asia Research Foundation (SARF), a not-for-profit research body based in India.