cricket should be the national game of india...

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Cricket is India’s de facto national game, if not its only secular religion of late. Indians, it is often suggested, like talking, reading, and writing on cricket. Indians love to watch their national cricket team play and worship their cricketing icons. They also invest safely in the “cricket industry.” Thanks to such preeminence of cricket in Indian life, books on Indian cricket are being published at a rapid pace. Boria Majumdar’s Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket is the most significant recent addition to this rich corpus of cricket writing. The work, commissioned by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), is a fruit of eclectic doctoral research, at once original and illuminating. It hits home a variety of themes, related and unrelated, uniquely illustrating a blend of conceptual, empirical, and analytical subtleties, which makes it a fascinating read. Invaluable for future sports historians and an asset to cricket aficionados, persons uninterested in sport as such but interested in broader themes of South Asian history also will find the book interesting as it outlines the processes by which phenomena such as colonialism, nationalism, communalism, regionalism, commercialism, and globalization are articulated through cricket in India. Unlike earlier attempts, it “aims to show how south Asian history and society have transformed cricket in the region while the game has simultaneously shaped the history and society of India, both before and after 1947” (16). More important, the work makes an invaluable contribution at a crucial juncture of the game’s history in a global context What is your opinion..