Why, on the one hand, did cricket flourish in lands like Pakistan and India? And why, on the other hand, is cricket not much played in the United States, with its heritage and 'special relationship' with Britain? For decades, historians have debated this question. This is yet another attempt to explicate how and why cricket and baseball, both with century-old histories, became national passions in two of the world's biggest erstwhile colonies, and were appropriated and subverted by indigenous peoples for purposes of confrontation against the Empire. In both cases, the common reference point remains the Empire. While in the Americas, the desire was to dissociate American sport from British sport, in countries like India where the Empire lasted far longer, the intention was to appropriate and subsequently indigenize British sports for purposes of resistance. In fact, the American reaction to Empire sport was simply the opposite of the Indian retort to imperial games. In India, the nationalist movement from the close of the nineteenth century made it imperative that cricket be taken up as a non-violent means to compete with the ruling British. In the United States, where independence was achieved a century and a half earlier than India, this need was totally irrelevant. Rather, what was important in the US was to sever all sporting connections with the empire to emphasize an independent American identity. It is this inverse invocation of nationalism, we have argued, that best provides the key to unwinding the old dichotomy, Why Baseball Why Cricket? in differing global contexts.
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