Cricket: A pillar of cultural superstructure?

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Just last week ESPN-Star sports acquired the rights for Cricket’s Champions League for a whopping 900 million dollars. It was the logical culmination of a process that began in the 1980s. Cricket’s rise as the pre-eminent Indian game has been intimately connected with television. Television was consciously turned into a mass medium in the 1980s as a political/developmental strategy. This was accompanied with advertising, which augmented the creation of a ‘new consumer class’ and a new notion of collectivity expressed as ‘the middle class’. The fact that these developments coincided with the 1983 World Cup win fundamentally changed the balance of power between cricket and other sports in India.

Television created conditions for cricket to become a central component of new notions of national identity and consumer spectacle. The advent of satellite television pushed this linkage further and the advent of ESPN in 1993 contributed much to making cricket into India’s secular national pastime. When television capitalists searched for ‘national’ public in their quest to create a ‘national’ market, they ended up with cricket as the lowest denominator of Indian-ness. Satellite television is a cultural arena where the idea of India is debated and fought for every day and its focus on cricket since the 1990s has reinforced the centrality of cricket as a pan-Indian marker of ‘Indian-ness’. This is a two-way process and world cricket itself has been transformed by the massive infusion of capital from Indian television. The enormous money that television has generated for cricket has also transformed India into the spiritual and financial heart of the global cricket industry a process that needs to be applauded by every Indian sports fan.