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.

Certainly this is a link that that sociologists and historians have stressed, ever since C L R James inaugurated the discipline of sport history with the statement: ?What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?? Presaging the rise of modern sport history and sociology, his classic Beyond a Boundary stressed how cricket either helped form or supplemented social practices based on the intersecting lines of colour and class in colonial and post-colonial societies. It initiated the study of sport as a relational idiom, as a magnifying glass amplifying the values, symbols, fissures and tensions of a society. Indian cricket literature, in the past decade, has taken this line of enquiry and a great deal of scholarship has stressed its political dimension. There is no doubt that cricket?s hegemony on television is tied to nationalism, and television, for its own purposes, has played a big role.

Cricket?s sheer length and complexity makes it one of the most tele-friendly games on the planet. For instance, a TAM study in 2002 found that in comparison to soccer, cricket offered far greater and more effective opportunities for advertisers. This partly explains why in 2001 as many as 473 brands advertised on cricket for 16,400 advertising spots on television. For television in general, cricket is a news event, for which advertising can be bought and sold well in advance.

The point is that cricket, in the Gramscian sense, is now a central pillar of the cultural superstructure of India. Bollywood is the second pillar of this superstructure and the two have now begun interfacing. Popular culture is a highly contested arena where the idea of India is always fought over. It is a relational idiom which reflects the ongoing conflicts, fissures and tensions of society. If one judges by the evidence of Bollywood, the verdict is clear: cricket is now central to the idea of India and Indian-ness and this cricket is very different from the gentlemanly imperial sport that the British had in mind when they first introduced it in India. India has appropriated and Indianised cricket and the Champions League is yet another exemplar.

?The writer is Joint General Editor, Sport, Global Society (Routledge)