Besides consolidating India?s position as the world cricket?s financial capital, the IPL has also played its part in countering the racial problem, one that continues to plague international sports contests. The discourse on ?race? in India has been historically predicated upon a position of relative under privilege. India, considered a ?white man?s burden? during its colonial conditioning, fought for nearly two centuries to free itself of this position of inferiority. While discrimination based on conditions of colour and economic pre-eminence was a regular practice in colonial India, its vestige continued for decades after independence. Hence, every time an Indian was/is questioned by an immigration official on entering a Western country, it is immediately perceived as a deliberate act of racial discrimination. To go a step further, most Indians settled in the West were, till a couple of decades earlier, expected to be living in a ghettoised suburban space, hardly ever integrated into the mainstream of Western society. This understanding of the West as ?superior? made for divisions between the occident and the orient and allowed for the perpetuation of the doctrine of ?orientalism?.

Such a common man?s understanding of race has been substantively transformed in recent times and the Indian Premier League, a hugely successful Indian innovation, has certainly helped mediate this change. Race, in contemporary India, is no longer a discourse predicated upon notions of inferiority. Rather, off late at least, it is built upon a notion of privilege, which has largely to do with India?s new-found status as a world player in an era of globalisation. At no point am I trying to claim that the IPL is a singular mover in heralding this transformation. Rather, it is my contention that the IPL has significantly enhanced the process, which, in the sporting domain, was spearheaded by India?s takeover of world cricket?s finances from the middle of the 1990s. With the nerve centre of cricket moving to India, a process the IPL has finally completed, there occurred three significant changes:

* The West was much better co-opted and appropriated within the Indian imaginary.

* It brings to light the complex and also exceptional nature of India?s racialised modernity.

* Finally, an aggressive hyper jingoistic nationalist sentiment has emerged in India and it often results in a complete overturn of the conventional racial ideology.

This transformed race reality is borne out by an ethnography of spectator behaviour across IPL matches in South Africa in 2009. For example, when Shane Warne rushed to congratulate Yusuf Pathan after his super over heroics against the Kolkata Knight Riders, the large Indian diasporic crowd was spontaneous in applauding Warne for his gesture. The Australian superhero, taken out of his nationalist context, had suddenly been appropriated and indigenised and was a key member of the Rajasthan Royals side. In the first edition of the IPL, too, this feature was prominent. David Hussey, the most consistent batsman for the Kolkata team in IPL season one, had soon become ?Hussey da?, meaning elder brother in the vernacular. However, this co-option rests on unstable foundations, a fact evident from the venom spilt at coach John Buchanan each time the Kolkata Knight Riders failed to deliver. Each failure was been greeted with murmurs of a ?white man here in India just for the money?.

This behaviour, it needs to be stated, is an exact throwback to a century earlier, when the British reacted in an exact similar manner to Ranji, Indian cricket?s first superhero. When Ranji scored a century on debut for England against Australia in 1896, his performance had a multi-layered impact. In England, he became the people?s darling and roused a ?Ranji fever?. In India, contrastingly, Ranji?s batting was declared a triumph of nationalism on the sporting field disregarding the fact that Ranji was playing for Britain, the ?white master?. For the colonial Indian imagination, the political reality of colonialism was relegated to a lower rung in the hierarchy, below the cardinal question of ?race?.

British administrators in India also tried to bail Ranji out of his financial difficulties on grounds that it was unworthy of a great cricketer to suffer such ignominy. For the British in India, Ranji was a hero having performed well against arch rivals Australia. The British rulers saw him as proto-British and used him as a trump card in sports contests against Australia. However, every time he failed, it didn?t take much time for the spectators to label him ?dirty nigger?, displaying how sports as a social practice has always been used to signify far deeper and more significant cultural attitudes and political contours.

?The writer is a cricket historian