The Politics of the Aesthetic: Cricket, Literature and Empire

Abstract

In his study, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture ofColonialisrn, Simon Gikandi suggests that cricket exemplifies the ambivalences and contradictions of colonialist culture. Cricket 'was considered, in both Victorian England and its colonies, to be the perfect expression of the values of bourgeois civility, Anglo-Saxon ethics, and public school morality', Gikandi writes, and because it was so closely linked to ideas of Englishness and nationhood, ' ... nationalists in India and the Caribbean were to posit their entry into the field of cricket as the mark of both their mastery of the culture of Englishness and their transcendence of its exclusive politics.' 1 Gikandi also notes that cricket in colonies such as India and the British West Indies worked itself out of such colonial ambivalences by radically reinventing the sport's terms of play and thus providing the colonial centre with a model of how to aesthetically reinvigorate one of its most important cultural forms.2