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Around 20 cyclists from India embarked on long and arduous intercontinental journeys between 1923 and 1942 individually or in groups. Many of these 'globe cyclists', as they were often referred to by the Indian press, later wrote media articles and longer travelogues about their expeditions. This article examines the narratives of these long-distance cycling expeditions to argue that these journeys can illuminate new histories of the bicycle's socio-cultural impact beyond the West, the self-fashioning of Indian cyclotourists as an example of complicit masculinity, and world tours as a novel form of anti-imperial counter-mobility. It does so by drawing on several historiographical subfields that have hitherto rarely been mobilized together, namely the histories of sports, masculinity, colonialism and decolonization, tourism, and (everyday) technology. The article focuses pars pro toto on the tours of Adi Hakim, Jal Bapasola, and Rustom Bhumgara (1923-1928) and Ramnath Biswas (1931-1940) that were strongly over-determined by the contexts of colonialism, anti-colonialism, and decolonisation, while nationalist masculinity represented another recurring trope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of modern India have emphasized the reflexivity of men and women in the making of womanhood, paying attention to notions of gender difference emerging from both primordial, restrictive codes of behaviour and contrarian impulses towards what was popularly called progress. There have been relatively few attempts to trace gender interaction in outdoor leisure activities, public displays of femininity, and male regulatory anxieties in the post-colonial context. By studying the symbolism of women's presence in the Eden Gardens, the international cricket stadium in Calcutta, from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article reflects on the nature of power, authority, and gender hierarchy in urban Indian society. This study of questions of gender hierarchy, women's mannerisms, social identity, and informal resistance through a historical lens will enable us to understand the trajectory of women's outsider status in urban public spaces. Through a reading of the mediated parti pris impressions of female spectators, it will also map the transition in society's approach to sport from a structured homosocial community activity to a relatively unstructured field of shared experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an introduction to the special issue, Cricket in the Twenty-First Century. It argues that cricket's struggle for global recognition and the shifting concerns about cricket's perceived 'character' provide two of the most significant meta-narratives to shape the game's historical and future development. However, in contrast to the degree of continuity these narratives appear to provide, the article argues that the game is currently undergoing a particularly rapid and radical phase of change. The contents of this special issue illustrate the processes that will dominate in the twenty-first century. These can be broadly categorised as the changing political economy of the game, the culturally-specific manifestations of cricket's political-economic landscape, and the intro- and retrospection within the English game. The article concludes with a state-of-the-art review of cricket scholarship, and some recommendations for future research agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fantasy sport has become a digital rage in the US and several European countries, while its presence has started to be felt in India in the 2010s with the expansion of smartphone technology. As the number of Indians playing fantasy cricket has exponentially grown over the last few years, concerns over the game being a front of organized online gambling has surfaced. In this article, I will explore the question whether or not fantasy cricket is a game of skill. I will analyse the extent of knowledge required for excelling in fantasy cricket in view of the 'glorious uncertainty' of cricket and the need to account for luck in any gameplay. Using the methods of autoethnography and phenomenology, I will study fantasy cricket as an object of my experience and offer an interpretive personal account to mediate a discussion about the extent to which knowledge is important in fantasy gaming success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contradictory responses to cricket in India from the perspective of transcultural encounters. Football and hockey lost their foreign character by the time of India’s independence in the mid-twentieth century, but cricket was not indigenized the same way and retained its Englishness. As a result, it was often considered as inimical to nation-building in the age of decolonization, leading to periodic calls for its boycott. Although cricket grew in popularity and gradually emerged as India’s favourite sport, its English origin and discourses are still criticized in the mass media and public sphere. The historiography of cricket in India has analysed the proliferation of cricket in India as an accomplishment of the state, corporate and private patronage networks, and the ‘games ethic’ as cultivated by cross-cultural interactions. It has focused on the diffusion and resistance models but has overlooked the complex entanglements of the bridges of transfer, the conflicts in the ideational space mediated by agents of transfer, and the hypertexts of transferred culture across social strata. This article offers a corrective to this methodological problem by analyzing the dilemma of cricket’s appropriation in the light of the ambiguities of cultural transfer. By linking the debates about cricket’s legitimacy as an Indian sport to the operations of political ideologies, it maps the history of cultural transfers in a postcolonial setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the changes in the sports industry, the media coverage given to sports events, and the relationship between sports and international relations.