Cricket is a bat-and-ball game between two teams of eleven, codified in eighteenth-century England and carried across the British Empire as a tool of imperial culture meant to teach colonial subjects an idealized set of 'English' values. The colonized embraced it, mastered it, and turned it around: beating England at its own game became a form of dignity and self-assertion. Today the sport's heartland is the Indian subcontinent, where it is a near-religion, India-Pakistan matches draw hundreds of millions, and the money and power have shifted decisively from London to India. Cricket is the rare imperial inheritance the former subjects made more their own than the rulers ever were.
In June 1983, a West Indies side that had won the previous two World Cups walked out at Lord's, the London ground long treated as cricket's spiritual home, expecting to beat India easily. India had been given almost no chance. They bowled the favorites out and won. Across the Indian subcontinent, people poured into the streets. A game the British had brought to instill discipline, deference, and fair play had just been won, on English soil, by a former colony that was supposed to be the pupil. Within a generation, the sport's money, its biggest crowds, and its governing power had all moved east, from England to India. The rulers' game had become the ruled people's passion, and then their possession.