CRICKET AND THE IDEA OF INDIA

‘Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English’, it has famously been said. Today, the Indian cricket team is a powerful national symbol, a unifying force in a country riven by conflicts. But India was represented by a cricket team long before it became an independent nation.

My lecture tells the extraordinary story of how the ‘idea of India’ emerged on the cricket field in the high noon of empire. Conceived by an unlikely coalition of colonial and local elites, it took twelve years and three failed attempts before a representative Indian cricket team made its debut on the playing fields of imperial Britain in 1911.

This historic tour, which took place against the backdrop of revolutionary protest in the Edwardian era, featured an improbable cast of characters. The team’s young captain was Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, the embattled ruler of Patiala. The other cricketers were chosen on the basis of their religious identity. Remarkably, for the day, two of the players belonged to a community denigrated as ‘Untouchable’.

Over the course of a blazing Coronation summer, these long-forgotten Indian heroes participated in a collective enterprise that epitomizes how sport— and above all cricket—helped fashion the imagined communities of both empire and nation.

Film Screening of "From Where We Stand" and discussion with Lucy Kaye and Adrian Favell

Lucy Kaye's one hour documentary and deep dive into the life and times of residents of three post industrial towns in the North of England is at once moving, visually haunting, and (in parts) disturbingly raw. It is part of a 4 year project run at the University of Leeds which took a sociological look at political disaffection -- and issues of austerity, deprivation, race and nation -- in the North of England after Brexit and during COVID.

With a direct and spontaneous approach, filmmaker Lucy Kaye creates intimate portraits of diverse individuals in three post-industrial northern English towns. Through the stories of people connected by place, the film explores our relationship with where we’ve come from, what we’ve left behind and where we live. Amongst the people we meet are Bini, a former asylum seeker from Eritrea trying to root himself in Middlesbrough; Stella, a Polish woman stuck in the UK after a relationship breakdown, making a life for herself and her daughter; and Yan, a former power station worker enveloped in nostalgia for the past. We also get to know Yubi, a Pakistani immigrant mourning the passing of his father in Wakefield; and Lisa, another Halifax resident determined to make sure the voices of her community are heard. In pared-back verité style that deploys music and lingering shots of the landscapes that define these lives, From Where We Stand offers the people portrayed time and space to express how they feel about their lives and their towns.

Background:

From Where We Stand is made in collaboration with the Northern Exposure research project at the University of Leeds. Adrian Favell, is Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork and is PI of the Northern Exposure Project at University of Leeds. The research explores notions of identity, place and disaffection in post-industrial towns in the North of England after Brexit. More information can be found here: https://northernexposure.leeds.ac.uk/.

https://fromwherewestand.co.uk/

Host
Institute for European Studies

Cosponsors
Sociology
Migrations

In a world of massive inequalities between nations, and where citizenship at birth is the biggest determining factor of anyone's life chances, migration and international mobility are often seen as dramatic mechanisms of change. Yet strict borders and hierarchies between nations persist. The recently initiated five year ERC Advanced Grant project, MIGMOBS - The Orders and Border of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism (2024-28) investigates how and why global inequalities are reproduced through the shifting classification of mobile populations. In opening a new vision by seeing "international migration" as only a narrow and symbolically overcharged slice in a continuum of "mobilities", both human and non-human, it effects a paradigm shift in conventional migration studies, in both theoretical and operational terms. Building a global database with case studies across 23 sending and receiving countries, MIGMOBS charts how nation-states have preserved power through the era of neoliberalism by selectively opening and closing channels of mobility: making immigration and asylum the obsessive target of sovereign control while rendering invisible and fluid the mass mobilities of tourism, students, business and commuter travel. For more information, contact the PI, Adrian Favell (adrian.favell@ucc.ie), or see: https://www.ucc.ie/en/migmobs

Adrian Favell is Professor of Social and Political Theory and Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork. He directed the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds, and was also Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, Aarhus University and UCLA. He is the author of various works on migration, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and cities, notably a recent book with Polity Press (2022) The Integration Nation: Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies. He directs the ERC AdG Project MIGMOBS - The Orders and Border of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism (2024-28) . Website: www.adrianfavell.com

Host
Institute for European Studies

Cosponsors
Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative
Comparative Muslim Societies Program
Sociology