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and 2007) and three champions trophies. This would not have been possible without advertising and satellite-TV money from the subcontinent. A huge chunk of the 1.25 billion global television audience for the South African World Cup was Indian.
    TV gave the Indian fan not merely a more diverse menu; it offered his obsession wings. Suddenly, we were exposed to fandom in the international sense: faces painted in the country’s colours, banners and placards, the Mexican wave and the chants. Seeing what our counterparts did in other parts of the world gave us a template. Young people going to the grounds in India or watching the game from their living rooms realised for the first time that there existed a code of conduct for supporters, liable to be adapted differently according to the demands of each ground or team, but a code of conduct nonetheless. (The Bharat Army, an indefatigable – and indefatigably good-humoured – band of expatriate Indian supporters who danced the bhangra at cricket grounds, was modelled on the Barmy Army.) Before long, fans – and players – from this part of the world began to realise that they were more crucial to the health and the future of the game than they had hitherto believed.
    Nearly three decades ago, I considered any cricket played on the subcontinent as an approximation of the real thing.
That
happened on English cricket grounds. A seven-year-old Indian today believes that the game played on his home ground is the genuine stuff; all else is merely a watered-down version, a pale imitation of it.
    The manner in which India has made cricket its very own – in terms of the money it generates, the frenzy it engenders and its intrusion into every area of public life, from pop culture to politics – is a marker of India’s post-colonial present. Like the English language itself, cricket was a game that was made popular in India by the British. And like the English language, it has, over the years, been appropriated by Indians in a very Indian way. It is not just that cricket now touches more hearts and fosters more excitement in India than in the land of its birth. Even the enthusiasm – its pitch, texture and unbridled overflow – is very different on the subcontinent. (Multiply by one million the kind of atmosphere you get at an India game at an English ground and you are beginning to get there.) The empire has taken England’s national game, subverted accepted notions of how fans respond to it and turned it into something that is its very own.
    When
Time Asia
ran a feature on the eve of the 1999 World Cup, it stumbled upon a touching, funny anecdote that exemplifies how deep this idea of cricket being an essentially Indian sport has now taken root. The magazine interviewed a young boy, Sukhdev, who played, in front of an admiring, unemployed audience, a serious game of cricket in the shadows of Delhi’s Red Fort. ‘[Sukhdev] is confused about where the game originated; he believes it began in the subcontinent. “The English,” he says, “must have stolen it from us.”’
    The advertising industry – always a prism through which social trends are reflected – was one of the first to cash in on this. A slew of brands began to use cricketers as ambassadors. And as they successfully raised the sales of colas or credit cards, they began to be seen as sure bets for commercial success, even if the products they advertised had little to do with the game. Driven by the millions he made from endorsements, Sachin Tendulkar became the world’s richest cricketer. Cricket was no longer a game any more. It had become Cricket Inc.
    Followers sensed that the cricket pitch was one arena (perhaps the
only
arena) in which India could hold its own against the rest of the world. It is a situation which has not much changed in the twenty-first century.
    Today, India is an emerging economic superpower. Jeffrey Sachs, special advisor to