Now, it is a habit. There are thousands of articles written every single day on Indian sport. Some newspapers have three pages dedicated to sport, and there are countless websites and digital platforms that cover sports news and features. And more are springing up every single day. What is also interesting is that more and more sites are now starting to cover Olympic sport in India, and that only augurs well for the country going forward.
So, when did it all start? Har far back does sports writing in India go? What were the earliest pieces like, and where were they published? Which were the sports that got covered and how?
The significance of sports in Indian social life is borne out by the advanced nature of sports writing in the country in the first half of the nineteenth century. These reports, in most cases, were concerned with cricket, a favourite sport of the British soldiers and sailors. Horse racing was also a passion among the English residents of the country, evident from the extensive coverage it received in early sporting journals. Reports on football are available from the 1860s.
The earliest sports magazines, the Bengal Quarterly Sporting Magazine and the India Sporting Review, date back to the 1830s and 1840s. Sports coverage was of a fairly accomplished level and detailed rules of cricket and horse racing were published, often drawing queries from readers:
Dear Sir- will you very kindly favour me with an answer to the following query connected with the game of cricket. Is a batsman, when he is in common phraseology ‘winded’ allowed any time to recover breath?
November 23, 1844
Answer- No rule for it. It must depend on the umpire calling play. Editor
The early magazines also printed scorecards and statistics of cricket matches played in and around Calcutta during a season. Detailed year-end statistics on the performances of players were typical items in such publications.
Several non-sport publications also carried cricket news under the heading “Miscellaneous News”:
Cricket Matches- On the 24th of December; the Calcutta Club played a cricket match against XI officers and privates of His Majesty’s 44th regiment. The club won the match by 263 runs.
A match between the Calcutta and Dum Dum Club was played on December 31st. The Calcutta Club won by one innings and 67 runs.
While the India Sporting Review was published for a decade between 1845 and 1854, the Bengal Quarterly Sporting Magazine, which is the earliest sports magazine I have been able to identify, came out in the 1830s.
Specialised cricket magazines are a much later phenomenon, and the best was Indian Cricket, published from Bombay in the 1930s. While it was called Indian Cricket, it also carried news of other sports and was beautifully designed with photographs and graphics. While Indian Cricket stopped publication in the late 1930s, Sport and Pastime, one of the best magazines on sport in India, took over from the late 1940s and continued for the next two and a half decades.
