In today’s India, it is difficult to imagine mainstream news platforms without dedicated columns for sports. The idea of sports reporting in the 19th century, though, was very different. A glance through some of the major newspapers that came out in the 19th century reveals that there was hardly any space for more conventional sports. As the issues of the Indian Sporting Review, published in 1845, confirm much emphasis was instead given to publishing stories on hunting, angling, and horse racing. However, there were some exceptions, like The Bengal Hurkaru, later The Bengal Hurkaru and India Gazette. The Hurkaru was one of the first major English newspapers that came out of Calcutta and was in circulation for almost seven decades, from 1795 to 1866. Though it started off as a weekly, the newspaper turned into a daily in 1819.
While going through the digitised files of the newspaper during my Ph.D. fieldwork at the newspaper section of the British Library in London, I realised that The Hurkaru acknowledged the significance of sports reporting quite early and published a dedicated column, ‘The Sporting Gazettee’, once a week. Besides reporting weekly races, the column also gave equal weight to cricket matches. By the 1850s, along with detailed match reports, The Hurkaru was also reproducing full-length scorecards.
Usually, these scorecards only had European names; however, one report published on January 5, 1857, stood out for the significant presence of Indians in the match report. The match played at the suburban town of Chinsurah in the Bengal Province in 1856 interestingly pitted a group of Bengali students from Krishnagar against the 6th Dragoon Guards, an army regiment that was in action during the great revolt of 1857, on the cricket pitch.
Match Scorecard Courtesy: The British Library.
Competitive cricket has been played in Bengal since the 18th century. The earliest surviving reference to the Calcutta Cricket Club goes back to 1780. The Calcutta Cricket Club played annual fixtures against various regiments of the army stationed either at Fort William or the cantonment at Barrackpore. The various match reports published at The Hurkaru suggest regular fixtures were also played between the members of the Calcutta Cricket Club and combined elevens featuring alumni of different British educational institutions, like the Etonians and Harrovians or the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Hurkaru even provides us with reports of unusual contests such as ‘Married’ vs ‘Single’. A match the unmarrieds won comprehensively by 10 wickets. But these match reports say very little about the participation of the ‘natives’. We do find a report of a match played between the Calcutta Cricket Club and the Medical College in January 1856. But the names of the players on the Medical College team suggest either they were Eurasians or Europeans.
The brevity of the report also makes it difficult to speculate if the Medical College team was represented by the students of the college or the staff. One can argue that The Bengal Hurkaru, a newspaper that catered mostly to the European population of the city, preferred to overlook the sporting exploits of the Indians. There are historical sources that indicate that by the 1840s, the Indian sepoys were picking up the game of cricket and often found their way into the regimental teams. However, there is very little information on the early participation of civilians. Due to the dearth of source materials, this report of the match played at Chinsurah becomes all the more important for enthusiasts of Indian cricket history.
Rise of cricket in Bengal
Unlike Bombay, where the Parsi mercantile class took the initiative, in Bengal it was the middle class that took the lead in popularising the game. Participation in bodily activities and European sports was propelled by the impulse to counter the colonial aspersions of effeminacy and physical inferiority. For the locals, involvement in the game of cricket took on a more organised form through the efforts of pioneering figures like Nagendraprasad Sarbadhikary, who founded the Boys Club at Calcutta in 1880. In the town of Dhaka, we find the report of a cricket match where 16 Bengalis competed against 11 Europeans in the midst of great popular support in 1876.
An even more interesting description of how the game was played in Calcutta in the 1870s can be found in Mahendranath Dutta’s memoir of his elder brother, Swami Vivekananda. Dutta writes, “…. bricks were piled up on top of one other. A person with a bat guarded the pile of bricks, which served as the wicket, from the bowler. If the bowler managed to hit the pile of bricks, the batsman was out…The game required one to be skilled and alert. Vireswar showed much enthusiasm for the game of cricket…. A number of kids from the neighbourhood congregated in the courtyard each afternoon to play cricket.”
Dutta’s description of the game is very much akin to how the game is played today across neighbourhoods in the subcontinent. The description also underlines that by the 1870s, the game of cricket was popular enough in Calcutta to be played by middle-class children with makeshift arrangements like piled-up brick wickets. The Hurkaru report on the match involving the college team from Krishnanagar and the 6th Dragoon Guards in 1856 also substantiates this point.
From the little information that we can gather from the report, we can infer that cricket was already quite common among college students in Bengal by the second half of the 19th century. At least two suburban colleges, those of Hooghly and Krishnanagar, had their own cricket teams in 1856, which was more than a decade before official initiatives were taken to incorporate sports in the curriculum of educational institutions in the province through the efforts of Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant-Governor.
The match
The story of the match begins with the 6th Dragoon Guards landing at the town of Chinsurah after a long voyage from Britain on the final week of the year in 1856. Located about 60 km upstream of Calcutta, Chinsurah was a Dutch settlement from 1656. The town came under British control in 1825 when the Dutch ceded much of their settlements in India in exchange for Sumatra. Most British regiments shipped to India for the service of the East India Company generally landed on Chinsurah, which was the northernmost deep-water anchorage on River Hooghly. The regiment was then stationed briefly at the army barracks in Chinsurah.
The barracks at Hooghly. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Frederick Fiebig.
The imposing army barracks of Chinsurah, which currently house the District Court of Hooghly and other governmental offices, are among the longest buildings in Bengal. The 6th Dragoon Guards disembarked on Chinsurah a couple of days before the cricket match, where they remained for a brief period before being sent off to Allahabad on barges along the Ganges. From Allahabad, the members of the 6th Dragoon Guards marched along the Grand Trunk Road to Meerut, which they reached on March 11, 1857.
During their time in Chinsurah, the 6th Dragoon Guards were invited to play a cricket match with the locals. Curiously, the team that was asked to play the army regiment was neither another division of the army nor a European club, but rather a bunch of young college students. The Hurkaru reports that these ‘Collegians’ were not ‘natives’ of Chinsurah. Due to the unavailability of the students from Hooghly College, the students of the college in Krishnanagar, located about 90 km away, were brought in. It is the composition of the college team that is of particular interest to us. The Hurkaru reports that the ‘Collegians’ were represented by three Europeans or Eurasians, and the rest were all Bengalis.
Besides the fact that a group of Indians were facing a British army regiment on the field of sports, what also needs to be underlined is the decision to field a composite team. This was long before cricket teams were to be divided along racial and communal lines in the famous Bombay Quadrangular. R. Thwaytes, G. Beatson, and H. A. Graves took the field along with Ram Coomar Mookerjea and Hurroprashad Ghose. Gobind Chunder Mookerjea, Chunderkant Roy, Ishar Chunder Roy, Koylash Chunder Roy, Shoshee B Banerjea, and Kistonath Roy on the morning of December 31, 1856.
The inexperienced ‘Collegians’ did put up a stiff resistance against the 6th Dragoon Guards. Batting first, the army team folded out for just 66 runs. Graves picked up five wickets, while Ram Coomar Mookerjea chipped in with four wickets. In response, the ‘Collegians’ could manage only 23 runs with the bat. The students from the town of Krishnanagar fought back in the third innings, bowling out the Dragoon Guards for just 42 runs. Graves again was the pick of the bowlers, capturing three wickets, while Mookerjea managed two.
In the final innings of the match, with 85 runs to win, the Collegians put up a commendable fight. Opening the batting, Thwaytes scored 24 and Ishar Chunder Roy battled on till the very end, scoring 21. The ‘Collegians’ were pipped at the post in 84. They lost the match by just one run. The report says there were frequent cheers from the crowd, particularly for Ram Coomar Mookerjea.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to follow up on the subsequent careers of the Indian students who took part in the match. But we are a bit more lucky with their opponents; all the members of the 6th Dragoon Guards were posted in the various cantonments across Northern India when the great revolt of 1857 broke out.
For example, Lieutenant (Sir) Baker Creed Russell, who opened the innings for the Dragoon Guards and picked up seven wickets in the match, was stationed at Meerut on the fateful day of May 10, 1857. Russell later played an important role in recapturing Bareilly and Shahjahanpur from the sepoys. Russell was even awarded a medal for his part in capturing Tantiya Tope. The news report, though, is significant to the aficionados of sports or cricket history not because of these ‘heroes’ of the ‘mutiny’ but for the Indian students who fought them on the twenty-two yards.
Sarbajit Mitra completed his PhD from the Department of History at SOAS University of London in 2023. Sarbajit’s doctoral research focuses on the socio-medical history of intoxicants in colonial Bengal in the nineteenth century. Currently, he is a faculty member at the Department of History at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.
