Why you need to have caste based reservation in Indian cricket?

Very few scholars have looked at possible reasons for this stark under-representation of Dalits in cricket. Sirivayan Anand wrote that this was a product of Brahminical tastes. Brahmins, who are historically indolent, like cricket because it involves hours of merely standing around and an absence of physical contact. This resulted in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald by Steven Anderson wondering whether this was true. This article also carried interviews with Indian cricketers and commentators like Harsha Bhogle, who promptly dismissed any caste bias in cricket by stating that players and selectors don’t even know each other’s castes. Even mainstream sites like ESPNCricinfo promptly dismissed this article for having cited Anand’s controversial thesis.

Ramachandra Guha’s history of Indian cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field, chronicles the life of Palwankar Baloo, a Dalit, and India’s first great cricketer in Guha’s opinion. Guha’s shows that there were a number of Dalits playing at the highest level in the early 20th century, before India received Test status. This led Boria Majumdar in the International Journal of the History of Sport to conclude that the change of patronage from the princes to corporate houses post-independence resulted in a decline in Dalit participation. These corporate patrons required cricketers to meet certain educational qualifications so that they would be employable post their retirement from the game. Consequently, opportunities in cricket, as in other private, corporate employment, were shut to those who could not access education.

We heartily agree with Majumdar that it is the structure of the sport, and not Brahminical tastes per Anand or choices as Guha seems to suggest in his book at one point, that is responsible for this decline in Dalit participation. Apart from the corporate patronage leading to the decline in the number of Dalit cricketers, we believe that structural impediments can be seen from the urban concentration of the game, the contrast with the women’s sport as well as the imbalance in the number of minority batsmen and bowlers.