We have to thank one Abdul Bismillah for providing this rare film of young Indian men playing amateur cricket in Bradford in the early 1970s.  The cricketers were members of the Interlink Cricket Club that formed two years before this film, in 1970, as part of the Bradford Mutual Sunday School Cricket League.  It appears that Abdul Bismillah wasn’t a member of the club, or at least didn’t play cricket, but clearly took a keen interest.   The Interlink Youth Club was established on St...

We have to thank one Abdul Bismillah for providing this rare film of young Indian men playing amateur cricket in Bradford in the early 1970s.  The cricketers were members of the Interlink Cricket Club that formed two years before this film, in 1970, as part of the Bradford Mutual Sunday School Cricket League.  It appears that Abdul Bismillah wasn’t a member of the club, or at least didn’t play cricket, but clearly took a keen interest.   The Interlink Youth Club was established on St Margaret’s Road and managed by Rev. Keith Potter of St Columbus Church in Great Horton, with its home ground on Spencer Road.  The club lasted until 1979, but has subsequently reformed under new management and with new players.   The club was open to all nationalities, but was mainly made up of players who had come from India and several from Pakistan. 

 

On 30th September 2012 a reunion took place of players at the Aagrah Restaurant in Bradford.  The event was organised by founding member Mohan Mistry to celebrate a film he had made commemorating the club.  The film, simply called Interlink Cricket Club 1970-1979 (Our Story), and made into a DVD, traces the history of the club through interviews with past members recounting some great stories.   The film also has many old photos of members and the annual dinners at places like the Royal Bengal Restaurant in Bradford, complementing the film here of the Sheesh Mahal Restaurant on Great Hatton Road in its early days.

 

The programme for the reunion, attended by the Lord Mayor, Councillor Dale Smith, also includes several photos of the teams and individual players and a list of fifty players who have passed through the team, as well as their present locations, where known.  The great majority of them are still in the Bradford area, though some have subsequently emigrated.  Among the club’s former members is Professor Lord Kamleesh Patel, who relates that: “Some people would say it was only a game of cricket – but as we think back and remember, we realise it was a lot more.  Many of our parents came to England and settled in Bradford in harsh times.  For us as children and young people – our friendships combined with our passion and the love for the game of cricket gave us an avenue to escape our challenges, build support networks and helped us grow and develop into the people we are today.”

 

Not all of the old members have been found, and this isn’t helped by some similarities in names.  Mohan Mistry relates a story about when there were three players in the same cricket team that all shared his name, two from the same village.  To get around it they had to resort to adding the initials of their middle names (representing their father's initial name): so it was Mohan P D Mistry (himself) - originally from Gandeva, India; Mohan P Mistry - originally from Gandeva, India; and Mohan D Mistry (owner of the Bharat Restaurant) - originally from Vadoli, India. Mohan notes that, “whenever one of us performed well and the highlights in the press articles just said Mohan Mistry... scored XX and we could all take the credit!!!”  Members from both the Indian Cricket Club and Interlink still meet at the Bharat Club.

 

People from India have been settling in Britain for centuries, as a direct result of British colonialism in India, beginning with the East India Company in the seventeenth century who recruited Indian seamen, named  lascars.  Part of the reason for this recruitment, as well as sickness and death on the outward journey, was that British sailors would abscond when in India, doubtless to escape the conditions in England!  Indeed, such was this recruitment that the Navigation Acts was passed in 1660 to restrict this to just 25 per cent of the crew of British-registered ships.  Over the years many of these settled in Britain, especially in the ports, making up the majority of the 70,000 Indians in Britain by the beginning of the First World War.   

 

After the Second World War, with a shortage of labour, and after the partition of India in 1947, many more came until the successive immigration acts, in 1962, 1968 and 1971, restricted immigration to family members only of those already in the UK.   It wasn’t until the British Nationality Act of 1981 that the centuries old common-law tradition of an automatic right of citizenship to all those born on British soil was removed.  The largest foreign-born population is from India, some 639,000 in 2008.  In Bradford the proportion of Indian born inhabitants is just slightly above the national average – 2.8% compared to 1.8% (in 2001) – much less than those from Pakistan.  The Migration Information Source, part of the Migration Policy Institute, is a good independent source of information in these matters (References).

 

Much has been made about the problems of different ethnic communities integrating, not least in Bradford with the riots in 2001.  This is not helped of course by those who would prefer not to see any integration in the first place.  This film provides features two of the ways in which at least some integration has taken place: curry houses and cricket.  For more on the Asian communities in West Yorkshire see the Contexts for The Bradford Festival Mela (1998) and Bradford College Collection Sikh Temple Decorations  (1972).

 

Cricket developed in India in the nineteenth century as much by accident as design.  Somshankar Ray states that although there are stories of something like cricket being played in India going back into the distant past, at least in its modern form it entered India with the British Raj, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century “it was being played in all the British-Indian presidencies, i.e. Calcutta, Bombay and Madras”.  He goes on to say that, “the first Indian community to get interested in this exercise was the Parsis of Bombay, who were commercially and socially close to the British, [and who]organized tours to England in 1886 and 1888.”  But it was the native princes who took it up, for various reasons, and who ‘Indianized’ cricket.

 

The major breakthrough came when an ‘all-India’ cricket team took on the MCC at Bombay on 16 December 1926 – with the first popular Indian player, C K Nayudu, hitting 153 in 116 minutes, including 11 sixes.  By this time a definite concept of an Indian nation was developing, with the Indian National Congress passing the Declaration of the Independence of India (the Purna Swaraj) in 1929, and Mahatma Gandhi instigating the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930.  Then the first proper test match between India and the MCC took place in 1932.  At this time cricket was competing with other sports, especially hockey, but also football, as witnessed by the famous victory by Mohun Bagan over the East Yorkshire Regiment in Calcutta in 1911 to win the IFA Shield (this despite Mohun Bagan players playing barefoot while the EYR played in proper football boots).   Yet, although football has thrived in India, on and off, and Mohun Bagan continues to prosper, it is cricket that has become the national passion.

 

It was in the 1970s that Indian cricket really began to flourish.  Tony Greig, remembering his time when captaining England on their tour of India in 1976–7, wrote of Indians as ‘people, who love cricket like no others I have ever seen’.  The number of great Indian cricketers over the years is far too long to list here, but perhaps three deserve special mention for the period since this film was made; the record breaking batsmen Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar (Yorkshire’s first-ever overseas signing), and the much loved Kapil Dev.

 

Cricket has continued to play a big part for those Asian communities which have settled in Britain, now of course with many who were born here.  Jack Williams points to the fact that “In the 1980s and 1990s the proportion of the Asian population who played [cricket] was higher than that for blacks or whites.” (p 173)  Yet he also notes the segregated nature of the clubs within the Asian communities, not only between those with an Indian or Pakistan background, or Hindu and Muslim, but also within these separate communities.  However, despite their strong presence in club cricket, these tend to be in the lower leagues, and to be exclusive.   Yorkshire remains a dominant cricketing county, with 20% of all cricket played in England being played here, with 900 clubs and 45,000 players (as of 2006).  And the Bradford Cricket League has been described as "arguably the country's strongest amateur competition”. 

 

Yet it has been extremely difficult for Asian players to break into the Yorkshire County team.  It wasn’t until 1992 that the rule stipulating that every player had to be born in the county was revoked.  And it wasn’t until May 2004 that Ajmal Shahzad, an 18 year old fast-medium bowler, became the first Yorkshire-born ethnic-minority cricketer to play in the first team – although the year previously Ismail Dawood became the first British-born Asian to represent the county.  YCCC has for some time maintained a ‘colour blindness’ policy towards players, and has encouraged cricketers from Asian communities in its academy.  This policy being encouraged by the Clean Bowl Racism Report that the ECB published in 1999. Up to the end of the 2011 season, YCCC has fielded five British Asian players, with Adil Rashid probably the most prominent, and during the three seasons of 2009, 2010 and 2011 four British Asians have represented YCCC’s first team at some point.

 

Yet in his research Thomas Fletcher found that many of those he interviewed from South Asian origins in Yorkshire still believed that racism persists at YCCC.  This is not helped by the fact that Headingley has a history of racist abuse from the terraces.  Many of Fletcher’s respondents had stories of hostility at YCCC, although Fletcher himself believes that the club is genuinely seeking to be inclusive.  The one consolation was that the racism wasn’t as strong as it is in football.  One problem that was noted was that in trying to address this problem coaches might go too far the other way and pick Asian players for the wrong reason, and this is clearly unhelpful.   A major problem he highlights is that his white respondents often held an idealised notion of ‘Yorkshireness’ that they saw as excluding Asians, but which they didn’t see as being racist.  Something that Ian McMillan sends up with his idea of Elective Yorkshire days.  Fletcher sees the dismantling of this informal criteria of Yorkshireness – even though most Asians in Yorkshire see themselves as being as Yorkshire as most white people do – as being an important component in opening up Yorkshire cricket in general, and YCCC in particular, to Asian players.

 

On an international level, betting scandals continue to dog the Indian Premier League, the biggest in the world; although gambling has been a part of cricket – as it was with all sports – from its beginnings.  In an attempt to curb gambling in sports, as early as 1664 the Gaming Act was passed which limited stakes to £100: equivalent to about £12,000 in today’s money, so clearly betting was on a massive scale.  Some attribute the recent spate of  corruption cases in Indian cricket – although they are not confined to here – to the outlawing of betting on cricket in India, with many calling for this to be made legal.  Others claim that the huge growth of the Indian Premier League is related to the influence of Indian television, especially now with satellite television.  Nalin Mehta contends that the huge amounts of money that television has put into the game has meant that “hockey and other sports have been left behind by the cold logic of capitalism and expanding markets.” (References, p 164)  Russel Holden also points to the deleterious conflict between commercialisation and ethics in cricket.  Others point to a similar process of money creating great inequalities in football (see the British Library compiled Bibliography, in association with the Speakers’ Corner Trust, References).  But despite the downside of these developments, cricketing enthusiasts The Duckworth Lewis Method, highlight the more progressive impact that cricket has had in their song  Age of Revolution:

 

“Here's to the future, Punjab and Tamil Nadu.

Always remember the passion of '32, oh yeah, yeah!

 

"Always denied entry by the English gentry.

Now we're driving Bentleys playing 20/20"

 

(With special thanks to Mohan Mistry)

 

References

 

Russel Holden, ‘International cricket – hegemony of commerce, the decline of government interest and the end of morality?’, in The Changing Face of Cricket: from Imperial to Global game, eds. Dominic Malcolm, Jon Gemmell and Nalin Mehta, Routledge, 2010.

Nalin Mehta, ‘Battling for the flag: cricket, television and globalization in India’, Ibid.

Thomas Fletcher, ‘All Yorkshiremen are from Yorkshire, but some are more “Yorkshire” than others’: British Asians and the myths of Yorkshire cricket’, Sport in Society, (2012) 15:2, 227-245.

Somshankar Ray, ‘‘The Wood Magic’: Cricket in India – A Postcolonial Benediction’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 25, No. 12, October 2008, 1637–1653

C. Richardson, Bradford Region: Studies in its Human Geography, Bradford Libraries and Information Services, 2002.

Jack Williams, Cricket and Race, Berg Publishers, 2001.

Dolores Cowburn: ‘Friends gather for reunion to celebrate popular Great Horton club and see new film on its history’, Telegraph and Argus, 27th May 2012.

Focus Migration

The Migration Information Source, The Migration Policy Institute

Ian McMillan, ‘Yes, you too can share my Yorkshireness’, Yorkshire Post, 11/12/2007

SA Aiyar, ‘Legalize betting, make cricket cleaner and whiter’, The Times of India, 16th May 2013.

Commercialisation in football, British Library Bibliography

Football 2011 – Feast or Famine?, the Speakers’ Corner Trust

The Duckworth Lewis Method, Age of Revolution