Cricket in a Post-Nation World? Reflections on the Recent India versus United States T20 World Cup Match – Pardhu Pinnamshetty – Doing Sociology

The other day, I walked into a neighbourhood tea stall, a space that often doubles up as a public living room, and saw a group of young men watching the USA versus India match played as part of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026. At one point, one of them quipped, “It looks less like a clash between two countries and more like a match between India-A versus India-B.” The comment, which ended with laughter, resurfaced when I returned home.

On looking at the line-ups, it revealed that the remark alluded to the fact that a majority of the players representing the USA not only had recognisably “Indian” names, but were either born in the subcontinent or were children of migrants from it. Players such as Sourabh Netravalkar, who moved to the USA for higher education and works as a technology professional, and Sai Teja Mukkamala, born to Indian parents in the United States, were part of the team. A few, like Monank Patel, Subham Ranjane, Harmeet Singh, and Milind Kumar, had played in India’s domestic circuit before relocating when prospects narrowed. Social media was quick to respond; one widely circulated meme described the match as “Aadhaar Card versus Green Card.” Much of the news coverage celebrated the players’ initiative and enterprise, proudly claiming them as one of “our own” and wishing them success in representing the USA. Social media proudly claimed it as further evidence of the contribution of Indian migrants to the United States.

One way to interpret this phenomenon is through the familiar lens of talent drain, shaped by the structural constraints of professional sport in India. India produces an excess of cricketing talent, yet the pathways to professional success remain narrow and deeply unequal. For every player who breaks into the Ranji Trophy or the Indian Premier League (IPL), thousands remain at the margins. The cricketing infrastructure is structured through unequal distributions of capital, leading to the concentration of resources and visibility at the top. Those caught below this “glass ceiling” often view migration as a strategy of survival rather than ambition.

Another interpretation situates this mobility within the global political economy. The United States recruiting cricketing talent from India is not entirely dissimilar from European football clubs drawing players from Africa and South America. Scholars of global sport have shown how athletic labour circulates along unequal axes of power between the global South and North (Maguire, 1999; Darby, 2007). In such circuits, the global South becomes a reservoir of raw skill, while the global North functions as the stage upon which that skill is refined, commodified, and celebrated. Talent becomes detached from its local ecology and reinserted into more lucrative sporting markets.

These developments are part of a broader transformation in which cricket and other sports are increasingly mobile, globalised, and commodified. As Arjun Appadurai (1996) notes, global cultural flows destabilise earlier territorial alignments between culture and nation. In this system, talent no longer “belongs” to the place where it was nurtured; rather, it circulates within transnational regimes of capital and opportunity. National teams can thus resemble curated portfolios assembled through migration and naturalisation rather than organic reflections of long, uneven sporting histories.

My intention, however, is not merely to decry neo-colonial extraction or commodification in sport, but to ask what this moment signifies for cricket in India. From the players’ perspective, this mobility is often a positive development. It enables professional continuity, better facilities, and institutional stability. Yet for many who pursue cricket in India, the game is not simply a career. Beyond professional aspirations lies the affective desire to represent the nation. Wearing the national jersey carries symbolic weight far exceeding occupational success.

This symbolic charge is rooted in cricket’s particular historical trajectory in India. Introduced by colonial powers in the eighteenth century, cricket gradually became a site of anti-colonial assertion where colonised subjects could symbolically confront imperial masculinity (Guha, 2002). The film Lagaan dramatises these historical tensions between the coloniser and the colonised. Cricket, often described as the “gentleman’s game,” was embedded in ideals of hierarchy, discipline, and racialised civility (Mangan, 1988; James, 2019; Sorger, 2023). Colonial discourse frequently positioned Indians as lacking the masculine discipline and character necessary to excel at the sport. To defeat the coloniser at cricket was thus to disrupt the moral and racial grammar of empire.

Postcolonial rivalries further layered the sport with political meaning. Matches between India and Pakistan are routinely saturated with histories of Partition, war, and geopolitical tension. India’s victory in the 1983 ODI World Cup carried significance far beyond sport; it symbolised the arrival of a postcolonial nation capable of challenging former imperial powers on a global stage (Guha, 2002). If 1983 was the triumph of the underdog, the 2011 World Cup victory represented the assertion of India as a confident, globally competitive power. Mega-events such as the World Cup function as what John Horne (2006) calls “global spectacles,” arenas where nations perform sovereignty, prestige, and modernity.

Yet the stability of national meanings in cricket had already been unsettled by the advent of the Indian Premier League. The IPL reconfigured loyalties: audiences were invited to support franchises named after cities but owned by corporate conglomerates with tenuous ties to the locality. Players circulated freely between teams; it was unremarkable for a Chennai-born cricketer to represent Rajasthan, or vice versa. The IPL habituated fans to a regime where loyalty was chosen rather than inherited, transactional rather than historical. David Harvey (2005) describes neoliberal restructuring—where market logics reorganise institutions previously grounded in collective identity.

The Bollywood film Patiala House (2011) similarly stages the tension between inherited national loyalties and neoliberal individualism. The narrative centres on a second-generation British Indian aspiring to play for England. The father’s resistance is anchored in memories of racial discrimination and colonial humiliation. The narrative culminates in his father’s eventual acceptance, symbolising a new normal; a neo-liberal globalised order that privileges individual success over historical grievance. The film thus articulates what Ulrich Beck (2000) calls “individualisation,” wherein biographies are increasingly detached from traditional collective anchors such as nation or community.

If India’s passion for cricket and its surplus of talent are now absorbed into mobile, commodified sporting systems, this is symptomatic of broader neoliberal transformations that relativise nation and community. Under neoliberalism, as political theorist Wendy Brown (2015) argues, market rationality extends into domains once governed by non-market values. In sport, what matters increasingly is not where or for whom one plays, but the capacity to sustain a professional career within global circuits. Continuity, visibility, and employability take precedence over older affective ties to nation and history.

This argument may risk sounding like nationalist romanticism. Yet the intention is analytical rather than nostalgic. It is to underline how the histories embedded in sport, of colonial subjugation, anti-colonial resistance, and postcolonial assertion, are progressively decontextualised when sporting labour (of players and supporters) is subsumed within global political-economic disparities. When cricket becomes fully mobile capital, its social meanings risk being severed from the historical conditions that made it matter so profoundly in the first place.

References:

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalisation. University of Minnesota Press.

Beck, U. (2000). What is globalisation? Polity Press.

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.

Darby, P. (2007). Out of Africa: The exodus of elite African football talent to Europe. WorkingUSA, 10(4), 443–456.

Guha, R. (2002). A corner of a foreign field: The Indian history of a British sport. Picador.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

Horne, J. (2006). Sport in consumer culture. Palgrave Macmillan.

James, C. L. R. (2019). Beyond a boundary. Vintage Classics. (Original work published 1963)

Maguire, J. (1999). Global sport: Identities, societies, civilisations. Polity Press.

Mangan, J. A. (1988). The games ethic and imperialism: Aspects of the diffusion of an ideal. Frank Cass.

Sorger, A.-J. (2023). Cricket and colonialism: Towards a political theory of sport. European Journal of Political Theory, 24(2), 245–263.

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Pardhu Pinnamshetty is a PhD candidate at JNU, New Delhi. His research interests lie in the fields of popular culture, diaspora studies, class and sociology of law.