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years before, when an All-India side had toured England, captained by the cricket-loving Maharaja of Patiala. They won only two of the 14 first-class games, thus confirming the English cricket establishment’s low opinion of the Indian game. ‘Notwithstanding their multitudes,’ opined the MCC’s president Lord Harris, ‘I doubt if they are going to turn out a team of all India as good as the best of our county clubs.’ Harris was held to be an authority on the matter. A former captain of Kent and England, he had also served a five-year stint as governor of Bombay in the 1890s. Indian cricket, he believed, would be held back by its poverty, for this would prevent regular tours to expose Indian players to English first-class standards. But Harris had also detected certain preternatural inferiorities in the ‘excitable Asiatic’ cricketer. ‘It is in the matter of patience,’ he wrote, that ‘the Indian will never be the equal of the Englishman’. He was a man of his time. Yet Bombay and its cricket had come a long way in the three decades since Harris had presided over them. The 1890s were tough years for Bombay, marred by bouts of Hindu– Muslim rioting inside the city and hunger in the surrounding villages. In 1896 a famine swept central India in which a million people starved. Thousands of famished fugitives were driven to Bombay, where an outbreak of bubonic plague ensued, claiming 20,000 lives, and driving many back to the countryside. In 1899 there was another famine there. Yet better times followed. The plague spurred a major overhaul of Bombay, including heavy investment in sanitation and transport. This enabled the city to absorb a lot more people. Between 1900 and 1905 more than half a million migrants flooded in, which in turn provided labour for Bombay’s cotton-mills and textiles factories just as they were beginning a sustained boom. In 1914 the city received over 87 per cent of India’s capital investment. With the outbreak of war in Europe, demand for its cloth and thread soared. Over the course of two decades Bombay was transformed ‘from a cluster of distinct localities into an industrial megapolis’. By the early 1920s this growth had spawned a sizeable middle-class whose members enjoyed weekends off and a modicum of discretionary income. These are the basic ingredients of organised leisure: it was no coincidence that this was the decade in which the Hindi film industry became established in the city. By 1923 Bombay’s cinemas were taking so
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