A Day Off for Cricket in the Early Days of the Republic | Sreejith K

The year India turned republic, by around this time when winter had set in, things had begun to look up. The riots which rocked the nation in the aftermath of the partition had subsided, the displaced and the refugees had, for the most part, found temporary shelters, and the worst seemed to be over. Much serious work, of course, remained to be done. The five-year plans would be launched the next year, and so too the first general elections which would be completed only months later the following year. But as a couple of government circulars issued during this time and available on the Abhilekh Patal would suggest, amidst all these grim preoccupations, people still found time to indulge in sporting exuberance.

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Inspite of some initial misgivings amongst the leaders of the newly independent nation, India would become part of the Commonwealth. Whatever the political implications of the decision, at a time the Board of Control for Cricket in India was at its infancy, and the team not yet at the level to compete with the best, it helped to keep the country alongside the elites in the sport, and partake, as a consequence, in exchange tours. On one such tour in 1950 by a Commonwealth team to the sub-continent, when an unofficial test match was played at Delhi in early November, the Secretary of the Delhi and District Cricket Association would write a letter to, amongst others, the Ministry of Home Affairs requesting the grant of leave for government employees interested in attending the match at the Feroz Shah Kotla where, he said, arrangements had been made to entertain thirty thousand spectators through the duration of the match. To buttress its case, the Association cited precedence, the cricket-loving staff of the Central Secretariat and other government offices in the capital as well as the fact that the President of the republic would be in attendance to inaugurate the match [1]. The Ministry, without any undue delay, would give the nod and issue a circular on 28th October, 1950 where it was stated that