by Kate Attwell Directed by Pam MacKinnon

A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VATO R Y T H E AT E R

Pam MacKinnon, Artistic Director • Jennifer Bielstein, Executive Director P R E S E N T S

Testmatch

by Kate Attwell

Directed by Pam MacKinnon

The Strand Theater

October 24–December 8, 2019

Words on Plays Volume XXVI, No. 2

Simon Hodgson Editor

Elspeth Sweatman Associate Editor

Joy Meads

Director of Dramaturgy and New Works Claire L. Wong

Publications Fellow Radhika Rao Cultural Consultant

Made possible by

Bank of America, Kimball Family Foundation, PG&E, The Sato Foundation, The Stanley S. Langendorf Foundation, Theatre Forward, Union Bank Foundation, US Bank, the Vermut Education Fund, and Wells Fargo

COVER Show art for A.C.T.’s 2019 production of Testmatch. Design by A.C.T.’s Graphics Team.

OPPOSITE A used cricket ball, July 15, 2006. Photo by Ed g2s. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

A.C.T.’s Production of Testmatch

Testmatch is the recipient of the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. It has received

workshops at Playwrights Horizons, JAW: A Playwrights Festival produced by Portland Center Stage, and A.C.T. This production at the Strand Theater is its world premiere.

Creative Team

Playwright ...Kate Attwell Director ...Pam MacKinnon Scenic Designer ...Nina Ball Costume Designer ... Beaver Bauer Lighting Designer ... Marie Yokoyama Sound Designer and Original Music ...Elisheba Ittoop Voice and Dialect Coach ...Lisa Anne Porter Movement Coach ...Danyon Davis Dramaturg ...Joy Meads Cultural Consultant ...Radhika Rao Casting Director ... Janet Foster, CSA Assistant Director ... Gracie Brakeman Stage Manager ...Elisa Guthertz Assistant Stage Manager ... Dani Bae Stage Management Fellow ... Gabrielle Harper Associate Artistic Director ...Andy Chan Donald General Manager ... Louisa Balch Director of Production ...Martin Barron

Characters and Cast (in alphabetical order)

England 2, One ...Arwen Anderson England 3, Two ... Millie Brooks India 1, Messenger ...Meera Rohit Kumbhani India 2, Abhi ...Lipica Shah India 3, Daanya ...Avanthika Srinivasan England 1, Memsahib ...Madeline Wise *Information correct at time of publication.

Challenging the Story

A Conversation between Testmatch Playwright Kate Attwell and Director Pam MacKinnon

By Simon Hodgson

As soon as Pam MacKinnon read the script for a new play titled Testmatch, she fell in love with the writing of its playwright, Kate Attwell. It was only later that she realized that the two theater-makers had crossed paths three years earlier in New York, when MacKinnon was directing Amélie: The Musical and Attwell was working on dramaturgy for Amélie book writer Craig Lucas. Over several phone calls (and a cup of tea in a wintry London this past February), director and playwright began to work together on producing the world premiere of Testmatch at A.C.T. During a weeklong workshop in April, the play took shape as MacKinnon and Attwell deepened their collaboration. “I felt super excited during the workshop watching the way Pam worked with the actors,” says Attwell, “allowing them to feel and swim around within the words and find their way.”

The playwright’s own path to San Francisco has spanned continents. Born in South Africa, Attwell moved to Britain when she was young. In the United Kingdom, she gained a BA in performance from the University of Bristol; in the United States, she earned an MFA from Yale School of Drama. Today she divides her time between the UK and New York. “I feel like a bit of a fly on the wall in most countries,” she says. “I feel like I come from nowhere, and from lots of ‘wheres.’” Attwell’s roots in New York theater are widespread. The playwright has dramaturged for theater-makers including Lileana Blain-Cruz, Lucas Hnath, and JoAnne Akalaitis. She has produced and developed work at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, Bushwick Starr, and New York Theatre Workshop. And she’s currently writing plays commissioned by Ensemble Studio Theatre and Playwrights Horizons.

Both those theaters are well known to MacKinnon, who cut her teeth in the off-Broadway scene and won an Obie Award in 2010 for her direction of Bruce Norris’s

Clybourne Park at Playwrights Horizons. The director is enthusiastic about the rehearsal

work ahead and her ongoing relationship with the playwright. “In our workshop together in the spring,” she says, “I already felt that we were speaking the same language.” As MacKinnon and Attwell prepared for Testmatch rehearsals at A.C.T., they shared a

series of phone conversations, offering a glimpse into the developmental journey of a new play.

Pam MacKinnon: What was in your head while you were writing Testmatch?

Kate Attwell: Having lived in South Africa as a child, it has been interesting to observe

over the last few years the conversation in America about race and its relationship with history and systems of power. In school, I remember being shown the acute differences between two textbooks: the one from the Apartheid period [a brutal system of segregation, discrimination, and violence]—I think it might have been from the ’70s— and the one we were using in the 1990s, in a post-Apartheid environment. I grew up during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [a restorative justice process following the end of Apartheid], which was a difficult, traumatic, and yet exciting time—an entire community investigating and understanding the atrocities of the past in deeply personal ways. That experience made me understand that feelings are political.

In America, when the Black Lives Matter movement started and the conversation about race and power returned to public attention, the legacy of slavery was discussed in a way that felt long overdue. I wrote this play in America and I wrote it with an American audience in mind—to speak about past and present histories, gender, and racism. And the interconnectedness of those things.

PM: As you thought about those connections between past and present, what did

you research?

KA: I felt that the legacy of empire was lying dormant. Uninterrogated. That feels

unacceptable to me. I began to delve into the history of colonization in India as a kind of root moment. I was looking at the atrocities of the [1770] Bengal famine, and the catastrophic loss of life as a result of that colonization. It’s perhaps a stretch to say that these events are entirely overlooked, but they don’t have the place in history that they should. I also read a lot about women’s cricket—how women were allowed to come into the sport, and numerous sources talking about women introducing overarm bowling. There are people who read this play and say, “Oh my god, Kate, you must love cricket.” I don’t. [Laughs] I had to look stuff up. I watched a lot of footage and documentary video. I talked to an extended family member who recently became a cricket coach. He spoke about waiting for the rain to go away, and how pervasive that is in the game.

PM: Why cricket as a lens for this story?

KA: It’s a form and content thing. Cricket is tied to the conversation about empire

and that dynamic calls to me. There’s no other sport that has the same DNA. Soccer is played all over the world, but it’s more democratic. Cricket has ended up in this weird realm in which it’s the English [in cricket, there is an England team, whereas in the Olympics, English athletes join those from Scotland, and Wales, and Northern Ireland

to represent “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”] and Britain’s formerly colonized nations [including Australia, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, and South Africa] who play it. Cricket served me metaphorically. I had this feeling about cricket being a mechanism, like the mechanism of empire.

Cricket is also a particularly complicated sport. It’s confusing and has all these little rules. There’s a trickiness to it, which has a parallel for me with politics. And while there’s all sorts of match-fixing and cheating that goes on in every sport, I think there’s a notoriety about cheating in cricket.

PM: Why women’s cricket?

KA: I played cricket until I was nine years old, when I got ushered into “girls’ sports.”

I can’t say I felt much at the time, but looking back, there’s a clear prioritizing of one gender over the other, and a sense of what’s acceptable and “normal” for women to do. For me, the play looks through the sport to the connection between various kinds of (largely male) desires to own and control both land and bodies. That applies, in very different ways, to gender and to race. While I was writing Testmatch, I was really excited to see the Women’s T20 World Cup. There were women wearing the cricket uniform— they looked fierce, powerful, strong. That felt visually exciting as a place to start, as my work draws on the visual, and I always want to write about women.

The cast of Testmatch, with Tony Award–winning director and A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon (far right). Photo by Claire L. Wong.

PM: As a South African–born playwright, you might be expected to draw on that

experience. What made you choose India as the focal point?

KA: What I want to do with this play is challenge the notion of empire and the way

it’s historicized. I want to confront the way people talk about empire—to take down the idea that “We British went all over the world, we took so much, we destroyed so much, but now we’re going to talk about it as this wonderful time when we built the railways.” Britain’s colonization of India had a particularly capitalist bent—it was fundamentally about wealth and the trade of goods. They built on what they learned in Ireland. They took those learnings to America. For me, South African colonization, with its confrontation between the [white] Dutch and English colonizers [and indigenous peoples]—is different to India. That is a whole other project.

I want to go to a root moment of Western history and challenge it. White people invented racism to start the project of capitalism and then to maintain it. By the 19th century, that was just what things were. That’s the story we’ve been told. I want to really investigate this history and the lasting dynamic between these two countries coming together in a sport in which they are equal opponents.

FROM LEFT Playwright Kate Attwell, Director of Dramaturgy and New Works Joy Meads and A.C.T.

Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon during rehearsals for A.C.T.’s 2019 world premiere of Testmatch. Photo by Beryl Baker.

PM: There are moments throughout history when those in power make the rules—of a

particular sport or an economic system—to establish or reaffirm that power. And in the second part of Testmatch, there’s a pivotal moment when rules are getting codified and set in stone. We are the heirs of that and sometimes we forget it.

KA: We need to remember we are being fed particular narratives to maintain power and

wealth for specific members of society. Theater has the power to be a pretend world that we totally believe in, and then it can turn around and say, “Hey, this is a game. This is fake.” For me that’s powerful; it shows that structures we assume to be “just the way things are” can be revealed for what they are—structures—and dismantled. Once we understand systems, once we see them, we can start to undo them. And we need to be undoing those kinds of systems: racism, gender norms, capitalism.

PM: Testmatch has that as its spine. It decolonizes scene by scene. Part One is

contemporary, taking place on British soil. Part Two is in a fanciful and dangerous past in an British fort in Kolkata [under colonialism, known as Calcutta]. You keep peeling back the layers.

KA: The play needs to decolonize itself. Just as it’s interrogating the force of whiteness

that went all over the world, it’s important that, by the end, that’s not there anymore. That whiteness is present, then it’s called out and ridiculed, and then it’s taken away entirely.

PM: This decolonizing is just one of the dramatic devices that you use to tell the story,

but there are many other extraordinary theatrical elements in Testmatch: the way actors take on other guises to tell the story in different ways; the oversized British accents; the Memsahib character that echoes Ophelia [in Shakespeare’s Hamlet]; the clash of contemporary and classical language; the character of Abhi who goes in and out of the scene as both the beleaguered sepoy and the main character who straddles both worlds.

KA: Abhi’s like something out of French farce. [Laughs] I am always drawn to theater

that in some way acknowledges its falseness. There’s such a long history of that, starting

“ONCE WE UNDERSTAND SYSTEMS, ONCE WE SEE

THEM, WE CAN START TO UNDO THEM.”

with the Greeks and the way they used the chorus as a built-in audience. There’s a teasingness to the way my work acknowledges the spectator. I am also interested in the political nature of theatricality—when the play trips you up and says, “Remember, this is a false construct and not concrete.”

PM: Yes, that’s at the core of the play. Testmatch starts off in a contemporary scene,

with the audience on a delightful ride with six young women filled with competitive adrenaline, fear, ambition, joy, and pride. Even when the dynamics get prickly and overtly racist, it’s still (dare I say) comfortable.

KA: Then in the second part, the theatricality is heightened.

PM: I love what you said, Kate, about how this 95-minute entertainment breaks

theatrical form and therefore breaks the audience’s expectations. You’re asking A.C.T. audiences to acknowledge that structure and then the possibility of breaking it.

KA: Exactly, and that’s where the metaphor of sport comes in. We’re told what the rules

are, so we follow these rules. But what does it mean when we follow the larger rules of Western society? How damaging are they? And whom do they serve?

PM: I see structural similarities between Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, which opened

our 2019–20 season, and Testmatch, not least in the way both plays are structured in two parts.

KA: As soon as I began writing, I wrote about female actors playing those male

characters in the past. The first scene [in which a conversation between Indian and English women cricketers unearths deep cultural tensions] is about the past, the second scene—a fiction looking at the corruption of British colonials—is about the present. It always felt really clear to me why these two parts go together, how the present-day part speaks to the historical part. A lot of my work in the past few weeks has been drawing those things together and making the parallels clearer.

It’s been so valuable to have the physical body of an actor in front of me during the workshops. It enables me to make the echoes really clear between the two sections, to see who that actor is in the beginning and who they become later on. Structurally, I want almost every line in the first part to speak to the situation in the second. And every line in the second part to speak to the first. It’s a made-up conversation between past and present.

PM: The stakes continuously rise in the first contemporary scene; each moment has an

origin in the second scene—which explores the origins of systemic racism. Look at the way the super sweet mango drink that the characters debate in Part One is later echoed in Part Two as a precious, untaxed mango smuggled into the fort. Ultimately, tensions among the cricket players can only be explained—and hopefully resolved—by the actors telling the story differently and the audience talking about it with each other.

KA: Totally. The actors have to switch forms.

PM: I can imagine in production (and this is a world premiere so we get to invent

it!) that there is some kind of overlap in theatrical terms. It’s not like, “And now, fade to black at the end of Part One and in the darkness things get transformed.” We cut into the contemporary world with the historical, so that at the tail end of the first part, a swatch of history comes in visually, perhaps someone who was dressed in contemporary cricket gear walks past as an 1800 East India Company big shot.

KA: All attempts at the “real” disappear. And if we see an actor as an actor, that’s fine too. PM: Working with actors and moving from contemporary to historical is going to

be really gratifying. I love all these theatrical elements. I know A.C.T. audiences will really enjoy spotting these tropes and getting to be experts on form. When you wrote

Testmatch, what was the audience you envisioned?

KA: Hmm. That’s always a tough one. I hope, I believe, that there is something in this

play for a lot of people, people of different genders, different races. I also hope that this play gets the chance to speak pretty frankly to a particular kind of white, often liberal person who believes (even if they don’t always admit it) that there is no problem any more. That believes that we’re “beyond” race or gender being an issue. To move forward, we all need to be open to understanding that the histories we’ve created still have repercussions. I think, as a white woman, this is an interesting fundamental dynamic for me—this play is speaking from a white lens, wanting to interrogate that very history.

PM: I’m also interested in this play being about a sport that some of our audience doesn’t

know at all, while hopefully others are well versed and play in the numerous cricket leagues in the South and East Bay. It is, after all, the second largest sport in the world.

KA: As much as we’re going to talk about how difficult it is to be a woman or a woman

sports player, it’s ultimately about hearing more of the intersectional feminist voice [how different aspects of an individual’s identity, such as race, gender, and age, create

Rules of Play

with Tony Award–Winning

Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon

Rule Two:

Use of Time

This season, we are exploring the rules of play in theater and the storytelling devices that theater-makers use to unearth aspects of our modern lives.

When the present gets too stressful, emotionally confounding, and unjust or unfair or ugly or even too beautiful to sustain, either we need to break out into song like in a musical or we need to break form and put on a play. In Kate Attwell’s play Testmatch, a contemporary scene— reminiscent of a David Mamet play for its rapid-fire dialogue and landscape of raw ambition, but with finely drawn young women—gets pushed to near breaking point. Long-held, unspoken feelings come to the fore, and some more benign characters are confused as to how they all got to this place.

Then the playwright, like a god, changes the rules of her own play. Suddenly we time-travel away from a “locker room” world of privilege and organized competition to a version of 1790 Fort William, India, where the Number One Sepoy is run ragged; the new generation cockily climbs over walls to take its rightful place; and a wife—depressed and alone—seethes under orders to hasten her own demise, becoming a broken Ophelia-type character before our eyes. All the while, nameless British administrators codify the rules of pillaging an entire country alongside the rules of a sport that will become the second-biggest sport in the world by the time Part One of Testmatch takes place.

Kate Attwell demands that we investigate our history. The seeds are sown before us. It can be hard to look at, but it is only in knowing where we come from and understanding the systems put in place that we can possibly undo them and possibly dream of one day changing the world. Theater and storytelling are revolutionary acts. It is the purview of the playwrights, directors, and actors on the stage to create and break worlds, but it is the audience that can do the same in real life too. We can sort through our past to clarify our present to better remake our future.

intersecting systems of discrimination]. What are the really big rules at play which we need to dismantle? I hope people who experience this play will walk away feeling that there is so much we need to talk about and unearth in order to move forward. There’s this big, tangled knot in our collective brains, and we’re in this place as a society because we haven’t done the work of untangling that knot.

When audiences see Testmatch, they’re going to walk out of A.C.T.’s Strand Theater and the Tenderloin is right there. I love San Francisco but I also find it a violent and brutal place. Large parts of this city are still drawn along racial and economic lines. Those dynamics in the play—some people in a “wealthy fort” and other people outside— exist everywhere. When one of the England cricket players says, “Fuck history, it’s dead,” I think that there are a lot of people who feel racism and colonialism are in the past (even if they wouldn’t admit it). I want people to understand that the weight of history is not going away. We have to pick it up. What does the past mean for the present and the future? I want people to have to sit with that feeling.

Set model, by Scenic Designer Nina Ball, for A.C.T.’s 2019 production of Testmatch. Photo by Claire L. Wong.

Playing the Game

Stories and Scandals from the Cricketing World

By Simon Hodgson

The Rise of Cricket in India

Diehard defenders of the British Empire claim that cricket—just like the railroads and the rule of law—was a gift to India, a cultural benefit from a generous colonial power. The reality of cricket’s origins in the Indian subcontinent is rather different. True, the British administrators and army officers did play cricket, but only with each other. The Calcutta Cricket Club was established in 1792 and the sport was played on the grassy plain outside Fort William, the East India Company fortress mentioned in Kate Attwell’s Testmatch. All across India, provincial garrison towns featured a cricket oval,

but there was no encouragement of the game among Indians. There was no mistaking the stark message of racial segregation behind the signs warning, “For Europeans Only.”

The early growth of Indian cricket, says Indian journalist and cricket writer Mihir Bose, was never about the British sharing a cultural pursuit, but “more about the initiative of the locals who took up the game. Cricket became popular because the natives picked it up.” The first group to play were the Parsis, a Zoroastrian religious community. Based mainly in Mumbai (then known as Bombay), the Parsis established the Oriental Cricket Club in 1848, using cricket to consolidate relationships with the British, says Prashant Kidambi, a professor of colonial history at the University of Leicester. In a large city where communities were demarcated along religious lines, the new Parsi cricket club attracted attention. Within a decade, Hindu and Muslim communities also had cricket clubs in the same neighborhood. Today, Mumbai’s Kennedy Street is still home to various cricket grounds known as gymkhanas [sports clubs, derived from the Urdu word

gendkhana, meaning ball-house].

In the late-19th century, local sponsorship of the game and of talented Indian players by regional Indian leaders (often to strengthen relationships with colonial British administrators) broadened cricket’s appeal across the country. Meanwhile, in Mumbai, well-attended matches between the various religious teams (including British sides) continued through the 1880s and ’90s and laid the groundwork for a national team in the 20th century. In 1932, the Indian team toured Britain and played a match at Lord’s, the historic London home of the sport, becoming the fifth international team in the

PITCH

INFIELD

OUTFIELD

The batter’s job is to hit the ball and then run to the other end of the pitch before the fielders (the bowler’s teammates) retrieve the ball—this scores one run.

If a fielder catches the batter’s hit before it touches the ground, the batter is out.

At each end is a wicket—three wooden sticks in the ground.

20 meters long and 3 meters wide At one end of the pitch is the bowler,

who hurls the ball overarm towards the batter at the other end of the pitch. The bowler’s job is to stop the batter scoring runs and to hit the wicket with the ball, which gets the batter out.

EACH SIDE

TAKES A TURN

TO BAT AND

TO BOWL

TWO TEAMS OF 11 PLAYERS

GOAL:

SCORE AS MANY

RUNS AS POSSIBLE

BEFORE TEN BATTERS

ARE OUT

TEAM WITH THE

MOST RUNS WINS

THE RULES OF CRICKET

cricketing world alongside England and three other nations formerly colonized by the British: Australia, New Zealand, and the West Indies.1 _{Fifty-one years later, India}

won the inaugural Cricket World Cup. Today, India is the most influential nation in the world for cricket. Its male players are global icons with million-dollar salaries, its audiences are the most fanatical on earth, and its national administrators are the most powerful in the sport.

The Growth of Women’s Cricket

When cricket first took root in 18th-century Britain, women’s cricket was a popular activity. “The greatest cricket match that was played in this part of England,” recorded the Reading Mercury newspaper in 1745, was “between eleven maids of Bramley and eleven maids of Hambledon, all dressed in white. . . . The girls bowled, batted, ran and catched [sic] as well as most men could.” In villages throughout the southeast of England, women’s teams—composed largely of middle- and upper-class players— competed in front of mixed crowds.

As the 18th century wore on, however, and the Industrial Revolution took hold of towns in the north of England in the 1800s, the game did not spread widely among working-class women. “The time and space requirements of the factory system and an increasingly strict moral attitude among the ‘better classes’, who regarded games-laying among the lower orders as frivolous, non-improving and morally suspect, militated against working-class sport of any kind,” writes University of Windsor Professor of History Kathleen McCrone.

Women in England—and in Australia, where the women’s game started up in the late 19th century—continued to play cricket into the 20th century, but the competition was mostly in local leagues, and the sport lacked nationwide coordination in both countries. Not until the 1930s did women’s cricket go international, with Australia playing England. In 1958, the founding of the International Women’s Cricket Council sparked the development of the game worldwide, with nations from New Zealand to the United States to the Netherlands competing in international matches.

For more than two centuries, women’s cricket has been at the forefront of innovations in the sport. Christina Willes, an 18th-century English woman, is reported by some writers to have invented overarm bowling—a historical claim that Kate Attwell draws into the plot of Testmatch. The inaugural Women’s Cricket World Cup in 1973 predated the men’s equivalent by a decade, and the first international women’s T20 match (a shorter, more explosive form of cricket featuring big hitting and more risk-taking) took place in 2004, a year before their male counterparts.

In recent years, there has been “a revolution for women’s cricket,” says Ananya Upendran, an Indian cricket writer who plays for Hyderabad women’s team. Arguments for gender equality have bolstered the pay and profile of female professionals in multiple sports (including cricket), though much work is still necessary to ensure full financial

CRICKET MATCH TYPES

Test matches last up to five days, with both teams (dressed in white uniforms) each getting two chances to bat.

One-day matches are limited to 50 overs per team (an over is six balls)—each team bats once.

T20 matches feature each team batting once for 20 overs; the team with the higher score wins.

Cricketer Mithali Raj batting for India against England in Truro, United Kingdom, July 8, 2012. Photo by Harrias. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

parity. “We are living through a revolution where a great effort is being made to show that everyone is equal,” says Bose. In the United States, the women’s team (captained by Bay Area resident Sindhu Sriharsha, a wicketkeeping batter based in Livermore) is steadily establishing itself on the international stage. As teams prepare for the next Women’s Cricket World Cup in 2020, international women’s cricket matches now attract tens of thousands—a throwback to those 17th-century matches.

So How Do Cricketers Cheat?

On the surface, cricket seems a “gentlemanly” sport—the players traditionally wear white, the pace seems leisurely, and there’s even an umpire to adjudicate on decisions. In

Indian women’s international cricketer Harmanpreet Kaur, playing in the Australian women’s league, representing Sydney Thunder against Perth Scorchers on January 7, 2018. Photo by Bahnfrend. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

reality, cricket is fiercely contested, even gladiatorial, as it pits one team’s bowler against another team’s batter. As in all competitive sports, players have historically searched for advantages both fair and unfair.

On the field itself, cheating can take many forms, and several relate to the umpire, who plays a critical role in the sport. Unlike baseball or soccer, in which the officials makes decisions themselves, cricket umpires don’t. “In cricket you have to appeal [to ask the umpire “how’s that?”] in order to trigger a decision about whether a player is ‘out,’ so there’s an in-built morality,” says Bose. In cricket, players can dupe the umpire into thinking that they took a catch cleanly—when it hit the ground first. Wicket-keepers

can convince the umpire that a batter nicked the ball—even when he didn’t. And a fielding team (the bowler’s team, which works together to defeat the batting team) can appeal together for a decision, putting enormous collective pressure on an umpire.

While these onfield actions may sometimes be excused as playing the game to the limit of the rules, other cheating methods are more obviously corrupt. Players have tried a variety of imaginative ways to affect a cricket ball’s condition and the way it moves. Some methods—using sweat or spit to clean the ball, and rubbing the ball on players’ uniform—are deemed legal. Other techniques (such as unpicking the seam, adding Vaseline, or in the unusual case of Pakistan player Shahid Afridi cited in Testmatch, biting the ball) are illegal. Australian players Steve Smith, David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft were banned from international cricket in 2018 after they were caught altering the condition of a match ball using sandpaper.

Why is the state of a cricket ball so critical? If a bowler can rough up one side of the ball while keeping the other shiny and smooth, they may be able to bowl deliveries

“[THE ENGLISH] LIKE TO BE SEEN AS MORAL AND

UPRIGHT MEN AND WOMEN BUT WHEN IT IS

POINTED OUT THAT IN BUILDING AND SUSTAINING

AN EMPIRE THEY WERE ALSO VERY CRUEL,

VINDICTIVE, GREEDY, DISHONEST AND EVIL

THEY WANT TO LOOK AWAY, UNABLE TO ACCEPT

THEY COULD EVER HAVE BEEN FALSE TO THEIR

ESSENTIALLY GOOD AND HONEST NATURE.”

featuring exaggerated “swing,” or lateral movement. And in a sport where a batter with a 4-inch-wide bat may have only 0.3 seconds to determine the line of a 90-mile-per-hour delivery, that lateral movement is the difference between hitting the ball with the center of the bat and edging the ball to a fielder.

Although television cameras have made it easier to spot cheating on the field, corruption off the field is harder to police. Individual players (including English bowler Mervyn Westfield and South African batter Hansie Cronje) have been drawn into spot-fixing, a small-scale scam in which a player might bowl a certain number of “wides” (a delivery deemed inaccurate by the umpire) within the space of six balls. For gamblers who know what’s coming, the rewards can be considerable. “One of the main reasons why cheating has emerged in the last 15 years,” says Bose, “is that, in India—where there is a tremendous amount of money and betting—gambling is not legalized; it has been pushed into the underworld. That has encouraged underworld bosses to seek out cricketers [of all nationalities] who can be manipulated.” The illegal cash up for grabs is nothing, however, compared to the profits reaped by those who control the sport.

How Is Cricket Run?

For most of the last hundred years, cricket was administered by the International Cricket Council (ICC). This dusty and rather slow-moving organization was headquartered at Lord’s Cricket Ground, the venerable sporting venue noted for its hall of portraits and hallowed air of timelessness (as well as the privilege and pompousness skewered by Attwell in the second part of Testmatch). But with the lightning spread of cable television across India in the 1990s, new powerbrokers arose to challenge the ICC. Among them was Lalit Modi, the ambitious son of a North Indian business family. And Modi’s ideas were about to shake up cricket worldwide.

Modi was a fast-moving and charismatic visionary with a nose for profit and a willingness to play hardball. In the 1990s, he contacted the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and pitched the idea of a new form of cricket—shorter, more colorful, more exciting. When the BCCI turned him down, Modi realized that to get his way, he’d have to join the board.

By 2005, Modi was on the board and ready to play. “Cricket in India is a $2 billion a year market,” he said. “We are sitting on a gold mine. Our players should be paid on a par with international footballers and NBA stars, in millions of dollars and not in measly rupees.” As newly appointed head of the BCCI marketing committee, he immediately raised $630 million by selling the rights to Indian cricket broadcasting. With such staggering sums, the BCCI quickly supplanted the ICC as the administrative force in international cricket.

When the BCCI launched the Indian Premier League (IPL) in 2008, this T20 competition represented a revolution in cricket. Focusing on three-hour games—no more matches over one day, let alone five-day Test matches—this was a new kind of entertainment extravaganza with brightly colored uniforms, dancers, and explosions. On

the field were some of the best men’s cricketers in the world; off the field, in the owners’ luxury boxes, were some of the richest people in India, including actor Preity Zinta, distillery magnate Vijay Mallya, and Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan.

Ten years after its launch, Indian cricket continues to set records (a women’s version of the IPL is reportedly in the works). In 2018, international consultancy Duff & Phelps valued the IPL at $6.3 billion. Modi’s own role in the BCCI may have been removed— he was fired for “financial irregularities” in 2010—but his vision of an eye-catching cricketing feast for television audiences has been realized. In July 2019, 229 million Indians tuned in to watch their country play historic rival Pakistan in the men’s Cricket World Cup. Indians’ extraordinary enthusiasm and national fervor for cricket will ensure that their nation will dominate the sport for years to come.

SOURCES James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption, and the Turbulent Rise of Modern

India (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Mihir Bose (journalist), in conversation with Simon Hodgson,

June 7, 2019; Isabella Duncan, Skirting the Boundary: A History of Women’s Cricket (London: Robson Press, 2013); Kathleen E. McCrone, Playing the Game: Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English

Women 1870–1914 (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1988); Reuters Mumbai, “Over

200 million watched India-Pakistan World Cup match on TV in India,” The Hindu Business Line, June 27, 2019, bit.ly/2khjjsW (accessed September 11, 2019); Akash Sakaria, “Mumbai’s Parsis Were the First to Play Cricket in India,” Hindustan Times, April 21, 2017, bit.ly/2lUFIwk (accessed September 13, 2019); Shashi Tharoor, “‘But What about the Railways?’ The Myth of Britain’s Gifts to India,” The Guardian, March 8, 2017, bit.ly/2kf7gfA (accessed September 7, 2019); Matt Wade, “The Tycoon Who Changed Cricket,” The Age, March 8, 2008, bit.ly/2kHcpNL (accessed September 12, 2019)

England cricket player Heather Knight and Indian cricket player Mithali Raj pose with the Women’s Cricket World Cup trophy, July 22, 2017. Photo by BMN Network. Courtesy Flickr.

You Are Merchants. What Need

Have You of a Fortress?

Wealth, Power, Colonialism, and the British East India Company

By Elspeth Sweatman

N.B.: Colonialism affects everything, including the historical archive. The voices of Indian people from the 15th to 19th centuries were not recorded, have been filtered through the words and views of their colonizers, or have been lost. While contemporary scholars try to interpret the biases and gaps existing in colonial evidence—a practice known as “reading against the grain,” the information left to modern historians may not accurately reflect the realities of what Indians actually experienced under colonial rule.

Three headlines from August 2019: “Russia Says Donald Trump Has the Right to Buy Greenland” (Newsweek); “As Climate Change Worsens, Puerto Rico Continues to Drown Under the Weight of U.S. Imperialism” (El Tecolote); “The Fight Over Mauna Kea Is About More Than a Telescope” (Truthdig). While these stories range from absurd to serious, they all point to one incontrovertible truth: in the 21st century, colonialism and capitalism remain the coziest of bedfellows. Corporations search for where they can find the coveted money-making mixture of low wages, low prices, and low oversight. In these environments, the acquisition of wealth with minimal effort is the name of the game and there can only be one winner. Extreme wealth inequality, racial violence, and oppression of native peoples are just the cost of doing business.

One of the first corporations to weave together these deadly threads of capitalism and colonialism was the British East India Company (EIC).1 _{In Western eyes, the}

EIC was the business darling of its day. From 1600 to 1858, it made a fortune for its investors and lined the pockets of the British treasury. But its actions in India—which laid the foundation for the British government’s rule from 1858 to 1947—led to what historian William Dalrymple describes as the most “supreme act of corporate violence in world history.”

India, 1600

The India that the EIC encountered on its first voyages was an awe-inspiring rival, a land of prosperity, innovation, and relative harmony. India in the 1600s had more

1 Britain did not officially exist as an entity until 1707, but for the sake of clarity, we are using the terms Britain and British throughout this article.

wealth than the whole of Europe, producing 23 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP). The Mughal empire under Emperor Akbar (1542–1605) and his descendants Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb stretched from Kabul and Kashmir in the north to the state of Karnataka on India’s southern tip, and produced enough revenue to fund the arts, ambitious construction projects (such as the Taj Mahal), and a sizeable military. “The Mughals were, in many ways, the equal to the [neighboring empires of the] Ottomans and Safavids to its west and the Ming to its northeast,” says Middlebury College Professor of History Ian Barrow.

Power lay with India. In 1600, England’s population was a mere four million, India 116 million. England needed saltpetre to make gunpowder, and spices, tea, coffee, and Indian textiles—such as muslin, calico, and gingham—to meet the growing appetites of its people. India didn’t need England’s trade; its exports were booming. Not only was the Mughal empire trading with its neighbors within Asia, but Dutch and French ships were also clamoring at the emperor’s door for access to its ports. The EIC would have to get in line.

“The Meanness of a Pedlar [sic] and the Profligacy of Pirates”

Chartered in 1600, the EIC was created to find an overseas trading route to the coveted spices and goods of India, Indonesia, and (later) China. It was set up as a joint-stock company, the latest cutting-edge business model; rather than a single investor funding a voyage and handling all the preparations and day-to-day business of the venture, a number of investors would pool their money together to fund several voyages, supervised by a board of directors. Under this scheme, an investor didn’t need to know the price of gingham. Any losses he or she had would be minimal (only as much as an investor initially put in), but profits could be exponentially higher.2

While this further broadened the pool of capital, it created a low risk–high reward environment perfect for corruption and price-fixing.

The risks were not quite the same for those who actually made the perilous voyage to the other side of the world on EIC ships. The Company paid very little, and the threat of deadly diseases or shipwreck was high. As a way of encouraging men to take these risks, the EIC condoned a certain amount of insider trading. On each ship, the captain and his officers were given a 4 by 1.5 by 1.5 foot chest to transport their own goods back to London for sale. “By 1715,” says Barrow, “captains were allowed three hundred pounds of goods for every one hundred tons carried on behalf of the

2 The EIC had both male and female shareholders.

OPPOSITE Territory controlled by the East India Company in 1765, based on a map originally printed in

the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1907). Photo by Edinburgh Geographical Institute and Fowler&fowler. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Map created by Elspeth Sweatman on a modern map of India, by Nichalp. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

EIC-controlled area Indian territory Neighboring countries Because the original map was created by the colonizers, we have kept their spelling of Indian cities.

Madras Afghanistan Delhi Ahmedabad Hyderabad

BENGAL

BAY OF BENGAL

1765

Company.” Every EIC employee in India—from lowly clerk to regional president— was looking after his own self-interest.

From the beginning, the EIC knew the importance of having a military presence on their ships and in their forts and warehouses. Dutch ships patrolled the Indian Ocean, seeking to destroy any threat to their position. French ships loomed, looking for their own piece of the market. In response to these threats, EIC ships were designed to carry between 30 to 36 cannons alongside 500 to 800 tons of goods. Every EIC factory (warehouses and merchant lodgings) had at least one battalion of soldiers to protect its supply chain. And every EIC leader hunted for an opportunity to throw the might of the EIC military against the Indian rulers for the chance of grabbing land. In 1686, EIC governor Josiah Child tried to seize a piece of Bengal but was defeated. No matter; he and the EIC were content to bide their time.

“While One Set of Them Is Overloading the Superstructure, Another Is Undermining the Foundations”

The foundations of wealth inequality laid in the 17th century bore fruit in the 18th. As the Mughal empire began to collapse due to war with the Persians, leadership errors,

The Sale Room at India House, London 1808 (with an auction going on), an etching with watercolor by Thomas Rowlandson (FAMSF). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

and market pressures, its leader Farrukhsiyar issued a firman (edict) on December 31, 1716, giving the EIC duty-free trading rights on all export trade in Bengal, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad. The Company exploited this new opportunity with full force. Not content with saving the tax on their own goods, EIC traders immediately sold some of these rights to Asian merchants, thereby collecting taxes that should have gone into the Bengal treasury. The EIC gained full export and tax domination in 1757 with its victory at the Battle of Plassey. Now in charge of all of Bengal, the EIC’s capitalist greed could run unchecked.

The Company artificially pushed textile prices low by only paying for goods using its revenue from Bengal (in rupees) rather than the much stronger British pound. Company gomastas [agents] “forcibly take away the goods and commodities . . . for a fourth part of their value,” wrote Nawab (Governor) Mir Kasim in 1762, “and by ways of violence and oppression they oblige the ryots [peasants] to give five rupees for goods which are worth but one.” The Indian people were being squeezed at both ends of the trading process. This “monopoly of industrial production [by the EIC] drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain,” says UN Under-Secretary General and Indian Congressman Shashi Tharoor. “This in turn had a knock-on effect on the peasants who worked the land, by causing an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages.”

But it wasn’t just a trade monopoly that the EIC wanted anymore. As the 18th century dawned, everyone in the Company knew that more wealth lay in taxes on

BRITISH RULE IS “BASED ON AN EXTREME FORM OF

WIDESPREAD VIOLENCE AND THE ONLY SANCTION

IS FEAR. IT SUPPRESSES THE USUAL LIBERTIES

WHICH ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ESSENTIAL TO

THE GROWTH OF A PEOPLE; IT CRUSHES THE

ADVENTUROUS, THE BRAVE, THE SENSITIVE, AND

ENCOURAGES THE TIMID, THE OPPORTUNIST AND

TIME-SERVING, THE SNEAK AND THE BULLY.”

—JAWAHARLAL NEHRU (1936),

WHO BECAME INDIA’S FIRST PRIME MINISTER

Calcutta Afghanistan Nepal Bhutan Madras Delhi Hyderabad Ahmedabad Bombay

BAY OF BENGAL

1857

OPPOSITE Territory controlled by the East India Company in 1857, based on a map originally printed in

the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1907). Photo by Edinburgh Geographical Institute and Fowler&fowler. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Map created by Elspeth Sweatman on a modern map of India, by Nichalp. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

the physical land than in any goods the land could produce. They sought ways to grab land whenever it became available. When a ruler died without a male heir, the Company seized his lands. When an Indian could not prove ownership of land in a formal (i.e., Western) way, the EIC deposed him. When a ruler such as Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II needed funds or protection, the EIC offered him a deal: tax revenue in exchange for military support. The 1765 Treaty of Allahabad granted the EIC diwani—the rights to collect tax revenues from more than ten million Indian people. Unlike the Indian rulers, the EIC based its tax policy on the potential revenue of each area, not on the actual goods produced. This kept taxes high even when an area was decimated by drought, further increasing the wealth inequality between the EIC and the Indian people.

“They Have Sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain”

This EIC monopoly decimated not only the Indian lower classes but also the environment. The Company needed more land to produce opium and tea—the two crops that would make the most revenue. The forests of Nilgiris and Assam were razed to the ground to make way for coffee, tea, and opium plantations. The EIC also “brought in several exotic species like eucalyptus, pine and wattle to produce viscose,

which was sent to the UK to be made into fabric,” says Tharoor. “Unfortunately, plants like eucalyptus thirstily drink up the ground water; thanks to their plantations, the British converted the once lush tropical rainforests of the Nilgiris into a water-shortage area.” This level of production devastated regional ecosystems, leading to droughts, famines, and crop shortages. In the two millennia before the British arrived in India, there were 17 recorded famines. During British rule, there were 34, killing an estimated 25 million people.

Where others saw disaster, EIC executives saw opportunity. Rather than lower the price of food and forgo tax collection, the Company raised taxes in times of famine. During the 1770 Bengal famine, “many of the Company’s leading executives used their position to purchase grain by force—even seed for the next year’s planting—and then sold this at famine prices in the big cities of Calcutta and Murshidabad,” says historian Nick Robins. During the 1866 Orissa famine, British government officials exported 200 million pounds of rice as 1.5 million Indians starved to death.

Apart from their insatiable desire for wealth, the British had philosophical, racist reasons for not providing disaster relief. They believed in free trade (you shouldn’t interfere in market forces) and in the Malthusian doctrine (when the population gets too big for the land to support, natural disasters restore the balance). They did not

EIC-controlled area Indian territory Neighboring countries Because the original map was created by the colonizers, we have kept their spelling of Indian cities. All boundaries are approximate.

believe in the tradition of charity—tax relief, fixed grain prices, suspended food exports during times of famine—set down by Indian rulers and the wealthy landowners. “The East India Company took a dim view of this kind of Indian almsgiving,” says Tharoor, “dismissing it as undiscerning charity which irresponsibly attracted the wandering poor. . . . The British therefore declared that they would ‘provide employment for the

able-bodied’ but not ‘gratuitous relief ’ to the general public.”

“Commerce With Sword In Your Hands”

By the mid-1700s, the EIC was no longer a merchant enterprise; it was a colonizer, governing vast swathes of land in southern and northern India. Control—of revenue streams and Indian rulers—became its mission. Yet this “control was only possible because administrators could rely upon a large army to suppress opposition,” says Barrow. In 1830, there were 895 EIC civil servants backed by 36,409 European, 20,000 British, and 187,067 Indian troops. The EIC used these soldiers as a bargaining chip in alliance negotiations, war mongering, and quashing rebellions. “It is one of the

Sikh sepoys, non-commissioned and Indian officers in uniform and mufti, 1933–35. Photo from the War Office Photographic Collection, the National Archives UK. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

great ironies of the Company’s history that its Indian empire was effectively won by its Indian troops,” says Barrow.

It was in the military that the EIC’s racist strategy of divide et impera (“divide and rule”) flourished. Indians from Bengal were pitted against Indians from neighboring states. Indian troops were slowly cut off from their communities, forbidden from participating in festival parades or having holy men bless their regimental colors. Some ethnic groups or castes were favored above others. This was especially true after the Great Rebellion of 1857 (the First War of Indian Independence), when sepoys (Indian infantrymen) revolting over pig-fat-greased rifle cartridges caused a chain reaction of uprisings throughout Bengal and northern India. “The sight of Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelling together, willing to pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, alarmed the British,” says Tharoor, and they “concluded that pitting the two groups against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenged continuance of empire.”

“The Whole Ideology of This Rule Was That of . . . the Master Race”

Underlying all of the EIC’s economic policies during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was racism. Yes, some early Company officials took the initiative to learn local languages, to read Indian texts, and to sponsor the construction of schools and temples. But these were all a means to an end: exploitation. To weasel every cent of money out of the land, the governments, and the people, it was useful to know as

“THE ENGLISH HAVE TAUGHT US THAT WE WERE

NOT ONE NATION BEFORE AND THAT IT WILL

REQUIRE CENTURIES BEFORE WE BECOME ONE

NATION. THIS IS WITHOUT FOUNDATION. WE

WERE ONE NATION BEFORE THEY CAME TO INDIA.

ONE THOUGHT INSPIRED US. OUR MODE OF LIFE

WAS THE SAME. IT WAS BECAUSE WE WERE ONE

NATION THAT THEY WERE ABLE TO ESTABLISH ONE

KINGDOM. SUBSEQUENTLY THEY DIVIDED US.”

much about them as possible. For example, it was through “philanthropy” that the first governor-general of India, Warren Hastings (1773–85), was able to establish an opium monopoly in Bengal and begin the lucrative business of smuggling the drug across the Chinese border. “While Hastings and his era can be contrasted with the violent racism that characterizes the last half-century of Company rule,” says Barrow, “it should be remembered that Hastings was a ruthless empire builder and that his effort to understand Indian culture was, at least in part, a way of extending his control.” When Hastings was replaced by Charles Cornwallis (the general famous for the 1781 British surrender at Yorktown), the EIC’s racist policies became more prevalent. Cornwallis launched a series of reforms that segregated the Indians from the British. He reduced the numbers of sepoys in the military, and made it more difficult for Indians to pass the civil service tests. He also placed severe restrictions on those of mixed race, reminding them that, despite their British heritage, they were colonial subjects, says Cornell University professor Durba Ghosh. “These kinds of measures contributed to a growing sense that the proximity between Britons and Indians required careful regulation if the British were to retain political authority on the Indian subcontinent.”

In the 1800s, these regulations grew more overtly racist with the introduction of missionaries to India. “Their success,” says Barrow, “was an expression of a growing British contempt for Hinduism and Islam, [and] a conviction that the Company, as a government, had a duty to improve the lives of its subjects.” Now, the EIC no longer justified its actions in purely capitalist terms; it argued that its takeover of more land and imposition of harsher taxes was for the good of the Indian people. “The British used racism to create differences,” says Sourav Ghosh, a PhD history student at UC Berkeley. “They used the caste system as leverage to control Indians.” “The whole ideology” of British rule, says Jawaharlal Nehru, was that of “the master race, and the structure of government was based upon it; indeed the idea of a master race is inherent in imperialism. There was no subterfuge about it; it was proclaimed in unambiguous language by those in authority. More powerful than words was the practice that accompanied them and, generation after generation and year after year, India as a nation and Indians as individuals were subjected to insult, humiliation and contemptuous treatment.”

Modern Connections: India Today

India was forever changed by the EIC and the British government. The systematically imposed racism and wealth inequality created during those 350 years of colonial rule resulted in a societal and economic hierarchy that continues to impact the daily lives of Indians. The wedge driven between Indians of different castes, religions, and ethnic or regional backgrounds led to the separation of India and Pakistan, as well as lingering tensions in the Kashmir region. “The reality is that when it comes to occupying and governing territories and peoples that have contested relations with the

[Indian] mainland,” says University of Westminster professor Dibyesh Anand, India’s current government has “adopted measures including . . . suppression of rights, denial of self-determination, and absence of consensual rule.” These were all tactics used by the British.

India also has an enduring fear of foreign interference. Shortly after Indian independence in 1947, the Indian government, led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, passed into law extensive regulations for multinational companies. This helped the country’s own industries to grow and the new country to become self-reliant. In the 1970s, further legislation mandated that the majority of a foreign company’s equity must be owned by Indian shareholders; this resulted in Coca-Cola and IBM pulling out of the Indian market for a time. While economic reforms in the 1990s relaxed most of these measures—making the Indian market a prime opportunity for foreign companies once more—“multinationals still have villainous reputations in India, and with good reason,” says Dalrymple. “The many thousands of dead and injured in the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984 cannot be easily forgotten; the gas plant’s owner, the American multinational, Union Carbide, has managed to avoid prosecution or the payment of any meaningful compensation in the 30 years since.”

Modern Connections: In the Pockets of Government

Throughout its life, the EIC was constantly propped up by the British government. It was considered too important to the British lifestyle, too entrenched in the nation’s own and imperial economies, to go bankrupt—in other words, “too big to fail.” That phrase has dominated news headlines in the past twenty years to describe the likes of Enron (2001), Lehman Brothers (2008), and General Motors (2009). Also, because many EIC shareholders were also members of Parliament (and had often obtained their seats with the aid of their share earnings), the British government had a vested interest in keeping the EIC in power in India. This pattern of collusion between government officials and corporate executives can be found today in the corridors of Congress, with organizations such as the National Rifle Association and Koch Industries employing lobbyists to woo our representatives and donating to local, state, and national campaigns.

Modern Connections: Capitalism and Colonialism At Home and Abroad

While the age of empire may be over, US and British corporations continue to follow the EIC’s playbook in terms of bending the rules to maximize gain. Many oil companies, for example, control reserves in African countries; rather than their profits trickling into the local communities, they are whisked away to foreign banks or invested in real estate. This can exacerbate wealth inequality, famines, and other natural disasters, as well as create the necessary environment for other abuses. Chevron, Shell, and Exxon, among others, have all had cases brought against them for forced

labor, arbitrary arrest, torture, and the deaths of their employees overseas. “These are colonial era tactics,” says journalist Osaki Peebe Harry, “still employed with regards to who controls the revenues from Africa.”

Capitalism and colonialism working together to create mass wealth inequality is so embedded in our own society that we don’t see it. “In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth,” says Princeton University professor Matthew Desmond, “while a larger share of working-age people (18–65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.” Many people of color struggle to make a living wage, and many indigenous people are still fighting to protect their ancestral land from industries who want the natural resources. The Lakota, Standing Rock, and other Native American tribes are protesting the building of the Keystone XL pipeline in South Dakota, and native Hawaiians are protesting the construction of a new telescope on Mauna Kea, the most sacred site for indigenous communities.

United States, 2019

Today, the legacy of colonialism and capitalism can be seen worldwide. The desire for wealth and power continues to impact governments, economies, and societies every day. “The in-built pursuit of institutional and individual self-interest—which forms the foundation of the British and American model of the firm—has been left untouched” since the days of the EIC, says Robins. “In many ways, the global economy is currently living through the worst of both worlds: the removal of government restraints on economic activity without the introduction of compensating restraints on the power of corporations.” Greed and the racism, discrimination, and violence that it engenders are a part of our past, ingrained in our present, and an inescapable inheritance for our future.

SOURCES Ian Barrow, The East India Company 1600–1858: A Short History with Documents (Indianapolis,

Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 2017); Peter Beinart, “Greenland’s Wishes Don’t Matter to Trump,”

The Atlantic, August 27, 2019, bit.ly/2L32XP0 (accessed August 29, 2019); Nathalie Belhoste and Jérémy

Grasset, “The Chaotic History of Foreign Companies in India,” Institut Français des Relations Internationales, 2008, bit.ly/2mnWYuv (accessed September 24, 2019); William Dalrymple, “The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders,” The Guardian, March 4, 2015, bit.ly/2fV0pzL (accessed August 29, 2019); Matthew Desmond, “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation,” The New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019, bit.ly/2YZPZ8A (accessed September 5, 2019); Osaki Peebe Harry, “Colonialism in Africa is Still Alive and Well,” The Guardian, August 1, 2017, bit. ly/2mbJEJt (accessed September 11, 2019); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making

of Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Sourav Ghosh (UC Berkeley PhD student),

in conversation with Simon Hodgson, September 23, 2019; Amy Hawkins, “The World Is Reaping the Chaos the British Empire Sowed,” Foreign Policy, August 13, 2019, bit.ly/2N9BGMs (accessed September 10, 2019); Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern

Multinational (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Shashi Tharoor, “‘Inglorious Empire’: India Strikes Back,” The Irish Times, March 10, 2017, bit.ly/2KJZUrA (accessed September 12, 2019); Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (London: Hurst, 2017)

Inside the Testmatch Rehearsal Ro

om

ABOVE Actors Millie Brooks, Avanthika Srinivasan, and Ar

wen Anderson. Photo by Beryl Baker.

BELOW Playwright Kate Attwell and Movement Coach Dan

Kate Attwell’s Testmatch

WHEN

Part One: The pr_esent Part Two: Around 1749,

perhaps 1800

WHERE

Part One: A players’_{at Lord’s Cricket Gr lounge} ound, London

Part Two: Outdoors _{at The} Fort, an East India Co

mpany outpost in Calcutta,

India

WHAT

Part One: During a rain-delayed match in the Women’s Cricket World Cup, the English

and Indian players are stuck inside, waiting for the official call on if the game will continue. At first, both teams are united in their desire to play through the rain. But as the storm rages outside, buried tensions arise between them, from which is the better team and the merit of the game to each other’s characters and who deserves to play.

Part Two: Abhi, the Number One sepoy in an East India Company fort, performs damage

control for two British officers as they forgo work to rewrite the rules of cricket. As the two officers quibble over the best way to bowl, the Memsahib’s demands grow incessant, and breaking news arrives from outside the compound walls, Abhi must decide whether to take action and how.

WHO

England 1: Captain, batsman. A strategizer

with a lot riding on today’s match.

England 2: Batsman. Carrying some

relationship baggage.

England 3: Wicket-keeper. Level-headed,

a peacekeeper.

India 1: Captain, fast bowler. A talented

veteran player.

India 2: Batsman. Confident but plays her

cards close to her chest.

India 3: Batsman. An enthusiastic new

member of the team.

One and Two: Lord’s Cricket Club

members and East India Company officers.

Memsahib: The wife of One. Has an

opium affinity.

Abhi: A sepoy who encounters obstacles to

completing his assigned duties.

Daanya: A talented village cricketer. Messenger

Questions to Consider

Preshow:

1. How are sports and politics linked? How are women’s sports perceived? What aspects of sports apply to storytelling?

2. What are the unwritten rules that influence you? Whom do those rules benefit? 3. What does the photograph of Sikh soldiers on page 30 tell you? Who created this historical document? Why was it created? Why has it survived for more than 80 years?

Postshow:

1. Why does playwright Kate Attwell shift tone from the realistic depiction of modern cricketers to the theatrical comic figures of the East India Company officials?

2. How does watching Part Two of Testmatch make you view Part One differently? 3. In what ways do we see the legacy of colonialist, economic, and cultural systems of power in contemporary America?

For Further Information

Astill, James. The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption, and the Turbulent Rise of Modern

India. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Desmond, Matthew. “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.” The New York Times Magazine. August 14, 2019. bit.ly/2YZPZ8A.

Dirks, Nicholas B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Duncan, Isabelle. Skirting the Boundary: A History of Women’s Cricket. London: Robson Press, 2013.

Gowariker, Ashutosh (director). Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. Sony Pictures Network, Zee Network: 2001.

Robins, Nick. The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company

Shaped the Modern Multinational. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.