Indian Cricket, Popular Culture and “National Thing”: Reflections from Sport-Induced Nationalism

Cricket in India has evolved much beyond its fundamental definition as a game or form of entertainment in the present century. The liberalization process in the 1990s, followed by the drastic social changes in the country, impacted the game, leading it to acquire new meanings as cultural text. Currently, Indian cricket forms part of collective enjoyment, forming people's habitus and playing a central ideological role in the politics of ethnonationalism. This article attempts to analyze Indian Cricket using Slavoj Zizek's concept of “national Thing,” to critically understand its potential to evoke hyper-nationalism in the Indian polity. The concept of “national Thing,” proposed by Zizek, postulates that the recourse to nationalism can cause a pleasure-in-pain situation and evoke extreme “enjoyment” (jouissance), which functions on the idea of sudden sense of loss. Drawing insights from this, this paper theoretically investigates sport-induced nationalism in cricket in the backdrop of escalating neo-nationalist sentiments in India. Additionally, the article expounds on how cricket becomes a “lost Thing” in Indian popular culture by critically analyzing the Indian film Kai Po Che (2013), in which cricket emerges as a social and political entity, intervening with the lives of ordinary youths in India.