Is Indian cricket no longer cricket?

There is nothing in world sport, ‘nothing in the history of the human race’, Ramachandra Guha modestly reckons, that can remotely match the passions that surround Indian cricket. I have no idea how many listeners or viewers hung on every ball of Ben Stokes’s Headingley heroics last year, but it is a safe bet that had it been Sachin Tendulkar or Sunil Gavaskar batting, and an India victory over Pakistan at stake, then you could add as many noughts to that figure as will accommodate a cricket-mad population edging its way towards the one and a half billion mark.

The Commonwealth of Cricket is part celebration, part elegy, but before all else unashamedly the book of one of those tens of millions of India’s cricket fans. Ramachandra Guha is an historian, environmentalist, journalist and political biographer of wide-ranging distinction, but save for a dismal-sounding phase in his Marxist twenties, when E.P.