TO OUTSIDERS, the magnitude of Indians' love for cricket is as incomprehensible as its feverish intensity. In February 2014, India awarded the Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian honour, to Sachin Tendulkar, a recently retired batsman. Millions in India, a country of 1.3 billion people and only one nationally popular game, celebrated wildly. When India's national side plays a big game, an estimated 400 million watch on television. Yet cricket's take-off in India is a highly improbable development. The game is difficult to play properly, requiring space, a good turf pitch and expensive equipment – which only a small handful of Indian cricketers have access to. Most will never strap on pads or bowl with a leather ball. So why do Indians so love the game?

Contrary to what many believe, India’s success at cricket does not explain it; if it did, hockey would be far more popular. Between 1928 and 1956, India's hockey team won six consecutive Olympic gold medals, a domination Indian cricketers have never threatened to rival. Despite having more cricketers than the rest of the world put together, India has only fairly recently become consistently competitive at cricket.

Nor was cricket's conquest of India a colonial ruse. India's 19th-century British rulers never intended to proselytise their favourite game. But this proved to be the original, and perhaps most important, reason for its astonishing spread. Anxious for the prestige that the British attached to the game, some of the richest and most ambitious Indians – including Parsi and Hindu business communities in Bombay and princely rulers elsewhere – began playing it off their own bat (as it were). Thus, cricket became a game of the Indian elite, loaded with political significance which it has never lost. The fact that Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, also opened the batting for the Indian Parliament side was a symbol of a wider retention of British culture and institutions. No other sport has ever received such top-level patronage in India.

But Indian cricket was not only elite. From its earliest days in Bombay, it was also popular. Vast crowds turned out to watch the first Parsi and Hindu teams take on their colonial rulers, and each other. This reflected the time and place; surging growth in Bombay's textile factories had spawned a new class of organised labour, with a modicum of spare time and money. It perhaps also reflected the hierarchic nature of traditional Indian society.