Divided by design. United by cricket.

Every nation tells itself a story about the games it plays. India's is unusual, because for the first half-century of organised cricket in the country, the game wasn't telling a story about India at all — it was telling a story the British wanted told: that Indians were not one people, but several, and that even a cricket field should be marked out along those lines. Eighty years into independence, it's worth remembering how completely that story failed, and how much cricket has done, here and elsewhere, to write a better one.

A tournament built to keep Indians apart

Bombay's marquee cricket tournament through the first half of the twentieth century wasn't a city XI against visiting sides. It was communities against each other. It began in 1907 as the Triangular — Europeans, Parsis and Hindus, three separate teams drawn from the same city, playing for the same trophy. In 1912 it became the Quadrangular when a Muslims XI was added. By 1937 it was the Pentangular, a fifth team called simply "The Rest" — Buddhists, Jews, Indian Christians, whoever was left over — completing a competition where a cricketer's religion, not his ability, decided which XI he was eligible to play for.

It was, by design, a small working model of divide-and-rule: convince a diverse, majority-Hindu, sizeable-Muslim, historically plural society that its natural state was separation, and stage the proof every winter in front of paying crowds. It ran for decades. And it drew genuine crowds and genuine talent — which made it all the more dangerous as a template for how India might see itself.

Mahatma Gandhi said so directly. In December 1940, with the tournament still hugely popular, he wrote to the Hindu Gymkhana urging its players to boycott the Pentangular, condemning its communal structure as a source of what he called "communal poison" and asking Bombay's cricketing public to "revise their sporting code" and erase communal matches from it altogether. The pressure built through the 1940s. The tournament's last edition, delayed by the war, was played in January 1946 — a year before independence — and then abandoned for good, with BCCI president P. Subbaroyan backing the decision.

The dressing room where those lines dissolved

Independent India didn't just retire the Pentangular's idea — its national team spent the following decades quietly proving the opposite of what it had argued. Mansoor Ali Khan "Tiger" Pataudi, a Muslim born in Bhopal, became India's Test captain at 21 years and 77 days old — still the youngest in the country's history — and led India in 40 of his 46 Tests, including its first-ever series win overseas, in New Zealand in 1968. Farokh Engineer, a Parsi, kept wicket for India through the 1960s and '70s behind the legendary spin quartet, standing up to the stumps for some of the most testing bowling India ever produced.

The same story keeps repeating in different decades. After India's loss to Pakistan at the 2021 T20 World Cup, fast bowler Mohammed Shami — the side's only Muslim player — was singled out for vile communal abuse online, blamed for a defeat that had nothing to do with him. Sachin Tendulkar and a wave of other cricketers and fans publicly rejected it, insisting the whole country stood behind everyone wearing the jersey. Two years later, at the 2023 ODI World Cup on home soil, Shami finished the tournament as its leading wicket-taker with 24 wickets in just seven matches, including a scarcely believable 7 for 57 against New Zealand in the semi-final — the best bowling figures ever recorded in a World Cup knockout match. He was carried home a national hero, no asterisk attached.

It wasn't just India

Cricket carried a version of this fight everywhere the empire had planted it — and in two other places, it became one of the clearest stages on which people who'd been told they were lesser proved, in full public view, that they weren't.

Worrell wasn't the very first Black man to lead the West Indies for even a single match — George Headley had done that once, in 1948 — but he was the first handed the job as an ongoing appointment, in 1960, after a sustained campaign in the press. James later wrote it all up in Beyond a Boundary (1963), still regarded as one of the finest sports books ever written, using cricket to dissect colonialism and Caribbean self-determination through its most famous line: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"

South Africa's isolation has an India-shaped footnote worth telling in full. India was a vocal part of the global sporting boycott of apartheid — it even forfeited the 1974 Davis Cup tennis final rather than play South Africa. So when South Africa finally came back into the fold in November 1991, Sachin Tendulkar was named Player of the Match and Allan Donald took five wickets on his ODI debut, in front of a packed Eden Gardens — the country that had helped keep the door shut was the one that welcomed the team back through it.

A television, an underdog, and a nation that dared to aspire

Cricket's popularity in India owes an enormous amount to two things arriving within months of each other. Doordarshan began colour transmission in 1982 — Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's Independence Day address that August was among the first broadcasts in colour, with the Asian Games in New Delhi that November completing the rollout. For most Indian households, this was close to the first time anything was watchable in colour, let alone cricket.

Eight months later, on 25 June 1983, Kapil Dev's India — a team of largely unknown players, given odds as long as 66 to 1 by English bookmakers according to accounts widely repeated in cricket writing — beat the two-time defending champion West Indies at Lord's to win the World Cup. Days earlier, Kapil had played an innings that has become cricket folklore precisely because almost nobody saw it: 175 not out off 138 balls against Zimbabwe, after India had collapsed to 17 for 5, on a day the BBC's technicians happened to be on strike. It survives only in scorecards and memory — the most famous unfilmed innings in the sport's history.

Colour television reaching further than ever before, and an underdog win nobody had scripted, is the combination most cricket historians point to for turning the game from a genteel pastime into the obsession of a young, newly aspirational nation. Every child who watched Kapil lift that trophy, in grainy new colour, had a reason to believe something in their own life might be next.

Four decades on, the scale that set in motion is hard to overstate:

Figures are the most credible, source-dated estimates available; cricket and NFL/NBA audiences are measured in very different countries and by different methodologies, so treat the comparison as scale, not a like-for-like ranking.

A sport that most Indian households first watched in colour in 1982 now runs a private tournament worth billions and draws a single-country audience that rivals America's biggest single sporting night. That is the backdrop CricCuts is launching into.

CricCuts: India's next gift back to the game

Television made cricket watchable to a billion people at once. The smartphone and social media made it shareable, ball by ball, from anywhere. Both of those were revolutions in how cricket gets consumed. The next one is about how it gets produced — and it's happening on the same device already in everyone's pocket.

CricCuts is a free, on-device cricket video editor. Point a phone at a net session, a school match, a gully game, hit record — and CricCuts finds the shots on its own, using on-device audio and optional pose analysis, entirely on the phone itself. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; nothing leaves the device. What used to take an evening of scrubbing through raw footage becomes a clean, shareable reel in minutes.

India didn't invent Twenty20 — that came from England — but the IPL, launched in 2008, is what turned it into the sport's greatest commercial spectacle and exported the franchise blueprint to the rest of the cricket world. CricCuts is a much smaller thing built in that same spirit: cutting-edge, on-device AI, developed in India, given away free to anyone anywhere curious enough to pick up a bat or a ball — a schoolboy in Christchurch, a net session in Bridgetown, a gully final in Karachi, a backyard in Bengaluru. Not a product India sells to the cricket world. A tool India hands to it.

The talent nobody has found yet

India alone is home to hundreds of millions of people who have picked up a bat or a taped tennis ball on a maidan, a school ground, or a strip of concrete between buildings. Add in the growing number of franchise leagues worldwide — the IPL, BBL, PSL, CPL, The Hundred, MLC, ILT20 and more, each running its own auction every year — and professional cricket has more paid pathways into it than the sport has ever had. But the audition for almost all of them still comes down to the same old bottleneck: did a scout happen to be there.

Countless genuinely talented players, especially away from the traditional cricketing centres, are never seen — not because they lack ability, but because nobody filmed them, or the footage that was shot never got turned into something a coach, a selector or a scholarship committee would actually sit down and watch. Raw, unedited footage is very close to no footage at all; nobody has the time to scrub through it.

That's the gap CricCuts is built to close. For a talented teenager in a small town, or a returning club player anywhere in the world, the difference between a shaky phone recording nobody opens and a clean highlight reel that actually gets watched can be the difference between being seen and never being seen at all — done with AI that runs free, on the device already in their pocket, doing in minutes what used to need a coach with a camera and hours of free time to edit.

They face 130 km/h for the love of the game. The least we can do is press record.

A cricket ball weighs about as much as an apple and arrives at a batter anywhere from 130 km/h to well over 150 — under half a second to watch it, decide, and commit the whole of your body to being in exactly the right place. There's no play-by-play commentator for a Tuesday evening net session, no ground staff for an Under-14 school match, no broadcaster for a gully final. Just a player doing something genuinely dangerous and genuinely skilful, for nothing but the love of it — and, more often than not, for no eyes at all except a memory that will half-forget the details by the next morning.

Every one of those deliveries deserves better than a fading recollection. It deserves to be recorded — and because raw, unwatched footage helps nobody, it deserves to be cut down to the moments that actually mattered, so someone actually watches it back. That, plainly, is the whole reason CricCuts exists.

What happens in your brain when you watch yourself bat

There's a good scientific reason that footage matters beyond just having a record to look back on. Watching a movement isn't a passive act for the brain — mirror neurons fire both when you perform an action and when you watch it performed, so replaying your own innings partially rehearses it in your motor system. And because your own sense of your technique — your proprioception — is notoriously unreliable for the fast, fine details of an elite movement, a camera sees things your body's own "feel" simply cannot: the head that fell away, the bat that came down from third man, the front foot that landed a beat too early.

Your brain learns by comparing what it predicted a movement would feel like against what actually happened — a forward model checked against reality, with the gap between the two, the prediction error, driving the correction. Video makes that gap vivid instead of blurry, which is why players who study their own footage tend to fix technical faults faster than players who are only ever told about them. We've written the full science of this — mirror neurons, prediction error, and exactly which batting and bowling faults video can and can't fix — in a separate piece: the neuroscience of learning from watching yourself →

More on the CricCuts blog — read next about the solo developer building CricCuts, one late night at a time.