Calcutta Cricket Club and the Parsis of Bombay — Cricket in India, 1840s

Cricket had been played in India since the 1720s by employees of the East India Company. The Calcutta Cricket Club (1792) was already half a century old by 1840 but was a European institution. The Parsis of Bombay, by the 1830s, were the most westernised native community in India and the natural first adopters of European games.

Through the 1830s Parsi boys had played cricket on Bombay's Esplanade with sticks and tennis balls. By the mid-1840s some had begun to organise themselves in informal clubs. The Oriental Cricket Club's foundation in 1848 was the first formal step.

The Calcutta Cricket Club, founded by employees of the East India Company in 1792, had through the 1840s a settled fixture list against military and merchant elevens around Bengal. Membership was strictly European and the social model was unmistakably colonial. In Bombay (now Mumbai), cricket had been played on the Esplanade by British army and naval personnel for decades; from the early nineteenth century young Parsis had begun to imitate the game with improvised bats and balls. By the 1840s the Parsi community — small, educated, internationally networked through the China trade and shipping — was producing cricketers serious enough to challenge for proper grounds and equipment. The Oriental Cricket Club, founded by Parsi youth in 1848, was the first non-European cricket club anywhere in the world. It played informally for a decade before reorganising as the Young Zoroastrian Club in 1850, after which the Parsi cricket movement grew rapidly. The 1840s set up the Bombay-Parsi cricket rivalry that would eventually produce the Quadrangular tournament and India's first Test side. The Indian-cricket story begins, in any meaningful sense, with the Parsi cricketers of late-1840s Bombay.

Parsi cricket grew rapidly from 1850; by 1878 a Parsi side toured England (largely unsuccessfully) and by 1886 Parsi cricket was strong enough to start the Bombay tournament that became the Pentangular. The first Indian Test in 1932 included Parsi players in a direct line of descent from the Oriental Cricket Club of 1848.