Cricket in India — Bombay's Quadrangular Begins to Take Shape, 1860s

British India's cricket culture in the 1860s was primarily European; the gradual emergence of Parsi, Hindu and Muslim communities as cricket-playing groups reflected a broader process of cultural appropriation in which colonised peoples mastered the colonisers' game.

The Parsi community of Bombay — prosperous, educated and commercially successful — had taken to cricket in the 1840s and by the 1860s were developing grounds and clubs of their own. The Oriental Cricket Club, founded by the Parsis, was playing regular matches against other Bombay clubs by the mid-1860s. The Bombay Gymkhana, the European cricket institution, was the strongest side in the city and the Parsis' ambition was to compete against it on equal terms. Through the 1860s the Parsi vs European matches were increasingly competitive; by the 1870s they were genuine contests, and by 1877 the Parsis had beaten the Gymkhana for the first time. The social significance of these matches — a colonised community publicly besting its colonial rulers in the colonisers' own game — was immense. The Quadrangular tournament that grew from these beginnings was, by the early twentieth century, the most watched cricket event in India.