Adams and Eves at the Eden Gardens: Women Cricket Spectators and the Conflict of Feminine Subjectivity in Calcutta, 1920–1970

Abstract

This article explores how cricket-watching women in Calcutta have been historically portrayed in vernacular literature and newspaper columns. It begins by providing an historical background of women's presence in sport grounds, describing mainly the construction of Victorian ideals of the women-sport relationship. It locates women cricket spectators in two historical phases: before the 1950s, that is, at a time when gender boundaries were comparatively tightly defined and in the 1950s to ’60s, namely, when women's agency became a topic of intense discussion. While dealing with the colonial period, it contextualises the reactions to cricket-watching Bengali women in light of the colonial ideologies of domestic womanhood. Further moving on, it traces the subsequent depictions of women spectators, analysing the lampoons and debates around spectatorship. By doing so, the study hopes to locate the shifts in representations of femininity within the news media and in cricket books to understand, in a broader context, the changing gender relations and consumer culture in Bengali society.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.