ABSTRACT
Lawn tennis was imported to India by her British colonial rulers almost a century after two of the most popular Indian sports, cricket and football (soccer), reached Indian shores, courtesy of British East India Company officers. In a cricket-crazy country, tennis has always found a respectable place. Its appeal to the status of the affluent has made the sport a significant profession in post-independence India. Along with cricket and soccer, the introduction of tennis, an archetypal gentlemen’s sport, has been attributed to the recreation of British officers. In his seminal work on the history of cricket in India, Guha (2014, p.5) elucidated: ‘Cricket and other sports were a source of much comfort to the expatriate Englishman’. This aspect of sports promotion, it may be stated, stemmed from ideologies of the empire and was replicated in most other colonies. In Britain, as Mangan (2000) explained, headmasters used organised sport and controlled leisure time outside the classroom to control time inside it. In a similar way, the birth of tennis in India was greatly stimulated by local European administrators, and it was from their European teachers that Indian boys got their first lessons in the game.
