The Tailenders: Chasing Cricket In India's Forgotten Frontier

In Kohima, a group of young cricketers practice on a dusty patch of land, their kits a mix of donated equipment and second-hand purchases. One of them, a 16-year-old named Imti, dreams of playing in the Indian Premier League (IPL). He knows the names of the stars—Kohli, Rohit, Bumrah—but none of them feels like his own. “When I watch them play, I feel proud as an Indian,” he says. Then he pauses. “But I also feel small. Like this game is theirs, not ours.”

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) laid the foundation stones for indoor cricket academies across six states in the Northeast in May 2024. For many, this move appeared as a long-overdue recognition, a symbolic bridge extended towards a region that has rarely figured in India’s cricketing imagination. Yet, the gesture raises more questions than it answers. For decades, the Northeast has been a spectator in a game whose emotional weight was carried elsewhere on the backs of metro cities, in stadiums packed with roaring fans, on television screens that broadcast a version of India far removed from the hills and valleys of this region.

While cricket became the sport of national celebration, football grew quietly in the Northeast’s school grounds, churchyards, and community fields, not as a televised spectacle, but intertwining with everyday life.

This history cannot be undone with the laying of a foundation stone. The arrival of cricket in the Northeast is not merely a story of infrastructure arriving late; it is a question of whether a game so deeply tied to the assertion of national pride and so shaped by the centres of power can ever belong in a region that has long been made to feel peripheral to the Indian story. The BCCI’s initiative marks a new chapter, but the script remains unwritten.

Cricket’s spread across India was never accidental. It followed the fault lines of colonial commerce, caste hierarchies, and the consolidation of elite power. The ports of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras became cricket’s early centres because they were the centres of British capital and governance. The princely states patronised cricket as a way to signal proximity to colonial authority. By the time Independence arrived, cricket had already been absorbed into the machinery of the Indian nation-state.

The Northeast, in contrast, remained a geopolitical periphery administered as a frontier, seen through the lens of military control, and largely left out of India’s sporting imagination. Until the 2010s, most states in the region lacked basic facilities, and their cricketers had to train in faraway cities if they wanted to be taken seriously. Mizoram’s cricket association, for instance, operated for years without a proper ground, while Nagaland only fielded its first senior men’s team in 2018, playing “home” matches in other states. Even the BCCI’s long-delayed grant of full membership to Northeastern states—formalised in 2018—seemed less like an organic recognition of the region’s sporting identity, and more an afterthought spurred by legal mandates.

Football, on the other hand, required no expensive gear, no sprawling pitches, and no formalised leagues. By the time cricket became a televised national spectacle in the 1980s and ’90s, football had already taken root in the Northeast. The World Cup triumphs in 1983 and 2011 were celebrated as national milestones, but in the Northeast, they passed with little more than polite applause.

The story of cricket’s rise as the nation’s game is also a story of exclusion. Cricket became the language of an India imagined from the centres: from Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata. The faces who carried its symbols—Gavaskar, Tendulkar, and Kohli—belonged to the majoritarian heartland; their victories mapped onto the idea of India as a coherent, singular entity. The Northeast was rarely seen as a part of this imagined community.

The BCCI’s role in shaping this spectacle cannot be understated. As the financial powerhouse of world cricket, it has leveraged its control over the game to project an image of India as a cricketing superpower. Yet, this power has often been exercised without regard for the diversity within the nation itself. The Northeast was not seen as a talent pool worth investing in until recently. Cricket has been treated less as a shared national sport and more as a stage-managed display of unity. But what does cricket mean in a country where a Muslim boy can be branded anti-national for cheering the Pakistani team, where a Dalit cricketer’s success is framed as a miracle rather than a result of structural change, and where fans from the Northeast often feel like guests in the stadiums that claim to represent the nation?

The IPL, often held up as a symbol of inclusivity, has only deepened this contradiction. It offers spectacle but little in the way of structural change. The Northeast has remained largely absent from its franchise map, and while players from the region may occasionally find a place on the benches, they are rarely given the space to emerge as central figures.

The BCCI’s decision to invest in cricket infrastructure in the Northeast has been presented as a corrective gesture. The images of Jay Shah at these events, surrounded by local officials and hopeful young players, project a story of integration. Inclusion by infrastructure is not the same as belonging.

Northeast's Long Chase

There were a few success stories, though. The Northeast had its Riyan Parag moment. He was born into cricket but not into the system that produces its stars. His father, Parag Das, played for Assam, a career spent on the edges of Indian cricket in a space that rarely makes headlines. At 17, Riyan became the youngest player to score a 50 in the 2019 IPL. The media celebrated him as a sign of change: a boy from Guwahati, holding his own in the biggest cricketing league in the world. But the story behind the headlines was less triumphant. Parag’s rise was not the result of a system working as it should but despite it. His training often took him outside the Northeast. His exposure to high-level competition came not from local tournaments or state-backed facilities but through private effort and family support. In every interview where Riyan speaks about inspiring kids from the Northeast, there is an undertone of quiet burden: the weight of being the lone representative of an entire region.

A decade before Parag carried the weight of Northeast cricket on his shoulders, there was Hokaito Zhimomi. In 2008, he became the first cricketer from Nagaland to be associated with the IPL, drafted into the Kolkata Knight Riders’ pre-season training camp. For a moment, it seemed like a breakthrough: a player from a state without a proper cricket ground was knocking on the door of the nation’s biggest stage. But the door never truly opened.

Hokaito learned to play on football fields in Nagaland. His break came when he travelled to Guwahati, convinced his parents to send him to Kolkata, and found a place bowling in the nets during KKR’s training. KKR’s coach and a two-time World Cup winner, John Buchanan, saw something others did not. In Future of Cricket (2009), Buchanan called Hokaito a “champion,” a young man “trying his guts out” to chase a dream in a game that had never seen someone like him before. But grit and ambition could not sustain a career. Hokaito never played a single IPL match. His presence in the team’s training sessions was a gesture, not a commitment. No leagues nurtured his talent, no scouts followed his progress, and no media spotlight amplified his story. After the training camps ended, he slipped back into the margins, playing the Ranji Trophy for Assam and then for Nagaland, when the state finally got a chance. For a brief time, he captained the Northeast Zone in the Duleep Trophy.

Hokaito’s story is a reminder that talent alone is not enough. Parag and Hokaito are not exceptions that signal change; they are reminders of a pattern—when the spotlight moves on, the structures remain the same.

A Foreign Sport

In the years since, the Northeast has produced footballers, boxers, archers, and runners who have reached national and international stages. Cricket, by contrast, remains a game that glances at the region occasionally.

In Aizawl, Laltlanzuala, a coach at a local football academy, wonders aloud why cricket is being pushed so hard when football has already given the region so much. “We have sent players to the national team, to the I-League and Indian Super League. Our stadiums are packed during football matches. Why does it feel like we are being told that we should want cricket now?” A parent watching from the sidelines says: “We spend so much for them to play—bats, pads, travel. It’s a gamble.” A local sports journalist in Guwahati says cricket has always been something they watched on TV, not something they felt they could play.

For many, the issue is not with the sport itself but with what it represents. “Cricket is shown as India’s pride, but what does it mean for us here? It feels like we are being asked to perform a kind of belonging cheer for the national team and celebrate the victories, but we don’t see ourselves in the story,” says Imti from Kohima.

“They want us to love cricket, but they haven’t even fixed what’s broken in football. We play football because it’s ours. Cricket feels like a visitor here,” says a football fan in Kohima. At a small tea shop in Aizawl, a retired schoolteacher offers a different perspective. “I’m glad the kids have more opportunities now, but they should not forget football. That is the game that belongs here. Cricket has come, but it must find a way to fit, not replace.”

Sangmuan Hangsing is a researcher and alumnus of the Kautilya School of Public Policy

This article appears in 카지노 Magazine’s June 21, 2025 issue, Innings/Outings, which captures a turning point in Indian cricket —from retiring legends to small-town stars reshaping the game’s power map. It appeared in print as 'The Tailenders.'