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Last night, when the news came that Sir Garfield Sobers had completed his journey, I reached for those who shared the geography of that loss. I messaged Arlene, married to a Barbadian, and in the flood of memories that followed, my seven-year-old self reappeared, sitting in the sun-drenched tiers of Queen’s Park Oval, hand in my father’s, watching Sobers walk.

I was seven in 1971, visiting Trinidad from Dominica, where my father was on a UNDP posting. The world was bright and uncomplicated then: a child from India holding her father’s hand proudly as he presented credentials in a Caribbean capital still negotiating its postcolonial self. The match was India, led by Ajit Wadekar, against the West Indies, led by Sobers. The air was electric, the stadium a cauldron of sound. And in that cauldron, a young Sunil Gavaskar was making his legend—three centuries on that 1971 tour, his debut innings at the Oval a quiet revolution.

A few years later, the calypsos would come—some in praise of Sobers, some in mockery after the 1971 defeat. But in that moment, what stayed with me was the image of Sobers: not the fallen captain, but the generous champion who walked over and patted the young Gavaskar, a gesture that seemed to say the game was bigger than any single player. That is the Sobers who endured in my memory.

The cricket field as theatre of empire and its undoing

C.L.R. James, in Beyond a Boundary (1963), offered me an intellectual framework for understanding why cricket mattered so profoundly in the Caribbean. The game, he argued, was not merely a colonial import to be accepted or rejected; it was a terrain on which Caribbean people could contest, appropriate, and ultimately transform the very symbols of empire. The bat and ball became instruments of social identity, dignity, and anti-colonial assertion.

In James’s reading, the West Indian cricketer was not simply an athlete but a political subject, performing freedom on a field once reserved for the master’s games. When Sobers strode to the crease, he was not merely playing cricket; he was enacting a Caribbean claim to excellence, agency, and self-definition. Yet here lay the complication that I have come to recognise: Sobers, the symbol of Caribbean liberation, was also a figure celebrated by the very establishment he was meant to transcend. Knighted in 1975, honoured as a National Hero in Barbados, embraced by governments........

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