The Bombay Triangular and Quadrangular — Communal Cricket in India, 1900s

Cricket had been played in India since the late 18th century, but until the 1890s most of it was European. The growth of native participation — Parsi first, then Hindu, then Muslim — gradually produced an Indian first-class standard.

The Parsis had been the first Indian community to take up European cricket competitively, fielding a team that toured England in 1886 and 1888, and by the late 1890s the annual Parsi-European fixture in Bombay was a fixture of the city's calendar. In 1907 the Hindus joined as a third side, making the contest a Triangular; the matches were played on rough Bombay maidans with grandstands erected for the better-off spectators and large standing crowds drawn from the communities. The Hindu side of the 1900s included Palwankar Baloo, the left-arm spinner from a Dalit family, whose presence in elite cricket carried a social significance that was understood at the time. The tournament's expansion into a Quadrangular followed the Muslim community's request to be admitted, completing the four-team format that ran for the next several decades.

The Quadrangular and its later Pentangular form ran annually until 1945-46, when the tournament was abolished after Mahatma Gandhi and others argued that communal sport reinforced communal identity.