Calcutta Cricket Club and the Eastern India Game in the 1910s

Calcutta Cricket Club had been founded in 1792, making it the oldest cricket club outside the British Isles. Eden Gardens was laid out in the 1860s.

Through the 1910s, with the British Indian Army's presence and Australian service teams passing through, CCC hosted regular touring fixtures.

Calcutta Cricket Club, based at Eden Gardens, was the social as well as cricketing hub of the British community in Calcutta. Through the 1910s it hosted matches against Australian and English service sides during the war and continued its long-running fixtures against Bengal and Up-Country teams. Indian membership of the club itself remained restricted, but Indian cricketers played increasingly regular fixtures against CCC sides as part of the wider Eden Gardens circuit. The 1910s were the period in which the Bengal Cricket Association began to take shape as a separate body — eventually becoming the Cricket Association of Bengal in 1929. The eastern Indian first-class system, smaller than Bombay's, would not produce a Test cricketer until much later, but the foundations of organised Bengali cricket are in this decade.

“Cricket in Calcutta was as much a club institution as a sporting one.”

Bengal would eventually become a Ranji Trophy power; the first Test at Eden Gardens was played in 1934.