Cricket Commentary Languages in India: A History

Turn on an IPL stream today and you can hear the same delivery described twelve different ways. A length ball outside off is analysed in English, celebrated in Hindi, teased in Tamil, argued over in Telugu and Bengali, and, since 2023, narrated in Bhojpuri with a theatricality that regularly escapes the broadcast and goes viral on its own. Language is now a product feature of Indian cricket, planned in rights meetings and staffed like a newsroom.

None of this was inevitable. For the first three decades of Indian cricket broadcasting there was exactly one language in the commentary box, and it was the language of the empire that brought the game. The story of how that changed — slowly, against institutional resistance, and then all at once — is one of the better lenses for watching modern India happen.

The English inheritance

Cricket arrived in India speaking English, and so did its description. The pioneering radio commentators of the 1930s and 1940s worked in polished, formal English for an audience that was, in large part, imagining a game it had never seen. The convention hardened after independence: All India Radio's flagship cricket coverage remained English-led through the 1950s and 1960s, with commentary treated almost as a literary form. The assumption underneath it was rarely stated but perfectly clear — cricket was an English-speaking pastime, and the vernacular was for other things.

That assumption was already false. The crowds at Test matches in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta did not conduct their arguments about batting orders in English, and the transistor radio was carrying the game deep into small-town and rural India, where the English broadcast served mainly as a signal that something important was happening rather than an explanation of what.

Aankhon dekha haal: Hindi forces the door

The breakthrough is unusually easy to date. In 1968, a young commentator named Sushil Doshi delivered ball-by-ball radio commentary in Hindi at a Ranji Trophy match between Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in Indore — an experiment AIR officials doubted would work, on the theory that cricket's vocabulary simply did not exist in Hindi. Doshi's answer was to build the vocabulary: over the following decades he and his colleagues assembled a Hindi idiom for the game, and the phrase aankhon dekha haal — "an account of what the eyes are seeing" — became the standard name for vernacular ball-by-ball coverage.

Hindi commentary grew alongside, not instead of, the English broadcast. AIR ran parallel commentary, alternating languages by session or by frequency, and names such as Jasdev Singh and Ravi Chaturvedi became familiar to the radio generation in the way the English-language pioneers had been to their parents. The audiences it reached were enormous and largely invisible to administrators, because they were not the audiences who wrote letters to newspapers. A match in the great India-Pakistan rivalry of the radio decades was followed in Hindi and Urdu across two countries by listeners for whom the English feed might as well not have existed.

It is worth pausing on what that first experiment says about the domestic game's standing: Hindi commentary was not trialled at a Test match but at a Ranji Trophy fixture, the kind of match where a broadcaster could afford to take a risk. The domestic competition has served as Indian cricket's laboratory more than once.

Television's long bilingual compromise

Doordarshan's cricket coverage settled into a two-language pattern: English as the default register of expertise, Hindi as the language of reach. For decades the two coexisted on the same telecast, sometimes alternating by over or by session, and an entire generation grew up code-switching with the broadcast. English commentary carried the prestige — former Test players graduated to it as a second career — while Hindi commentary was often treated, unfairly, as the popular annex.

The satellite era initially reinforced the hierarchy. The private sports channels of the 1990s and 2000s built their coverage around international English-speaking panels, in part because the same feed served viewers in a dozen countries. What broke the pattern was not sentiment but arithmetic: pay-television and then smartphones took the game to households that had never been part of the English-speaking audience, and broadcasters discovered that the commentary language was the single biggest lever on whether those households stayed.

2018: the regional bet

The decisive experiment came when Star India took over the Indian Premier League rights in 2018 and treated language as the core of its strategy. A dedicated Hindi sports channel had already shown that Hindi-first coverage could out-rate the English feed. For the 2018 season Star went much further, producing full separate commentary feeds in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Bengali, staffed not with generic voices but with regional cricketing royalty — Krishnamachari Srikkanth and Laxman Sivaramakrishnan in Tamil, Venkatapathi Raju in Telugu, Sunil Joshi and Gundappa Viswanath in Kannada — and distributed them on the group's regional entertainment channels as well as its sports network.

The bet paid off immediately. Star reported viewership growth in the southern markets running far ahead of the national average that season, and the lesson was absorbed across the industry: an ex-India cricketer explaining the game in a viewer's first language was worth more than a bigger name explaining it in English. The count of commentators employed for a single IPL season climbed towards three figures.

Twelve feeds on a phone

Streaming removed the last constraint, which had always been channel capacity. A television network can carry only so many parallel feeds; an app can carry as many as anyone will produce. When JioCinema streamed the IPL from 2023 it offered commentary in twelve languages — adding Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Marathi and Malayalam to the established set — and the additions were not token. The Bhojpuri feed in particular, fronted by performers as much as former players, found an audience nobody had measured before and produced the season's most-shared commentary clips.

The economics of this are covered in the companion page on how Indian cricket broadcasting evolved; the cultural point stands on its own. A Bhojpuri-speaking viewer in Purvanchal is no longer eavesdropping on someone else's broadcast. The game arrives in their own register, with their own jokes, and the implicit message of the old English-only box — that cricket belonged to a particular class — has been dismantled feed by feed.

Era	Languages on a typical major broadcast	Where
1930s-1960s	English	AIR radio
1970s-1990s	English and Hindi	AIR and Doordarshan
2000s-2017	English and Hindi, occasional regional experiments	Satellite TV
2018-2022	English, Hindi, plus Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali feeds	Star TV and Hotstar
2023 onwards	A dozen languages including Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Gujarati, Odia	Streaming

What each language does to the game

The feeds are not translations of one another; they are different genres. English commentary in India still leans analytical, inheriting its conventions from the international circuit. Hindi commentary long ago developed its own high style — more emotive, fonder of metaphor, comfortable with open partisanship in a way the English feed is not. The southern-language feeds tend to be dense with local cricketing reference, because their commentators came up through the same state associations as the players they describe. The newest feeds, Bhojpuri most visibly, borrow from folk performance and stand-up as much as from sports broadcasting.

Purists complain, and have since 1968, that each step away from the classical English register loses something — restraint, mostly. The counter is that every one of these registers is doing the job Indian commentary has always done: making the game belong to the person listening. A form of the same argument runs through the women's game, where the arrival of the Women's Premier League with full national coverage gave a new generation of women commentators, in Hindi and the regional languages as well as English, a platform the pioneers of women's cricket broadcasting never had.

Building a vocabulary from nothing

The hardest part of vernacular commentary was never fluency; it was terminology. Cricket's technical lexicon — silly point, googly, leg glance, follow-on — was coined in English over two centuries and resists literal translation. A commentator working in Hindi or Tamil in the early decades had three options for every term: borrow the English word outright, coin a native equivalent, or describe the thing afresh each time it happened.

What emerged, in every language, was a negotiated hybrid. The positions and the umpiring vocabulary largely stayed English — no Hindi listener has ever been confused by "slip" or "lbw" — while the narrative spine of the commentary went fully vernacular. Hindi settled on its own words for the core objects and actions of the game where natural equivalents existed, kept the English where they did not, and developed formulas of its own that have no English counterpart at all, compressed descriptions of field settings and match situations that a listener absorbs without noticing their efficiency. The southern languages ran the same experiment independently and arrived at their own blends.

This is why vernacular commentary took years to mature rather than arriving fully formed. A commentary language is infrastructure, built sentence by sentence on air, tested against millions of listeners who will mock anything that sounds stilted. The commentators of the 1970s and 1980s were not just describing matches; they were standardising a dialect, and the ease of today's twelve-feed production rests on decisions those broadcasters made under pressure of a live over. When a new feed launches now — as Bhojpuri did — it matures in weeks rather than decades, partly because its commentators grew up bilingual in cricket's existing registers and can raid all of them.

The commentary box as a mirror

Read in sequence, the languages of Indian cricket commentary track the country's own story with uncomfortable precision. English-only coverage for an anglophone elite; a hard-won Hindi presence as the mass audience asserted itself; a bilingual compromise that flattered one and served the other; then a commercial reckoning in which broadcasters discovered that India's linguistic diversity was not a problem to be managed but a market to be served. The commentary box integrated in roughly the same order, and for roughly the same reasons, as much else in Indian public life.

What has not changed is the underlying craft. Whether the sentence is in English, Hindi or Bhojpuri, the commentator's task is the one the radio pioneers defined: hold the listener's attention between deliveries, tell them what the eyes are seeing, and make them feel the match matters. The rest of how the Indian game is organised, watched and paid for sits on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on published biographical accounts of the early All India Radio commentators and of Sushil Doshi's 1968 Hindi commentary debut, on contemporary press reporting of Star India's regional-language feeds for the 2018 IPL season, and on the broadcaster's own announcements of the twelve-language commentary line-up for the streamed IPL from 2023. Descriptions of commentary styles and their reception are characterisations of widely reported coverage, not measurements. Viewership movements are described in general terms as reported by the broadcasters at the time; no independent audience figures are claimed, and no computed statistics from this site's datasets are used on this page.