About the Book: The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India The Great Tamasha is the story of modern India told through the glitzy. scandalous and mind-blowingly lucrative Twenty20 cricket tournament. the Indian Premier League. The IPL - merging the three forces of politics, business and Bollywood - has transformed cricket and transfixed India like nothing before it. On a Bangalore night in April 2008, cricket and India changed forever. It was the first night of the Indian Premier League - cricket, but not as we knew it. It involved big money, glitz, prancing girls and BoIlywood stars. It was not so much sport as tamasha: a great entertainment. The Great Tamasha examines how a game and a country, both regarded as synonymous with infinite patience, managed to produce such an event. James AstiII explains how Indias economic surge and cricketing obsession made it the dominant power in world cricket. off the field if rarely on it. He tells how cricket has become the central focus of the worlds second-biggest nation: the place where power and money and celebrity and corruption all meet, to the rapt attention of a billion eyeballs. AstiII crosses the subcontinent and, over endless cups of tea. meets the people who make up modern India - from faded princes to back-street bookmakers, slum kids to squillionaires - and sees how cricket shapes their lives and that of their country.