SOURCE: Green, Benny. “The Ponce of Players.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (1 September 1991): 3, 7.

In the following review, Green offers a negative assessment of Playing the Game.

Ian Buruma's Playing the Game, an epistolary biography masquerading as a novel; is a honeyed account of the life of that dazzling orchid in the English imperial garden, His Highness the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, Col. Shri Sir K. S. Ranjitsinhji. The English sporting public, dispensing with the Oriental flummery, dubbed him Ranji, and Ranji he has always remained.

Until he stepped onto the playing fields of Queen Victoria's last years, there had never been any such thing as an Indian cricketing virtuoso, for the English modestly assumed that because they had invented the game, it would remain forever their own private preserve. In Ranji's day, cricket was assumed to be white, English and Christian. Ranji was born brown, Indian and Hindu...