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Every April and May, the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai, India, fills with devotees of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket team Chennai Super Kings, all wearing their trademark banana yellow. And every time one man—Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the team’s captain and a grizzled, canny veteran—jogs out to bat, arms stretching and flexing, bat held like a cudgel, the crowd seems to melt into one hoarse, fevered, perspiring organism. When he steps out, the spectators cheer like delirious banshees, the howl of paper-cone trumpets sounds around the stadium, and a percussive banger from some recent Tamil film or another drops on the loudspeakers. It’s astonishing that Dhoni can even hear himself think.
Chennai Super Kings star Mahendra Singh Dhoni at bat in the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai
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Chennai Super Kings star Mahendra Singh Dhoni at bat in the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai
R. Satish Babu/Getty Images
The IPL is not our grandfather’s cricket, or even our father’s. The older version of the game, called Test cricket, spreads over five full days of play, and its duration as well as its colonial-era quirks (players wear white while representing their country and take breaks during the day for lunch and tea) have often lent themselves to ridicule. I won’t lie: That is the form I best prefer, not only for its novelistic twists and turns but also for the languid experience of spending a whole day, or five, in a stadium, to watch a plot unfold and its characters respond. Test cricket still exists and in fact is more exciting now than it has been for a long time: fewer draws, more powerful, hectic cricket, and tight results. The venues can be varied and exhilarating: English grounds with turf as immaculate as a billiards table; the stadium in Dharamshala, in northern India, cupped in the lap of the Himalayas; the stadium in Galle, in southern Sri Lanka, cheek by jowl with an old Portuguese fort and the waves of the Indian Ocean.
But to know fandom and spectacle at their most frenzied, look at the IPL. As sports tourism becomes a more powerful engine for travel, offering an unexpected gateway into a society and its culture, travelers can get to know India through this brisk, energetic version of our most-beloved game. Watching the Chennai Super Kings at the MA Chidambaram Stadium is an exhilarating complement to the city’s more sedate rhythms—its long, palm-fringed beaches, its ancient temples, and its buzzing culture of music and dance.
The IPL began in 2008, not that long ago, compared with the almost century and a half that Test cricket has been around. But like a black hole, it has pulled everything into it: the biggest international stars, the money of investors and advertisers, and the appetites of India’s cricket fans, all 1 billion or so of them. In the IPL, franchises represent cities—just like the English Premier League or the NBA—and they play round after round of short, high-intensity games that culminate in a final. Each match, played under floodlights at night, lasts three and a half hours. There’s one brief inning for each team, which its batters spend trying to pummel the ball clean out of the park time and time again. Such a hit earns you six runs, and the team that ends up with the most runs at the end of the game wins.
The brevity of the game already makes for incessant adrenaline, but it’s even better if you ally yourself to a team’s cause. To the Chennai Super Kings’ bid to pull ahead of the Mumbai Indians in the race to rack up the most IPL titles, say. Or to the Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s star-crossed quest for a title, which ended in success last year, with the celebrated batter Virat Kohli collapsing on the turf at the end of the game and sobbing with joy. Or to the outsized talents of the Mumbai Indians, who play in a stadium that holds nearly 50,000 fans and has hosted Katy Perry, Coldplay, and Justin Bieber in concert. Or to the glamour of the Kolkata Knight Riders, partly owned by Shah Rukh Khan, one of India’s biggest film stars, who draws louder cheers from his fans than any of the cricketers. Every franchise has a particular history and set of hexes and a particular relationship with its crowd. In only 17 years the IPL has attracted practically every major cricketer in the world into its ranks.
Virat Kohli with his team's IPL trophy in June 2025
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Virat Kohli with his team’s IPL trophy in June 2025
Arun Sankar/Getty Images
Go to the IPL, I urge you. The stadiums may feature only plastic chairs or concrete bleachers; they may turn airless on sultry summer evenings; after you eat too many fried Indian snacks, you may crave a beer and be told that no alcohol can be sold. But go for the electric atmosphere, the camaraderie of fans all wearing their lurid synthetic jerseys, and the gravitational pleasure of cheering for a team at its home ground (or indeed, the subversive thrill of cheering for the away team). Go for the cheerleaders and DJs and baseball-style announcers—the familiarity of these American customs transplanted into an entirely new sport. Go for the sport itself, this new reinvention of an old game, its colonial spirit infused into a 21st-century body. Go to feel the ground shake and the sky roar when Mahendra Singh Dhoni walks out to bat.