Cricket Samrat

About Cricket Samrat

Cricket Samrat is a Hindi-language cricket magazine that, across its long run, became one of the most widely read sports periodicals in India. Founded by sports enthusiast Anand Dewan, the magazine began life in 1976 as Khel Samrat, a general sports title timed to the Montreal Olympics, before converting to an all-cricket monthly in 1978 under the name Cricket Samrat, priced at just Rs 3. It rode the wave of India's cricketing explosion in the early 1980s — capped by the 1983 World Cup triumph — to claim, by its own account citing the 2010 Indian Readership Survey, a readership of more than one million and the top position among sports magazines in any Indian language. For a generation of Hindi-speaking fans, particularly in the small towns and cities of North India, Cricket Samrat was the monthly ritual through which they followed the game: its statistics, its personalities and its unfolding seasons.

Origins as Khel Samrat

The magazine's founder, Anand Dewan, grew up around magazines — his father owned a magazine agency — and converted a childhood immersion in print and a personal passion for sport into a publishing venture. The first avatar of the title was Khel Samrat, launched in 1976 to coincide with the Montreal Olympic Games and covering all sports. Dewan ran it as a general sports magazine for two years, but, as the magazine's own history recounts, the team always knew at the back of their minds that the sport that mattered in India was cricket. With the long cricket seasons arriving in November 1978, the magazine was converted into Cricket Samrat, a monthly devoted entirely to the game, at a cover price of just Rs 3. From that point, the magazine never looked back: readership soared through India's explosive cricketing successes of the early 1980s, most decisively the 1983 World Cup victory under Kapil Dev.

The 1983 World Cup and the golden years

India's triumph in the 1983 Prudential World Cup transformed the country's relationship with cricket, and Cricket Samrat was perfectly positioned to benefit. In an era before the internet, before dedicated sports channels like Star Sports and portals like ESPNCricinfo, the magazine was one of the few places where a Hindi-speaking fan could find thorough statistics — who had scored how many centuries, which team led in Test matches — alongside match reports, scorecards and photographs of cricketers. Readers recall the mania the magazine captured when Kapil Dev lifted the World Cup in 1983 and when Sachin Tendulkar unleashed his desert-storm innings at Sharjah in 1998 against Australia. The magazine also distinguished itself with better-quality paper, pull-out posters for readers' walls, and pictures superior to those of rival print titles of the time, making each monthly issue something of an event for young fans in small towns.

Editorial content and regular features

Cricket Samrat's pages carried a broad mix of cricket writing and data. Typical issues included detailed match coverage and highlights, full scorecards, statistical tables tracking runs, wickets and records, player profiles and interviews, and stories tracing the history and techniques of the game. For young readers in small towns, the magazine served as an informal education in cricket: it explained the rules, the etiquette and the techniques of what one retrospective called "this complicated British game," fuelling the passion and sowing the seeds of the small-town dreams that later reshaped Indian cricket. The magazine's visual presentation — colour photographs and pull-out posters of stars like Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar — was a major part of its appeal in an age when such imagery was scarce in the Hindi heartland.

Readership and market position

At its peak, Cricket Samrat claimed the top position among sports magazines in any language in India, with a readership of more than one million according to the 2010 Indian Readership Survey figures cited by the publication — more than double the figures of its competitors, in the magazine's own telling. Its readership was concentrated in North India and the Hindi-speaking belt, in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and small towns where Hindi print remained the dominant medium for cricket consumption. Advertising trade commentary has noted that the magazine's readers specifically sought it out and paid for it, producing an unusually attentive and brand-loyal audience, and that its cricket-magazine advertising rates were meaningfully lower per insertion than English-language sports titles such as Sportstar, while its geographic concentration in the Hindi heartland was sharper than that of bilingual competitors like Cricket Today.

Competition in Hindi cricket publishing

Cricket Samrat operated in a competitive field of Hindi and bilingual cricket titles. Cricket Today, published in Hindi and English editions, targeted a somewhat more urban and metro-skewed readership. Diamond Cricket Today, from Diamond Magazines, competed in a similar Hindi-cricket space with generally lower circulation and IRS figures. Sportstar, the English-language premium sports weekly from The Hindu Group, occupied the prestige end of the market with a different readership profile and distribution geography. Cricket Samrat's structural advantage, as media planners described it, was its direct, cost-efficient reach into the Hindi-belt cricket fan — the most numerous and passionate segment of Indian cricket's audience — a position it held for decades through consistent monthly publication and deep distribution in the North.

The digital transition and the decline of print

Like much of Indian sports print, Cricket Samrat's fortunes declined with the arrival of the internet. Online portals, live ball-by-ball coverage, dedicated sports television and later social media stripped the monthly magazine of its role as the primary source of cricket information and statistics. The magazine never made a full transition to a digital-first model, remaining committed to its traditional print format even as its readership migrated online. The COVID-19 lockdown period proved especially punishing for print magazines dependent on newsstand sales and physical distribution, and retrospective accounts of the title describe the print edition as having been discontinued in that era. The decline of Cricket Samrat mirrors the broader contraction of Indian sports magazines in the 2010s and 2020s.

Digital availability

Although the print era of the magazine has wound down, Cricket Samrat's content remains accessible in digital form. The magazine is listed on the Magzter digital newsstand, which offers a Cricket Samrat app for Android with the magazine's issues available for reading on phones and tablets, and the app has continued to receive updates into 2025. Back issues of the magazine have also entered the second-hand and collectors' market, with vintage issues — such as a May 1987 edition — traded by specialist dealers in old Indian periodicals, a testament to the nostalgic hold the title retains over readers who grew up with it.

Cultural legacy

Cricket Samrat's importance lies less in any single editorial achievement than in the role it played across decades of Indian cricket's popularisation. For the youth of small towns with no internet and limited English, it was the unparalleled source of cricket knowledge: the statistics, the stories, the posters on bedroom walls. It documented the sport's transformation from a colonial pastime into India's dominant cultural spectacle, issue by issue, in the language most Indians speak. Retrospective tributes to the magazine describe it as having spread the good stories of cricket and having made fans informed and curious about the game — a quiet but real contribution to the cricketing culture that produced the small-town stars of modern Indian cricket.

How to read it

The print magazine is no longer in active monthly publication, but readers can access Cricket Samrat digitally through the Magzter platform, including the dedicated Cricket Samrat app on the Google Play Store at play.google.com, where current and archived issues are available for reading.