Among area Indians, a game of cricket is the unifying force

They came from across the state, wielding bats shaped like oars, hurling a dense, red fuzzy ball over the pitch, shuttling back and forth between two stumps to score dozens of runs, and seeking a sense of community they lost when they arrived in the United States.

Over the past month, 12 teams of South Asian batsmen, bowlers, and all-rounders from across the state have congregated at the beachside Joy Hanlon Fields in Quincy for what the organizers called the ''most prestigious cricket tournament in New England."

Naturally, winning is a priority -- and with Indian pop music playing in the background, home-team favorite Lagaan advanced to the finals among much cheering earlier this month, only to be defeated in the final round. But the daylong sports events are also one of the few chances that the growing, but scattered, Indian population in the state has to reconnect with its culture, its community, and the sport it compares to a religion.

The games ''make me feel like I'm home . . . You get to meet so many more Indians from the community," said Rajat Singhal, 32, a software engineer who lives in Quincy and plays for Lagaan.

The tournament grew out of casual weekend games: One guy would bring a bat he'd packed from India, another had a wicket in his basement, someone else had a ball. Those grew into more organized leagues, and the third annual tournament this year brought teams from Mansfield, Quincy, Braintree, Norwood, and Attleboro, as well as towns farther afield: Andover, Waltham, Lowell, and Burlington.

''There's nothing that brings Indians closer together," said Rajiv Ramaratnam, this year's commentator, who gave the play-by-play on a bullhorn.

Among new immigrants, Asian Indians stand out. They are predominantly young, working-age people who come to the United States with work visas or to finish their education. They tend to have middle-class jobs and lifestyles, living in the suburbs rather than settling in a single neighborhood or a particular city, according to Michael Liu, a research assistant at the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

''Their events are very popular. It's one of the few ways they have to get together," Liu said.

Cricket -- so popular in India that tournament players described the New England equivalent as the Red Sox, Celtics, Patriots, and Bruins combined into a single sport -- is the natural way to bring together a community that has largely dispersed throughout the suburbs, cut off from the food, festivals, and traditions of its homeland.

''It was a torture, to be honest," said Priyanka Wadhwa, of the move she and her husband Nikhil made from Brockton, with an Indian population of 220 according to 2000 census data, to West Bridgewater, with just nine. ''No Indian stores . . . we had one Indian family move next door to us."

Cricket anchored the Wadhwas: their one-acre lot was just big enough to host impromptu games in the backyard. The huge satellite dish they mounted on their roof to pipe in cricket matches during the wee hours of the morning was not allowed in Brockton. Nikhil began teaching the neighborhood kids how to play. And when the Wadhwas brought their children to a culture and language Sunday school sponsored by the Vrindavana Preservation Society in Quincy, in a desperate attempt to make sure their kids didn't lose sight of their heritage, a group of bored fathers found the community they, too, had been missing.

Ramaratnam, who lives in Norwell where there are three other Indian families, said that everyone anticipates cricket season just as Americans look forward to opening day at Fenway.

The sport is so wildly popular in South Asia, Australia, and England that it has even raised some scholarly inquiry. Ashis Nandy, a well-known political psychologist and sociologist who wrote ''The Tao of Cricket," theorized that the ''obsessive concern" with cricket in India could be traced back to the way the sport ''has met a vital need in Indian culture, trying to grapple with the modern world and to make sense of that world."

Even though the sport is rooted in tradition, times are changing.

''No one has the time here," said Wadhwa. ''We're following baseball's model," by shortening matches to about an hour and a half.

There, the similarities end. Batsmen hold their bats low to the ground, not up above their shoulders. The ''bases" are stump-like wickets that batsmen must protect from the bowler, who winds up and then bounces the ball toward the batter. Spectators snack on curry in a hamburger bun with spicy chutney, instead of hot dogs and cracker jacks. A ''home run" is worth six runs. But before each day of the tournament begins, the players make a point to sing both the US national anthem and the Indian national anthem.

''The best way I can summarize it is, it makes me feel like I'm home," Singhal said.

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.