1. Network effects and chicken and egg issues
You cannot avoid cricket in India. Everyone around you is playing.
Some (many?) people will not attend work or school on the days of major matches. I don't know how things are now but at least when I lived in India even when people did attend offices and schools on the day of a match, they used to smuggle handheld radios in and were highly distracted.
So much advertising in India is also based off of cricket - cricket stars are practically gods.
The scale of that network effect is also very large, practically a billion people of every single age group and every walk of life.
2. It is a real estate efficient game
As some of the answers mention above, it is also a game that can be played in a land scarce environment - all you need is a straight street.
Sure once in a while you'd break your neighbors window or had to go recover a ball from a neighbor who had a nasty dog, but in general, it was considered worth it.
3. Cricket is a non violent way to wage a proxy war with Pakistan
Definitely more sustainable and fun than lobbing nukes at each other.
It isn't uncommon to hear stories of people on the losing side to commit suicide.
An American friend of mine was visiting India for the first time when there was some tension between India and Pakistan going on. His observation were that people around him didn't care about the national level tensions, however people were worried it might lead to an India-Pakistan match getting cancelled - that should tell you something.
4. It is the only game India is capable of competing at the highest levels
If you are only good at one sport as a country of a billion people, you tend to be protective of it.
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