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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 May 2023
This historiographical review considers a corpus of literature which examines the spread of modern Western sport within and beyond the locus of public schools, princely playgrounds and club greens in colonial India. While locating the old historiographical problems and new social historical interpretations, a great deal of attention has been paid to foregrounding significant research areas that are less catered to in existing scholarships. As well, this review contends that the eagerness to examine colonial interventions in the sports field without tracing the conflict and negotiation between two different – pre-colonial and colonial – ideas of leisure and body cultural movements expounds an incomplete history of Western sport in modern India. While doing so, it urges a rectification of the methodology of current academic studies in which vernacular literary sources are treated as a ‘passive mediator’ merely reflecting the popular enthusiasm for sport. It concludes that this ‘reflectionist’ approach is a hindrance to research work on the diffusion of Western sports in colonial India, which recognises the emergence and development of a new sporting culture as the discursive formation that surrounded the ideological meanings and images of the literary construction of sport.
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3 Stoddart, Brian, ‘Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30 (1988), 649–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (2003 [1986]), 122–41; idem, ‘Manufactured’ Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality and Militarism (2012); idem, ‘Soccer as Moral Training: Missionary Intentions and Imperial Legacies’, in Soccer in South Asia: Empire, Nation, Diaspora, ed. Paul Dimeo and James Mills (2013), 41–56.
5 For instance, see Guttmann, Allen, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (New York, 1994), 32–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holt, Richard, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford, 1992 [1989]), 203–79Google Scholar.
6 Cashman, Richard, ‘Cricket and Colonialism: Colonial Hegemony and Indigenous Subversion?’, in Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism: British Culture and Sport at Home and Abroad, 1700–1914, ed. Mangan, J. A. (London and Totowa, NJ, 1988), 258–71Google Scholar, at 263–64.
7 See chapters in Soccer in South Asia, ed. Dimeo and Mills.
8 Paul Dimeo, ‘Football and Politics in Bengal: Colonialism, Nationalism, Communalism’, ibid., 57–74; Mason, Tony, ‘Football on the Maidan: Cultural Imperialism in Calcutta’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 7 (1990), 85–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Luise Elsaesser has recently shown that British imperialism not only created cultural space for the diffusion and absorption of Western sport (such as cricket, rugby and horse racing) in the colonial peripheries, but also made room for the transmission and appropriation of non-Western sport (such as polo) in the imperial metropole. The British uptake of the Indian game of polo (in India and Great Britain) during the colonial period demonstrates how the meaning of sport changed across cultures and within cultures across time. The global transfer of sporting culture was never a one-way traffic. Elsaesser, Luise, ‘“Dashing about with the Greatest Gallantry”: Polo in India and the British Metropole, 1862–1914’, Sport in History, 40 (2020), 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Guha, Ramachandra, ‘Cricket and Politics in Colonial India’, Past & Present, 161 (1998), 155–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Guha, Ramachandra, A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport (Gurgaon, 2014 [2002])Google Scholar.
12 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (2005 [1996]), 90.
13 Ashis Nandy, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and Destiny of Games (New Delhi, 2000 [1989]), 2.
14 Ibid., 7.
15 Satadru Sen, Migrant Races: Empire, Identity and K. S. Ranjitsinhji (Manchester, 2004).
16 Prashant Kidambi, Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire (Oxford, 2019).
17 Projit B. Mukharji, ‘The Early Cricketing Tours: Imperial Provenance and Radical Potential’, in Sport in South Asian Society: Past and Present, ed. Boria Majumdar and J. A. Mangan (2005), 15–26, at 24.
18 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 92.
19 See chapters in Subaltern Sports: Politics and Sport in South Asia, ed. James H. Mills (2005).
20 Boria Majumdar, ‘Politics of Leisure in Colonial India, “Lagaan”: Invocation of a Lost History?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36 (2001), 3399–404.
21 Boria Majumdar, Twenty-two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket (New Delhi, 2004); idem, Lost Histories of Indian Cricket: Battles off the Pitch (2006).
22 Boria Majumdar, ‘Imperial Tool “for” Nationalist Resistance: The “Games Ethic” in Indian History’, in Sport in South Asian Society, ed. Majumdar and Mangan, 48–65, at 50.
23 Boria Majumdar, ‘Tom Brown Goes Global: The “Brown” Ethic in Colonial and Post-colonial India’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 23 (2006), 805–20, at 805–6.
24 Boria Majumdar and Kausik Bandyopadhyay, Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation (New Delhi, 2006), 18.
25 See, particularly, Majumdar, Twenty-two Yards to Freedom; idem, Lost Histories of Indian Cricket.
26 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995).
27 Kausik Bandyopadhyay, Playing for Freedom: A Historic Sports Victory (New Delhi, 2008); idem, Scoring off the Field: Football Culture in Bengal, 1911–80 (2011), 1–107.
28 For such Eurocentric comment, see Paul Dimeo, ‘Colonial Bodies, Colonial Sport: “Martial” Punjabis, “Effeminate” Bengalis and the Development of Indian Football’, The International Journal of the History of Sports, 19 (2002), 72–90, at 84.
29 Kausik Bandyopadhyay, Mahatma on the Pitch: Gandhi and Cricket in India (New Delhi, 2017).
30 Ibid., 48–51.
31 Suparna Ghosh Bhattacharya, ‘Physical Education in the Curriculum: The Case Study of Bethune College’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 26 (2009), 1852–73; idem, ‘Women and Sports in Colonial Bengal: A Process of Emotional and Cultural Integration?’, in Asia Annual 2008: Understanding Popular Culture, ed. Kausik Bandyopadhyay (New Delhi, 2010), 257–71; idem, ‘Sport, Gender and Socialization: The Experience of Jewish and Parsee Women in Colonial and Post-colonial Bengal’, in The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-diversity, ed. Shalve Weil (London and New York, 2019), 125–41.
32 Satadru Sen, ‘Schools, Athletes and Confrontation: The Student Body in Colonial India’, in Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-colonial India, ed. James Mill and Satadru Sen (2004), 58–79.
33 Sudipa Topdar, ‘The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal’, Gender and History, 29 (2016), 176–97.
34 Anindita Mukhopadhyay, Children's Games, Adults’ Gambits: From Vidyasagar to Satyajit Ray (Hyderabad, 2019), 361.
35 In contrast to the historiography of modern Western sport in colonial India, few studies on the traditional indigenous manner of recreational activities and their changing colonial forms undeniably make the mentionable exceptions in this direction. For example, see Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Oxford, 1992); idem, ‘Kabaddi, a National Sport of India: The Internationalism of Nationalism and the Foreignness of Indianness’, in Games, Sports and Cultures, ed. Noel Dyck (Oxford, 2000), 83–115.
36 Ronojoy Sen, Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India (New York, 2015).
37 See, specifically, Manjita Mukharji, ‘Metaphors of Sport in Baul Songs: Towards an Alternate Definition of Sports’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 26 (2009), 1874–88.
38 Jeffrey Hill, Sport and the Literary Imagination: Essays in History, Literature, and Sport (Oxford and Bern, 2006), 21–2.
39 See John Bale, Anti-sport Sentiments in Literature: Batting for the Opposition (London and New York, 2008); Anthony Batman, Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire (London and New York, 2016 [2009]); Hill, Sport and the Literary Imagination; Jeffrey Hill and Jean Williams, ‘Introduction’, Sport in History, 29 (2009), 127–31; Michael Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980 (Chicago, 1982); idem, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill, 1993).
40 Hill, Sport and the Literary Imagination, 27.
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