Football, Culture and Society in India

Transcription

1 Paul Dimeo Stirling University Stirling, Scotland Ramachandra Guha is one of India s foremost writers. He has taken an eclectic approach to the study of his society, turning his powerful insights towards politics, the environment, biography, and sport. However, he has been at pains to ensure that the latter is not presented as somehow detached from the others, as he has recently written: I do not myself support the placing of sports history (or, indeed, other emerging fields such as environmental history and women s history) in a ghetto of its own. In my view, the attempt should rather be to use ignored or previously marginal spheres, such as sport or gender or environment, to illuminate the historical centre itself. 1 This comment comes from the Preface to his book A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport, a monument to the role of cricket in India since the eighteenth century. This is truly a history of a sport in its cultural and historical context, laying bare the themes of colonialism, resistance, decolonisation, communalism, post-colonial politics, and bringing the story up to date with an analysis of modern India. Clearly, the sport has been the one to grasp the popular imagination in the country, in both urban and rural settings, it has promoted India internationally, and proved a touching point for the expression of a range of national rivalries. Indians feel a great pride in their achievements on the oval pitch. What is not altogether convincing however is whether cricket s status can be described as either ignored or marginalised. In the popular press, advertising, commodification and sports hero-worshipping, cricket is everywhere in India. This near omnipresence in everyday life is reflected in the sports literature. Richard Cashman wrote Patrons, Players and the Crowd: the Phenomenon of Indian Cricket in 1980, Ashis Nandy published his brilliant The Tao of Cricket: On games of destiny and the destiny of games in 1989, and this was followed a year later by Mihir Bose s A History of Indian Cricket. These are just a selection from a wider set of readings on the subject: Guha has published other essays on the sport, 2 Mike Marqusee explored the politics of South Asia through the 1996 World Cup, 3 and biographies have appeared of famous players like Prince Ranji, Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar. 4 Meanwhile, it is the favoured sport of those academics interested in India. Arjun Appadurai has analysed the

2 Football Studies, vol. 5 no game as the expression of post-colonial nationalism; 5 Ian McDonald considered the more recent impact of fundamentalist nationalism on cricket, 6 while doctoral students at various universities including Oxford and Warwick are currently writing on the subject. In short, on the field success is being translating into literary and scholarly output. 7 It is not just success, however, that determines the value of a subject for academic inquiry; it is how controversial social, political and cultural issues can be raised, engaged with, negotiated and sometimes concluded. That is the case for cricket in India, but the sport also has the added cachet of seeming to suit the Indian people, or as Nandy has suggested, it is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English. 8 It thus invites speculation over grander concerns than the mere hitting of a ball with a bat. To continue with Nandy s theme: it is possible to see it as an English game which the Indians have learnt the play so well that they can now hope to beat the English at it... [This] can be pushed in two directions the Indians can hope to win the way traditional cricket allows them to win, by being Indians, or they can try to win the way modern cricket encourages them to win, by mortgaging their future to a unilinear theory of history. 9 The fact that this modern, global, Western-invented sport can be played in a traditional Indian way allows cricket to have some respectability amongst nationalist, academics, post-colonial theorists, as well as over 500 million fans. Nandy argues that the game ought to be played in an Indian way, perhaps regardless of the outcome, while others point to such recent stars as Sachin Tendulkar as epitomising a non-indian or Western style. Whatever one s perspective, the point is that the debate is there, that the arguments rage, that cricket is embedded in the psyche as the Indian sport. 10 This goes some way to explaining the attraction it holds for academics, journalists and historians. Football has no such literature, and only recently have some efforts been made to study the sport in its political, historical and social context. 11 That the sport is not embedded in Indian culture is demonstrated by the fact that there is no specifically Indian way of playing it. And, it is, of course, a sport in which absence and failure have been the bywords for India at the international level, Therefore, it has little visibility outside of the localised cultures of specific regions and specific communities. Where cricket has been successfully appropriated into Indian culture, and therefore has lost its connotations with hegemonic notions of global modernity (or even has usurped some of these notions), football has not. In fact, one might argue that football symbolises India s inability to modernise the FIFA World Cup is an unreachable goal. It is therefore something to be ashamed of, as evident in the ridiculing of the national team after various overseas defeats to low-level opposition. 5

3 The irony of cricket s recent dominance is that it simplifies history. Its great moments really began in the late 1960s and precisely when football s ended. Beforehand there had been a golden age of football when India was hailed as the Brazil of Asia, having won the gold medal in the Asian Games in 1951 and 1962, and having the best of the Asian showings in the Olympics between 1948 and Yet, this history has been subsumed by cricket, academics have ignored football, and there is little literature on the topic. Perhaps the more interesting question in terms of writing sports history and post-colonial history is why football has been so assiduously ignored by Indian academics. It seems that the sport is not considered to fit with the broad themes that have been emphasised by post-colonial historians and sociologists, almost as if the fans and players are not representative of the true India that ought to be revealed through Indian historiography. Yet the very underpinning ideologies of post-colonial theory should have opened up football since it is traditionally associated with groups that have been marginalised either for reasons of class, regionalism, or religion (working-classes, Bengalis, Punjabis, Goans, Muslims). One of the greatest proponents of a view from below is Ranajit Guha, who referred to the intrinsically radical character of a project that calls on the colonised to recover their past appropriated by conquest and colonisation. 12 In other words, to redress the inequalities that presented India as simply an extension of British history. Writing on cricket illuminates the historical centre : surely the challenge and the radical departure from traditionalist historiography, is to write about the margins. Of course there are studies of indigenous activities like north Indian wrestling, 13 kabaddi, 14 and kularippayattu 15 in which the motives of Guha and his colleagues in the Subaltern Studies movement are, to an extent, being revived and applied. However, these sports and pastimes relate to different themes of re-inventing or continuing traditions that either pre-date colonialism or manage to survive outside of colonialism s destructive influences. They are local and they do not seek to demonstrate the parity of India in terms of physical ability or organisational expertise. Therefore, football seems to sit uneasily between two particular models of India and of Indian sport. The first is the successful, Western but sort of India, modern but also traditional, cricket, in which India can engage with the world on its own terms and make its presence felt. The second is the more indigenous India, where physical activities are of a distinctly traditional nature, and draw from specific cultural and religious practices so symbolise uniquely Indian identities. Football falls in between, almost typifying the folly of buying into globalised forms of modernity, showing up the weaknesses of the body and the administrative systems. As such, it does not represent the type of Indian-ness and the debates around this topic that have characterised other sporting activities. 16 This collection adds to the small, but growing, series of publications on football in India. Each article approaches the sport from a different angle, and 6

4 Football Studies, vol. 5 no each shows that the sport has profound social meaning, whether that acts to illuminate the centre or the margins. They depart from the ethnocentrism of Western scholarship that has traditionally either ignored Indian football or has placed the British at the centre of Indian s sports history. They also depart from the simplistic endeavour to explain why India is not better at football, which is not the concern of historians or sociologists. Nor do they view Indian sport as a mere case study in something grander like globalisation, or as a comparative example in the politics or the history of sport. Instead, India is taken on its own terms, and the sport is placed in its social, cultural and historical context; it is viewed, as Nandy has written of cricket, as a truer projection of cultures and encounters with cultures than many other forms of human self-expression. 17 In brief, the articles address issues of great importance for a more balanced perspective on Indian sports history. James Mills considers the historical origins of football in Goa, a state that has produced some of India s finest players and administrators, to contrast the experience of Portuguese colonialism and Catholicism there with British colonialism and Anglicanism in other Indian regions. In this careful study, Mills demonstrates that the relationship of sport in imperial and colonial contexts should not be oversimplified, that not all colonial governments had the same approach to sport, and that consideration of the role of indigenous agents is fundamental to developing a proper understanding of this history. As such, he presents the history of Goan football as a constrasting example to the existing literature on colonial sports history. Satadru Sen s examination of cricket s rise to prominence in the post- Independence period highlights the need for a revision of existing history. While cricket seems to have slipped easily into the Indian psyche, there are specific structural and psychological reasons that facilitated this. Moreover, in analysing the sport s history Sen challenges essentialistic notions of cricket s place in Indian culture. He shows that its ascent came relatively late and was fortuitously linked to football and hockey s decline. It was also helped by the particular structure of the sport internationally that offered both opportunity and excitement. By focusing on how Sunil Gavaskar became a national hero, Sen traces the fascinating history of a sport s coming of age. Novy Kapadia, who is one of India s most respected sports writers has devoted much of his work to the history of football as well as to the contemporary game. A close observer of the sport s development, he presents here four potted biographies that expose the changing face of football in the country, the problems it has faced, and the efforts made by many to revive its fortunes. Kapadia argues that despite recent demands to recruit foreign coaches, history shows that it has been Indian coaches who have made the most significant impression on the game since Independence. However, the careers of Rahim, Dutta, P.K. Banerjee, and Nayeem chart the downfall of the national team Rahim took his team to the Olympics, was invited to the 1950 World 7

5 Cup in Brazil, and won two Gold medals in Asian Games (1951 and 1962) but the other great coaches made their names with local Indian clubs. Kapadia argues that this was not due to lack of talent or ability, indeed they innovated and were inspired by other more successful countries. Instead, he contends that the All India Football Federation has failed to act in the long-term interests of the sport, and often presented obstacles to these great coaches that prevented them from fully realising their ambitions for Indian football. Amitabha Das Sharma is also a sports writer who works within the Indian print media. His article draws from a variety of sources and personal biography to discuss why football has been the focus for so much social conflict in Bengal, particularly in Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2000). The chief rivalry is between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal supporters, despite the fact they hail from communities that share a language, religion and geographical heritage. Das Sharma highlights, however, the historical role of football in focusing nationalist resentment towards the British. Once they were overcome, it was more local passions that were evoked, and the process of Partition in 1947 made these much more pertinent and salient. Once in place the Mohun Bagan-East Bengal rivalry has dominated Indian football, though Mohammedan Sporting s place as representing the Muslims of Calcutta made them the third great team to help focus and shape social conflict. Das Sharma makes the quite intriguing implication that while these rivalries have been found elsewhere in society, it is in football that their expression has been most forceful, almost as if inverting the notion that football is a focal point for preexisting antagonisms to contend that it actually crystallises, or resuscitates, them for the sake of sporting competitiveness. In Paul Dimeo s article the various structural levels of play and consumption are examined and the inter-relationship of the local, national and global levels explored. It is suggested that football s role in Indian culture is quite complex and exposes some of the hierarchies of class and power that are internal to local society but that draw on global influences. These have been influenced by recent liberalisation that has also included a renewed relationship between India and its diaspora. The article asks some critical questions about how Non-Resident Indians have contributed to help Indian football progress, and so discusses both ideologies of diasporic intervention and their implications for the game s current state of development. To summarise, therefore, these articles deal with some of the major themes in Indian football and its place in Indian society. Together they prove that the history of sport in the country does not begin and end with cricket. 8

6 Football Studies, vol. 5 no NOTES: R. Guha, A Comer of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport (Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2002), p. xiv. R. Guha, Wickets in the East: An Anecdotal History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); R. Guha, Spins and Other Turns: Indian Cricket s Coming of Age (London: Penguin, 1996); R. Guha and T.G. Vaidyanathan, eds., An Indian Cricket Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); and R. Guha, ed., An Indian Cricket Century: Selected Writings of Sujit Mukherjee (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002). M. Marqusee, War Minus the Shooting: A Journey Through South Asia During Cricket s World Cup (London: Heinemann, 1996). See for instance, S. Bamzai and S. Manjrekar, Gavaskar and Tendulkar Shaping Indian Cricket s Destiny (Mumbai: Jaico, 2002); G. Ezekiel, Sachin: The Story of the World s Greatest Batsman (London: Penguin, 2003). A. Appadurai, Playing With Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket, in C.A. Breckenridge, ed., Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1995). pp I. McDonald, Between Saleem and Shiva: The Politics of Cricket Nationalism in Globalising India, in J. Sugden and A. Baimer, eds., Sport in Divided Societies (Aachen: Meyer and Meyer, 1999), pp For a wider review of Indian sports history see J. Mills A Historiography of South Asian Sport. in P. Dimeo and J. Mills, eds., Sport in South Asia, Special Issue of Contemporary South Asia, 10, 2, July pp A. Nandy, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000 [first published 1989]), p Nandy, The Tao of Cricket, p Football isn t in our blood, the sports journalists Chandan Mitra has recently argued, Since 1911, Indian football has rarely enjoyed a moment of glory. I believe football is too swift a game for our temperament or stamina. Indians excel when some intellectual input is required in an activity. Also, we are a ritualistic people and take time to warm up to something. That s why cricket fits into our psyche with such ease. The Pioneer, 27 June See the chapters in the collection: P. Dimeo and J. Mills, eds., Soccer in South Asia: Empire, Nation, Diaspora (London: Frank Cass, 2001); P. Dimeo Team Loyalty Splits the City into Two : Football, Ethnicity and Rivalry in Calcutta, in G. Armstrong and R. Giulianotti, eds., Fear and Loathing in World Football (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp ; P. Dimeo, Contemporary Developments in Indian Football in Dimeo and Mills, Sport in South Asia, pp ; P. Dimeo, Colonial Bodies, Colonial Sport: Martial Punjabis, Effeminate Bengalis and the Development of 9

7 Indian Football, International Journal of the History of Sport, 19, 1, March 2002, pp ; B. Majumdar, The Politics of Soccer in Colonial India, : The Years of Turmoil, Soccer and Society, 3, 1, Spring 2002, pp R. Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 2. J. Alter, The Wrestler s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). J. Alter, Kabaddi, a National Sport of India: The Internationalism of Nationalism and the Foreignness of Indianness in N. Dyck, ed., Games, Sports and Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000), pp P.B. Zarrilli, When the Body Becomes All Eyes: Paradigms, Discourses and Practices of Power in Kalarippayattu, a South Indian Martial Art (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). See Mills, A historiography of South Asian Sport, for a discussion of how different Indian sports have been interpreted. Mills, A historiography of South Asian Sport, p. vi. 10