SPORT
What ails Indian football?
N. U. ABILASH
|
The growth and decline of football in India.
|
Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation, Boria Majumdar and Kaushik Bandyopadhyay, Penguin Viking, 295 pages, Rs 595
THE timing of Goalless could not have been better. Even as the world moves towards its most popular sporting event — the 2006 FIFA World Cup — it is time for some outposts of the football empire, which are perennial consumers of the showpiece event, to reflect on the socio-political, cultural and economic fault lines of these regions, which has imposed severe limitations on the sport in these regions. The best possible method to come to terms with what ails Indian football is a historical account of its ebb and flow, its power struggles, its systemic strengths and failures and its peculiar cultural relationships with civil society, nation and region. The canvas of this enlightening book, authored by prolific cricket historian Boria Majumdar and fellow researcher Kaushik Bandyopadhyay, therefore is vast. That the book steps outside the boundaries of structural analyses of institutions and economics to dwell about the influences cast by masculinity and gender on the development of Indian football makes it "cool" for the non-academic reader.
The authors, through immaculate retrieval of archival material, bring to the fore how the assertion of masculinity of the Bengali male fascinatingly gets an outlet through football during the colonial age. The acme of this assertion was the historic triumph in 1911 of Mohun Bagan, comprising Indians playing barefoot, against the East Yorkshire Regiment. In an in-depth study of Bengali media narratives surrounding the victory and its aftermath, the authors convincingly argue how the match entered the nationalist imagination of Bengal.
Fascinating debate
This analysis logically leads into the next section, a fascinating debate regarding whether "native" footballing achievement turned the colonial civilising mission on its head or whether it merely endorsed its success.
The next section, perhaps the most boring of the whole book but of immense interest to the football afficionado, dwells on the intense power struggles that characterised the establishment of the governing bodies of the sport in India as we see them today. The history of the struggle for control of Indian football between the Calcutta-based Indian Football Association (IFA) and the All India Football Federation, established in the 1930s, makes for intriguing, if not unsurprising, reading.
Then comes what may be called the cornerstones of this book — chapters devoted to the influence of communalism, regionalism and sub-regionalism in Indian football. Perhaps, the best parts of the book are the ones that centre on the life and tribulations of Mohammed Salim, the first and only Indian to have played in the first division of a European league — for Glasgow Celtics during the 1930s — and the one that detail the oppressive treatment of Mohammedan Sporting Club by the IFA during the 1930s. The socio-economic interpretation of the Mohun Bagan-East Bengal rivalry — its linkage to class, country versus city polarity and of course the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 — given by the authors is informative to the non-Bengali reader.
The book then moves on to the discussion of the startling decline of Indian football and locates it in the context of the age of global capital and the nexus between the media, predominantly television, and the market. The failures of the governing body of Indian football to integrate with the work ethic of global capitalism is also discussed, though it must be said here that the book was written before Zee Sports signed the multi-million rupee ten-year contract with the All India Football Federation.
Where Goalless scores over Majumdar's history of Indian cricket, published in 2004, is that it is refreshingly free of the official voice that permeated the analysis of Indian cricket in the years following globalisation. The authors have done a good job notwithstanding the tokenism on display in the discussion of the growth and evolution of football in nurseries outside Bengal — Goa, Kerala, Punjab, Maharashtra.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
