| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Boria Majumdar and Kausik Bandyopadhyay. A Social History of Indian Football: Striving to Score. (Sport in Global Society.) New York: Routledge. 2006. Pp. 194. $65.00.

North American readers might be surprised to learn that Indians play soccer and that two young scholars consider it a valuable use of their time and resources to bother writing a book about it. Even the esteemed David Washbrook admits in his foreword that "the subject may not be an obvious one." However, Washbrook and the two authors do set out a good rationale: that soccer allows the historical exploration of social, cultural, and political aspects of Indian society. The history of the sport contours with some other historical changes, the most obvious being colonialism, nationalism, decolonization, internal postcolonial conflicts, and now global capitalism. Boria Majumdar and Kausik Bandyopadhyay offer a detailed study of various moments in the history of the sport in the context of such wider thematic paradigms. So, for instance, they tell us about how modern sports were introduced by British colonialists, taken up by Indians, then used as a means to "beat the masters." And they at least try to do justice to the complexities in using a colonial method to promote indigenous nationalism. They also have some grasp of Indian culture and show how the structure and clubs reflect some of the fissures and trends in the social demographic. By the last decades of the twentieth century, the sport was dominated by the interethnic rivalry in Bengal between "indigenous" West Bengalis and immigrant East Bengalis (from what is now Bangladesh). More recent concerns are the increasing involvement of women in the sport and how success on the world stage might be achieved.

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