Race, nation and sport: Footballing nationalism in colonial Calcutta

Abstract

Football, one of the central components of twentieth-century Bengali popular culture, has generally been neglected by historians as unworthy of serious academic enquiry. This article examines the way in which football as a societal mirror reflected the articulation of race and nation in colonial Calcutta in a period of clearest nationalist upsurge against colonial rule. It attempts to explain how football as a mass spectator sport came to represent a unique cultural nationalism of the Bengali people and to explore the character, pattern and forms of that footballing nationalism.