South India

Siddeshvara village in Bidar district, Karnataka, contained about 600 households and 4,000 inhabitants in 1997. Its cramped houses, made of a mixture of straw, stones and mortar, are linked by narrow lanes which are filled with water, rubbish, excrement and cow dung during the monsoon. The Siddeshvara temple overlooks the houses. A new statue recently installed by the members of the dominant caste of Virashaiva-Lingayats marks the entrance to the village. The climate is dry, there is little or no irrigation, harvests are disappointing, the local government is inefficient, and the state apparatus appears to be indifferent.

Shivaraj Mainalle lived in Siddeshvara. He was some 40 years old and the father of five children, the youngest of whom was in the primary school in the fifth standard. He owned 1.28 hectares of land and farmed 3.6 hectares as a tenant (lavani). In 1995– 97, he lost all his harvests because of parasitical worms and the vagaries of the weather. His debt to the local cooperative bank had risen to 24,000 rupees at the end of 1997 and he owed 80,000 rupees to a private moneylender in the village. The purchase of pesticides alone cost him more than 20,000 rupees. Notwithstanding this period of distress, his moneylender demanded his due.

For the film producers and distributors of Bombay (Mumbai), the foreign territories (or ‘the Overseas’) are not an abstract entity but an active field of transactions made up of unequally profitable areas. Called ‘the sixth territory’ on the distribution map, the Overseas are in fact a conglomerate of distant and fragmented spaces. If the Middle East, Africa and the traditional locations of the Indian diaspora have been among the privileged destinations for Indian film prints for many years, it seems that several elements altered the film production game significantly at the turn of the twenty-first century and considerably modified the status of the Overseas in the minds of Indian producers.

After the debacle of his film Trimurti (1995), the film director Subhash Ghai declared that he was making his next film Pardesh (shot partly in the United States, partly in Mysore) for the diaspora and that the latter was a more secure market than India itself. In spite of a more limited audience, the diaspora was offering incomparable profits and paradoxically seemed, to many filmmakers, to be more receptive and easier to reach than the local audience. The producers often used the rhetoric of globalization to justify strategic attempts to redirect their efforts towards this distant public, presented in the film press as an Eldorado to escape the crisis of local taste variability. This reorientation also seemed quite safe for many film professionals because it did not imply a major redefinition of their narrative conventions.

Sports and Subalternity

Subalternity, in this collection, has been interpreted in its widest possible sense. As defined twenty years ago by Ranajit Guha, the concept appears narrow and limited by its origins in Marxist theory (Guha 1982: 1–7). As it has been used over the last two decades it has taken on a broader meaning so that the ‘subaltern’ is the dominated party in any power relationship and the study of subalternity is of relationships characterised by ‘dominance without hegemony’. The importance of the concept of subalternity lies in its recognition of the ‘autonomous domain’ of the subaltern agent or agents. While dominated, the subaltern is not entirely obliterated and retains values, ideas and modes of action that are not prescribed by the dominant and which can draw upon beliefs and experiences exclusive to the individual or group. In other words the subaltern always has the potential to oppose or resist the dominant as he or she may draw upon alternative values and ideas and can refer back to different experiences and behavioural expectations. As such the position of the dominant group is often a precarious de facto arrangement rather than a generally accepted de jure agreement (Ludden 2002; Chaturvedi 2000).

Sports invite subalternity. In the first place this is because sports, especially those organized games of the modern period, are all about contest and competition in which victory or defeat are the anticipated outcomes of the exercise.

Football, the State and the Stateless in the Modern High Himalayas

It was with those few words that the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri filed the first sports report from Tibet early in the 18th century. Nearly three hundred years later a delighted striker for the exile Tibetan football team, Tenzin Dargyal, was quoted as saying that despite their 4-1 defeat by Greenland ‘I have never been so happy in my life’. His team had actually gained an early lead when Lobsang Norbu had scored in the 11th minute of the game. But Tenzin emphasised that ‘We're not playing for winning or losing. We're playing for the Tibetan people’ (www.friends-of-tibet.org.nz/news/july_2001).

Introduction

In June 2003 Manipur beat Bengal 2-0 in the 11th Women's National Football Championship to clinch the title. The newspapers reported it as a straightforward affair. Manithombi Devi and Sakhitombi Devi were the goalscorers in the 5th and the 50th minutes and while The Hindu newspaper noted that ‘in Alpana Seal Bengal had a gifted midfielder who single-handedly tried to control the proceedings’ (The Hindu 25/06/2003) overall it felt that this was ‘to no avail against the nimble-footed Manipuris’. Indeed, a little research shows that Manipur had strolled the competition. Over the course of the four games in the competition they had scored nine goals and conceded only once. A longer perspective still on this game further reinforces the impression that Manipur were deserved champions. Since the competition began they had won nine of the eleven trophies and had beaten Bengal in the final in each of those nine victories. 2003 was their sixth Championship in a row and was perhaps their most remarkable. The date of the competition clashed with the Asian Football Confederation's Women's Championships and eleven Manipuri players had travelled to Thailand with the Indian international squad. Many of the Manipuri team were thereforerelative newcomers and A. Sakhitombi Devi, the hero of the final who set up the first goal and scored the second, was making her debut for the state team.

Introduction

V. S. Naipaul once wrote of his native Trinidad that ‘we were a society with no heroes, except cricketers’. In other times and other places too it is sportsmen who have often most fully embodied the hopes of the lowly and dispossessed. Naipaul's sentiments would be recognized by blacks in the Chicago ghetto, who honour no hero other than Michael Jordan, and by mulattos in the slums of Buenos Aires who are devotees of the deity Diego Maradona. They would also have been appreciated by an Indian not generally known for his interest in sport, Dr B. R. Ambedkar. As an Untouchable boy placed by the accident of birth at the bottom of the Hindu hierarchy Ambedkar, the future draughtsman of the Indian Constitution, took as his hero a slow left-arm bowler named Palwankar Baloo. Year after year Baloo dominated the Bombay Quadrangular which was the showcase cricketing tournament of India at that time. He was one of the first great Indian cricketers and among the earliest public figures to emerge from the ranks of the Untouchables. Now almost wholly forgotten, Palwankar Baloo commanded enormous respect inside and outside his community during his lifetime. Consider thus a little, thirty-page biography published in Poona in 1959 as part of a series of Marathi tracts with the running title ‘Kahintari Navech Kara!’ or ‘Do Something Distinctive!’ Priced at half-a-rupee these booklets were aimed at school and college kids presumed to be in search of role models.

Introduction

In the well-known Bhagavad Gita section of India's Mahabharata epic, Krishna elaborates a view of duty and action intended to convince Arjuna that, as a member of the warrior caste (ksatriya), he must overcome all his doubts and take up arms, even against his relatives. As anyone familiar with either the Mahabharata or India's second great epic, the Ramayana, knows martial techniques have existed on the South Asian subcontinent since antiquity. Both epics are filled with scenes describing how the princely heroes obtain and use their humanly or divinely acquired skills and powers to defeat their enemies: by training in martial techniques under the tutelage of great gurus like the brahmin master Drona, by practicing austerities and meditation techniques which give the martial master access to subtle powers to be used in combat, and/or by receiving a gift or a boon of divine, magical powers from a god. On the one hand, there is Bhima who depends on his brute strength to crush his foes, while on the other, we find the ‘unsurpassable’ Arjuna making use of his more subtle accomplishments in single point focus or his powers acquired through meditation.

Among practitioners and teachers of kalarippayattu, the martial art of Kerala on the southwestern coast of India, some, like Higgins Masters of the P.B. Kalari in Trissur, model their practice on Bhima, emphasizing kalarippayattu's practical empty hand techniques of attack, defence, locks and throws.

Introduction: Centres and Subjects

Cricket is no longer England's national game. It might be argued that the sport now belongs to India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and to the South Asian diaspora in the Persian Gulf, Canada and elsewhere. England's status as a cricketing periphery has been accompanied by its fading reputation as a strong side and by its declining influence in regulatory bodies such as the International Cricket Council (ICC). Some observers have attributed this shift at the centre of the sport to the innate ‘Indian-ness’ of cricket (Nandy 1989). Whatever the merits of this supposition, international cricket today reflects a series of fundamental changes in the ability of old elites to claim and defend ‘their’ culture. As Appadurai (1996: 23–48) has noted, cricket in the decolonizing world provides marginal populations with the means of overcoming their marginality in global popular culture. What I intend to do in this essay is examine the tensions that are generated in the process of this reconfiguration of centre and margin and make a broad observation. The primary rivalry in cricket today is not between India and Pakistan or England and Australia. It is a moral, economic and political clash between the colony and the metropole both of which have outgrown those labels. The sport functions both as a mirror of the disjunctures between ‘how things stand’ and ‘how things should be’ and as an instrument that continuously widens the gap.

Introduction

As this volume demonstrates, the cultures of recreation, sport and the body in South Asia have increasingly attracted the attention of academic researchers interested in exploring aspects of South Asian society. Understandably, the more obviously ‘important’ pastimes were the focus of early work. For instance, the histories of cricket (Cashman 1980; Bose 1990; Guha 2002) and football (Dimeo and Mills 2001; Dimeo 2002) have been well documented as have some of the more salient indigenous body cultures (Alter 1992; Zarrilli 1998). Other studies have focused on specific individuals or times and places, thus drawing out the micro-level motivations and strategies of key participants. Such studies were bold and innovative, bridging the gap between sports studies and South Asian studies, and leading to a wider awareness of sport among social historians.

Golf has been in South Asia for over a century, playing an important role in colonial relations but failing to keep up with global developments in the period after Independence. In this, the sport's fate mirrored that of football. Unlike football, however, golf has been almost entirely ignored by historians, perhaps because there are no moments of historical gravity to compel nationalist re-visioning or no radical oppression of indigenous traditions to fire up post-colonial critics. Yet golf is full of potential to the historian because of its value-laden institutional culture and the demands that it makes upon the individual's behaviour patterns and somatic styles.

The Gymnasium, Jori-Clubs, Sexuality and Culture

In The Mythology of Sex Sarah Dening argues that the Hebrew prohibition against eating the ‘sinew of the hip which is upon the hollow of the thigh’ should be understood symbolically as a prohibition against the practice common among neighboring tribes whereby a new king would eat the penis of his predecessor in order to imbibe his power and authority. Dening and others point out that the ‘thigh’ was a biblical euphemism for the penis and that the penis was clearly associated with the power to rule and proclaim the truth. In the Genesis story God wrestles with Jacob and ‘touches the hollow of his thigh’.With this almighty ‘goose’ God metaphorically ‘eats Jacobs penis’ thus setting in place the rationale for the dietary prohibition, making himself the King of Kings, the one true God. In this myth sex, sacredness, power and sportive competition are linked together both figuratively and literally. The homoerotics of touching if not actually eating penises is also evident. Homoerotics are most clearly reflected in the classical Greek gymnasium, an institution that can arguably be held accountable for putting ‘civilization’ in modern Western history. Gymnasiums in Athens were places where men went to become men and develop themselves into citizens of the city state. For Plato and Aristotle they were institutions of embodied knowledge, to an extent that tends to get forgotten in the disembodied philosophical abstractions of the modern intellectual academy, where departments of philosophy and physical education are decidedly separate and unequal.

Introduction

G. Whitney Azoy's Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan (1982) is an exemplary ethnography of Asian sport. Focusing on the social and political mobilization of this dramatic equestrian game, Azoy moved well beyond a conventional hermeneutic interpretation of sport as ritual display, and highlighted the broader social and performative functions of buzkashi tournaments. These were force-fields of national and regional ethnicity: they enacted a distinctive ethnic identity among minority Uzbeks of northern Afghanistan, conveying their own regional aspirations of rugged autonomy from the alien hegemony of Pashtun officials in Kabul, who were attempting to appropriate this prestigious tribal game as a national Afghan sport. The patronage of Uzbek khans sponsoring the game was thereby reduced to brokerage with the regional Afghan Governor and his bureaucratic entourage of Pashtun athletic officials. By the 1970s these had already imposed their own disciplinary apparatus of civilizing rules and penalties on the game, together with national (Pashtunist) civilizing discourses of government propaganda. Azoy's historical ethnography of successive Afghan appropriations of the tribal Uzbek game from the 1950s thus exemplified societal changes of Weberian magnitude: a political transition from ‘traditional, patrimonial’ to ‘national-bureaucratic’ modes of authority and ideology which occurred within a single generation in mid-twentieth century Afghanistan and the repercussions of which, in terms of regional, ethnic and sectarian strife, remain unresolved.

This essay outlines a comparable historical ethnography of the similar equestrian sport of indigenous polo in neighbouring regions of northern Pakistan.

Introduction: Of Cities and Spectacles

David Harvey (1985a; 1985b) describes a concentration of artifacts of consumption such as entertainment complexes, convention centers, gentrified neighborhoods or amusement parks as one type of development strategy available to cities under the conditions of late capitalism. Other authors, describing the city as a ‘theme park’ in the late twentieth century, have critiqued the end of public space and the increasing surveillance of citizens in American cities such as Los Angeles, New York, or Minneapolis (Sorkin 1992). More recently, by analyzing gentrification programs, beauty contests and sports events in Atlanta (Ruthesier 1996), Istanbul (Keyder 1999) and Beijing (Brownell 2001) scholars have theorized the relationship between cities and spectacles under conditions of globalization and liberalization. By contrast Orsi (1999) and Srinivas (2001) describe the continuing relevance of religious maps, architectural complexes and sacred processions for presenting alternative topographies and emotional geographies of the city in relation to suburbanization, capital accumulation and diasporic or regional labor movements. This article will attempt to contribute to this debate about cities and spectacles by tracing the embeddedness of specific body cultures, wrestling and martial arts disciplines of considerable antiquity and ‘sportized’ athletics, within the larger space of ‘urban performative genres’. The article suggests that we need to consider an entire range of performances, ranging from festivals and sacred processions to political rallies, sports events and beauty contests, in order to understand the relationship between urban planning, environmental history, and politico-symbolic contests over public space.