Ronojoy Sen provides a compelling, provocative historiography of sport in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial India as a means to tease out the historicity of the Indian state and other social formations through sport, while interjecting how India influenced local and global sporting cultures. This long history includes readings of Hindu texts such as the Mahabharata, archival material, and oral histories in interesting ways to highlight physical cultural practices of wrestling and archery. Sen covers heterogeneous social formations and multiple social actors. For example, he demonstrates how polo and cricket attracted upper-caste persons and colonial administrators while football (i.e., soccer), hockey, and kabaddi included a much wider class and caste constituency.
Unlike the religious tension in present-day India, the royal patronage of sport until the 1950s supported athletes of various ethnic and religious groups at the royal court. As a result of such royal patronage, leisure activities allowed for social mobility. Yet Sen thoroughly captures the contradictions in such sporting relations, such as Dalit players eating and residing separately from upper-caste athletes. With the arrival of the British Empire, colonial administrators actively created sporting clubs and associations as a way to keep Englishmen away from what were considered the idle ways of the savage, and as a way to properly train colonial subjects. Without centralized colonial power in managing sport in the colonies, individual colonial administrators introduced cricket, hockey, and football while taking up the Indian sport of polo.
Sen underscores the pivotal role of Parsis and Anglo-Indians in taking up cricket, field hockey, and football during the time of the British colonial mandate as a well as in the early years after independence. Playing these sports gave Indians greater access to colonial administrators while presenting opportunities to beat the British at their own game. The Mohun Bagan football victory over the best British team for the 1911 IFA Shield, wrestler Gama's dominance over white opponents, and the first test cricket win over England by post-independence India in 1970 inverted relationships between race and ability. Additionally, Sen not only focuses on male participation in sport but also discusses the role of pivotal female athletes and organizers, such as Princess Pravinba of Kutch and Sarala Ghosh.
Like in Susan Brownell's Training the Body for China, we see the ways in which nationalist aspirations were linked to physical culture.Footnote 1 According to Sen, “the cult of bodybuilding and wrestling coalesced with militant nationalism and attracted several middle-class youths” (p. 184). Accordingly, we witness the shift from royal patronage of sport to governmental organizations, like the State Bank of India and the Indian Railways, in the sustaining of Indian athletes locally and in the Olympics. The Indian nation-state utilizes the symbolic realms of sporting excellence as a way to claim one's status in the global landscape.
Sen wraps up the book with an important analysis of the fading of football and hockey with the rise to dominance of cricket. He successfully shows the relationship between cricket hegemony, new infrastructures, and increased corporatization. Like Brian Larkin's work on the media, Signal and Noise, Sen's book deftly describes the expansion of communication infrastructure through the popularity of cricket.Footnote 2 The conclusion describes the professionalization of other sports and the larger Indian sporting economy.
Despite so many wonderful contributions by this book, a few methodological and theoretical questions surfaced. Most of the archival material focused on the sporting practices of elites and people of high status. What types of engagements between history and archaeology can expand our historical knowledge of sports? The intimacies between British soldiers and sepoys, alongside wrestling and kabaddi, are sites laden with homoeroticism and non-normative spatial arrangements that could have been theorized in line with the literature on queer theory, race, sexuality, and gender. How was the dominance of Sikhs and Muslims in hockey and football in relation to their racialization as “martial races” understood? How were mixed-race bodies of Anglo-Indians understood in the mainstream imagination? What were the comparative racializations when West Indian Learie Constantine played with the Indian cricket team and wrestler Gobor Guha fought Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight boxing champion?
Sen's Nation at Play is an ambitious project that reframes how to engage with “India” across local, translocal, and transnational scales. He inserts a much longer history of active sporting cultures and sporting success for Indians into Indian history. The book reshaped how I think about Indian diasporas and sport through this expansive historiography of sport in India. It is beautifully written in accessible language and should find a home in history, postcolonial studies, and critical sport studies classes.
