Prelims

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THE POSTCOLONIAL SPORTING BODY

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RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT

Series Editor: Kevin Young

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RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT, VOLUME 20

THE POSTCOLONIAL SPORTING BODY: CONTEMPORARY INDIAN INVESTIGATIONS

EDITED BY

VEENA MANI

Stella Maris College, India

and

MATHANGI KRISHNAMURTHY

Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL.

First edition 2024

Editorial matter and selection © 2024 Veena Mani and Mathangi Krishnamurthy.

Individual chapters © 2024 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80455-783-9 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80455-782-2 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80455-784-6 (Epub)

ISSN: 1476-2854 (Series)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

About the Editors

Veena Mani is an Assistant Professor at Stella Maris College, Chennai. Her research seeks to develop the domain of critical sports studies in India as a field to study social change, politics of gender, and democratic practices.

Mathangi Krishnamurthy is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her areas of interest include the anthropology of work and gender, and medical anthropology. Her book 1-800-Worlds: The Making of the Indian Call Centre Economy published by OUP in 2018 chronicles the labour practices, life-worlds, and media atmospheres of Indian call centre workers. She has also been a columnist for the blog 3quarksdaily and The Hindu, and writes occasionally on cultural production and practices for popular press.

About the Contributors

Aby Abraham is a Photographer trained in photojournalism from the Kerala Media Academy, Kochi. He currently works as an Assistant Professor at VIT-AP School of Social Sciences and Humanities (VISH), VIT-AP University, Amaravati, India. His doctoral thesis, titled ‘Framing Politics: Post-Millennial Land Struggles of Kerala’, looks at the photographic representations of Adivasi land struggles in Kerala. With a passion for visual culture and cultural studies, his primary focus lies in exploring photographic representation and its relationship with power. Additionally, he is a lens-based practitioner, having participated in numerous photography exhibitions across India.

Michiel Baas is a Senior Research Fellow with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany). He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam (2009), and has published extensively on migration and transnationalism, new middle-class formations, and gender/sexuality and the body in India. His most recent book is Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility and the New Middle Class (Context, 2020). In his latest project he looks at the use of AI by artists, creative professionals and data scientists in India.

Samata Biswas teaches English, and courses and texts related to gender, caste, partition and colonialism at the Sanskrit College and University, Kolkata. Samata is the Editor of Politics, Space, Memory: Identity Making in the Wake of Partition (Refugee Watch 61 & 62), and co-editor of Situating Social Media: Gender, Caste, Solidarity, Protest (2020), and the special issue of the Anveshi Broadsheet on Contemporary Politics on Violence (2017). She has conceptualised and curated three short documentaries titled Calcutta Migrant City. Samata is the book review editor of Refugee Watch: A South Asian Journal on Forced Migration and member of the editorial collective of Refugee Watch Online, a blog on forced migration.

Sonal Jha is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. Formerly, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai. Her research is rooted in the domain of Cultural Studies and her areas of interest include sports studies, popular culture, and visual culture. She has published in several peer-reviewed international journals of repute such as The Journal of Popular Culture, Third Text, Visual Studies, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Sport in Society, and South Asian Popular Culture.

Ashish Krishna is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at BITS Pilani, K. K. Birla Goa Campus, India. His research focus is at the intersection of sport, gender, and postcolonialism. He has contributed to sports studies journals and edited books, and presented ongoing research at a number of sports studies conferences.

Lakshyayog is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His doctoral project explores the production of a fit city by examining the role of initiatives such as open gyms and fitness campaigns in Delhi. He has been awarded the Senior Research Fellowship and Junior Research Fellowship for his doctoral studies by the University Grants Commission, Government of India. He has also worked with various organisations such as ActionAid, Participatory Research in Asia, and The Energy and Research Institute. His areas of research include physical culture and fitness practices, geographies of fitness and physical activities, and urban politics in the Global South.

Kabir Madan is a student enrolled in the M.A. in Social Anthropology program, at the Department of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. In the past, Kabir has worked as a football coach at Roots Football School (Bengaluru), as an SEO Manager at Outlook India (Noida), and as a Union Organizer at Teaching Support Staff Union, SFU (Burnaby).

Pretika Menon is an Indian Photographer based in Goa. She has worked in fashion and fine art for more than a decade as a photographer and creative director. Inspired by cinema, street life and childhood stories, Pretika’s works captures the dramatic in the everyday for her characters. Her work encompasses her fine-art painterly aesthetics in mise-en-scène with undertones of dark humour, that intrinsically weave boldness and the surreal into the fabric of postcolonial cultural identity. She has been featured in Proud South, a global index by Dutch trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort on trends in fashion and culture in the Southern Hemisphere, as also in all major fashion publications in India including Vogue India, Harper’s Bazaar, Verve, and Grazia. In 2022, she was part of a residency funded by Vogue Italia to create her first collection of NFTS on the platform VOICE.

Amritha Mohan is a Researcher, Writer, and Journalist from Kannur, Kerala. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at Monash University (Australia) and her doctoral research investigates women’s experiences in sport and physical cultures in Kerala (namely football, Kalaripayattu, and athletics). Her key research interests include gender, embodiment, leisure, sport, and physical cultures.

Supratik Sinha is pursuing a Masters in English at Shiv Nadar University. Supratik is a published poet with research interests in gender, forced migration, and visual culture, especially cinema. Supratik is currently researching memes and memory.

Stanley Thangaraj is the Inaugural James E. Hayden Chair and Professor for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice at Stonehill College. His monograph Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity (NYU Press, 2015) looks at the relationship between race and gender in co-ethnic-only South Asian American sporting cultures. He has co-edited volumes: Sport and South Asian Diasporas (Routledge, 2014) and Asian American Sporting Cultures (NYU Press, 2016). His newest research is on Kurdish America, which received the 2015 American Studies Association ‘Comparative Ethnic Studies’ award and Association for Asian American Studies Social Caucus Faculty Article award.

Acknowledgements

The impulse for this book arose from an invitation. In March 2022, Kevin Young, series editor for Research in the Sociology of Sport at Emerald Press since 2001 wrote to us asking if we might be interested in contributing as guest editors with a volume focused on India. From then to now, as we bring this exercise to fruition, Kevin has been with us every step of the way and we could not have done this without his attentive and empathetic presence. We are also thankful to Katy Mathers, Commissioning Editor for Sociology and Criminology, and Lauren Kammerdiener, Content Development Editor at Emerald Publishing, who have been tremendously supportive through the process. Katy additionally met our fledgling idea for the volume with great enthusiasm which helped reinforce for us the significance of this project.

Our essayists and contributors have been a joy to work with, and we thank them for their patience with our relentless, and year-long follow-ups. Their work is what animates this effort. This volume has been carried by a large team of patient and generous peer reviewers who together are responsible for the coherence of conversations between the essays and the themes of this book. We are also greatly thankful to Rahul Pillai, doctoral scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras, for his editorial assistance and keen eye, especially with the final copy edits for this volume.

Mathangi is grateful to the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras for a 10-month sabbatical in 2023, part of which was dedicated to working on this volume. She additionally thanks her partner, Vijay for unstinting support and motivation. Mathangi would also like to thank Veena for being the wind beneath this volume’s wings; Veena’s doctoral work on football functions as the original impulse for working on this volume together and it’s a joy to see the places she is going with it.

Veena thanks her friends at EFLU- Hyderabad for continued discussions on popular culture and for constantly inspiring her to imagine new grounds in academia. She would also like to thank Soumya, Krishna and Neelima for the sheer pride they showed when she signed her first book contract. Veena extends a special thanks to Mathangi, who daringly agreed to supervise a doctoral dissertation on sports and masculinities before Sports Studies was a recognisable domain in Indian academia. Without her constant support since then, this volume wouldn’t be what it is.