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The body has been one of the central tools in analysing connections between sport and postcolonialism in India, given how sport was an essential part of the colonial ‘civilising’ mission, which involved disciplining and controlling Indian bodies. Any discursive understanding of sport and postcolonialism in India must consider how it relates to existing concepts of the body and shapes the experiences of the people involved in it – acknowledging not just the power of colonialism in moulding sporting experiences but also the force of internal hierarchies that exist in Indian society. This chapter explores the experiences of students who studied in higher educational institutions in Kerala under the ‘sports quota’, a system that reserves seats in colleges/universities for high-performing sportspersons in India. Through their interviews, the sustained exclusion of the sporting body in contemporary Indian pedagogy is illustrated here. Specifically, the continuing prevalence of the colonial emphasis on the sporting body, as one whose strength and instrumentality are paramount, as well as its corollary postcolonial position, which treats this sporting body as inferior to the ‘refined mind’ of studious pupils, can be observed. Approaching the sports quota with a decolonising lens would require re-examining the disembodied nature of pedagogy in India’s higher educational institutions, acknowledging sporting students’ lived experiences, and a seamless integration – as opposed to separation/exclusion – of the sportsperson into higher education.

This chapter argues that the National Basketball Association (NBA) and American mainstream sporting media produce and mediate a representation of India as underdeveloped and as an unmodern subject/nation as a way to enter the Indian basketball marketplace. The chapter emphasizes that the NBA produces the attendant discourse of the ‘white saviour’ through a multi-pronged process. The chapter shows how it draws upon the legacies of British colonialism, along with the expansion of US imperialism, to construct India in particular racialised ways as backward, unmodern, and not cosmopolitan. In this respect, Black NBA players’ modes of basketball reach India as part of the racialisation of Indian basketball. Finally, the chapter engages with the larger global circuits of race and racialisation to understand how India is then imagined within the US sporting landscape. This chapter underscores the capitalist desires of the NBA alongside the desires of South Asian Americans for an Indian basketball hero. Both desires, institutional and personal, showcase racialisation at work. The NBA uses the language and performance of Judeo-Christian modernity through NBA players in India to racialise Indians as in need of NBA mentorship and upliftment. On other hand, diasporic Indians in the US dream of an Indian NBA player as a way to unravel, destabilise, and challenge their racialisation as hypo-masculine subjects. These competing forms of racialisation provide important information on the global flows of capital, desire, and sport.

Recent debates in urban studies and urban anthropology have revolved around the growth of neoliberal economies and their impact on postcolonial cities such as Bengaluru and invoke the phenomenon of the death of the commons. Rather than focusing on a dialectical existence of infrastructures, which suggests a life and death binary, in 2020, I turned my attention to the possibility of a life between and beyond these two binaries through the game of football and its place in Bengaluru. This essay is based on a study of two different types of football fields in Koramangala, Bengaluru, and through this exercise, it intends to examine a potential move towards the viewing of commons as sites of knowledge production for sport, culture, and the city. One of the key ideas around which urban commons are looked at in this essay is through an examination of Bengaluru as a postcolonial city, one which was supposed to uphold a Nehruvian vision, and its transformation into the Information Technology hub of India through a neoliberal turn in urban development. A major concern raised here with neoliberal models of urban development is how people who do not have the monetary capacity to access sports infrastructure end up playing in the postcolonial, neoliberal city.

For many Indians who played cricket in their backyards or whatever little spaces they had in their locality, the red Stumper ball became their ticket to the local version of the game. This form of cricket involved self-created rules, tailored to the available space or the mood of neighbours who may or may not return the ball if it were to land on their field. This photo essay follows the journey of ‘Mahanadu XI’, a group of young men, mostly from subaltern communities, who play cricket on the banks of the Krishna River in Vijayawada. The photographer, driven by his teenage memories as a cricket enthusiast who religiously followed test matches and one-day games on TV, captures their story through a series of interactions spanning three months from April to June 2023.

This chapter argues that football is central to specific regional, hegemonic masculinities within colonial histories and continuities in South India. Through ethnographic narratives of a prominent football figure associated with the Malabar Special Police, this chapter shows how different performances of a particular mode of masculinity draw power from multiple sites such as regional class networks, colonial legacies, and postcolonial sport. This work demonstrates how a (post) colonial space shores up the powers associated with a male sporting figure. The regional format of a sport is as important as the global format in producing regional, hegemonic masculinity. Analysing the powers and aura associated with this sporting figure helps one to understand the specific meanings of desire and aspirations for status and stability among a section of men in a South Indian context.

This chapter is an exploratory study of women’s football in Goa during two defining periods in its history: 1975–1991 and 2017–present. Anchoring the analysis within the intersection of sport, gender, and decolonisation, the chapter aims to address the peripheralisation of women’s sport in academic work on sport in India. Examining the evolution of women’s football in Goa and the multifarious factors that stilted its advancement, this research demonstrates how the systemic challenges that have historically plagued women’s sport continue to hamper its progress. The chapter argues that the professionalisation of women’s sport is indispensable to unlocking its potential and doing justice to the players and other stakeholders who continue to pursue it despite manifold challenges.

In this photo-essay, I engage with bodies in swimwear in both posed and candid fashion. Seeking out models, I put out an open call in my social media that I was looking for subjects who felt comfortable being photographed in their swimwear, without the angle of sexiness. I wanted to negate the sexual gaze on the body and the person, and instead create documentation and study of the body language, dress codes, and comfort levels of the Indian citizen. I juxtapose these photographs with a second set of images I shot is from my trip to Udupi, a small city in the southwestern state of Karnataka. These are photographs of the average Indian citizen, families, and small social groups by the sea in a very local yet touristy beach of South India.

Over some 20 years, the popularity of competitive bodybuilding has increased significantly in India, along with an increase in sponsorship and professionalism in the organisation of events. Multiple competitions are now held at city/town, state, and national levels, organised by a vast range of organisations. The popularity of the sport follows the arrival of muscular bodies in Indian cinema and the attendant rapid growth of the country’s fitness industry. However, what is required for a bodybuilding competition on-stage is not necessarily the same as what actors showcase in movie scenes, specifically orchestrated to underline bodily accomplishments. Nor may it be what clients are after when they enter a gym. This chapter examines how Indian bodybuilders who often make a living as personal trainers navigate different bodily ideals. It foregrounds the notion of ‘muscular capital’ to deepen the understanding of what value a bodybuilder’s body might hold on and off stage and how it is perceived by others. Building on extensive fieldwork in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, this chapter seeks to move beyond the mere economic dimensions of bodybuilding and instead gives prominence to the sociocultural aspects of the body as they reflect an array of different (post colonial) demands and expectations.