‘When Gold is Fired It Shines’: Sport, the Imagination and the Body in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Abstract

The body has been an important analytical tool in recent years in studies of South Asian history and culture. Two main sources lay behind this focus. On the one hand the work of Edward Said emphasized the place of cultural constructions of the body in the manufacture of the ideology of Western superiority and non-Western inferiority that was so important in legitimating the colonialism of Europe, and indeed has continued to feature in the collective denigration of imagined groups such as Arabs and Muslims. By representing in literature, art, journalism, and so on the physical manifestation of individuals deemed to belong to such groups as somehow 'different', 'corrupted' and 'unpredictable' when compared with the 'normal' bodies of those from the West, the control of those featured as 'normal' over those seen as 'different' was justified and made to seem part of a natural order (Said 1986, 1989).