The Limits of the History of Western Sport in Colonial India

This historiographical review considers a corpus of literature which examines the spread of modern Western sport within and beyond the locus of public schools, princely playgrounds and club greens in colonial India. While locating the old historiographical problems and new social historical interpretations, a great deal of attention has been paid to foregrounding significant research areas that are less catered to in existing scholarships. As well, this review contends that the eagerness to examine colonial interventions in the sports field without tracing the conflict and negotiation between two different – pre-colonial and colonial – ideas of leisure and body cultural movements expounds an incomplete history of Western sport in modern India. While doing so, it urges a rectification of the methodology of current academic studies in which vernacular literary sources are treated as a ‘passive mediator’ merely reflecting the popular enthusiasm for sport. It concludes that this ‘reflectionist’ approach is a hindrance to research work on the diffusion of Western sports in colonial India, which recognises the emergence and development of a new sporting culture as the discursive formation that surrounded the ideological meanings and images of the literary construction of sport.