Sports
Games of Self-Respect: A Colony at the Olympics
EXTRACT India was the first colonised Asian nation to take part in the Olympic Games. Its embrace of the Olympic movement, while still a British colony, was no mere coincidence. It was intricately linked to the forces of nationalism, the politics of self-respect and indeed the inculcation of what has been called the British ‘Games […..]
Whose Champions?
It is the ICC’s mini-World Cup but there is no enthusiasm for it in the country of the current World Champions, Australia. Cricket fans in Australia are focused entirely on the “revenge” Ashes series that will follow the Champions Trophy. A survey of sports pages across Melbourne’s two biggest newspapers—The Age and The Australian—over the […..]
A Metaphor For Life
Lage Raho Munna Bhai is a striking film partly because it resurrects the Mahatma as a popular icon – not just as a distant nationalist figure, but as the personal Mahatma that he always was in the sense that Shahid Amin has documented in his classic study on Chauri Chaura. The second striking feature about […..]
Walking on history’s pitch
“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” Ever since CLR James wrote these lines in Beyond a Boundary (1963) cricket has come to be understood as a sophisticated cultural lens to view the sociological development of colonial and post-colonial societies. Presaging the rise of modern Sport History and Sociology, Beyond a Boundary […..]
