Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of
expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as
distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.”
India. The historic happening not only materialized the dream to resist the growth of the colonizers but also produced forth a nationalistic zeal all over India that British arrogance could be challenged. Such victory had definitely been a premonition of the Indian Independence that finally occurred after thirty seven years of this local ‘playful’ resistance.
The glorious triumph at
the 1911 IFA Shield Final achieved by the fighting unit of
Mohun
Bagan was not a mere win but it was rather a socio-historic incident
(or,
accident?) that not only defied the monolithic and airtight
British rule but also
challenged the concept of Standard Football.
The barefooted eleven players of
Mohun Bagan virtually dragged the
white men of the East Yorkshire Club under
their legs. The so long
suppressed and oppressed natives of Bengal had always the
latent
longing to assert a virtual triumph over the imperialists. The result
of 2-1 in
favour of Mohun Bagan made them the microcosmic
representation of the
macrocosmic India. My article will discuss how
the historic happening not only
materialized the dream to resist the
growth of the colonizers but also produced
forth a nationalistic
zeal all over India that British arrogance could be challenged.
Though the victory of Mohun Bagan has remained unsung in the pages
of history, it was in fact a major attempt to question the basis of
British supremacy at least in
Bengal, though not in India.2 Allied
with the implication that what Mohun Bagan
today is India tomorrow,
the crystallization of national identity was troped
through the
ideological aggressivity of the Green-Maroons.
The 1911 IFA Shield Final
offered an open resistance not only by the eleven players
but by the
shadow of a total heterogeneous civilization that cabined, cribbed
and
confined the maverick greed of the Westerns. In the lens of
Postcolonial studies,
the corresponding amount of game probes the
limits of representations that
disrupt the received notion of
‘inferior’ natives through the iconic representation
of the
spatial fabrication. Thus through ‘adaptation’ and
‘appropriation’, the
stereotypical fixity and positionality of
the natives have been challenged by
reworking the standard norms of
existence on a playground:
Thus Green-Maroons, by
mapping the fault line through the epochal ideology of
social
positionality, not only dismantled the monopoly of the Englishmen
over the
land of India but also set an iconic socio-political
identity of the Indian
civilization. Interestingly enough, Mohun
Bagan won the Shield for the second
time in 1947, the year of Indian
Independence.
Colonizers physical
disappearance has not assured the absolute
independence of India. In
spite of celebrating Independence Day of India on 15th
August or
Mohun Bagan Day on 29th July, the nation and the club – both are
still
strongly hold by the Western powers. Standing in the centenary
year of that massive blow, it would be relevant to think in the
dialectic of authenticity that
how much ‘Indian’ is Mohun Bagan
in 2011! Along with the advancement of time,
the transformation of
Mohun Bagan from the ‘National Club’ to ‘McDowell Mohun
Bagan’
has been shaped following the patterns of marketable commodity and
its
additional consumer signs of ‘money’ and ‘buying power’.11
The leading players are
now hired from foreign countries. Tinged
with the cultural dynamics – from
national integration in 1911 to
cultural fragmentation in 2011, the strikers like Odafa
Okolie and
Jose Barreto (Captain) and the key players like Simon Storey
(Forward) and the coaches and the supporting staff like Stephen David
Darby
(Chief Coach), Bernard Oparanozie (Assistant Coach) and
Jonathan Corner (Physio
Cum Rehab Specialist) are
all not at all Indian. One feels sorry to say that the
Indianness
along with the greenness and the freshness of the Bagan has been
vanished. In spite of providing a mythical 1911 team, the Centenary
bears a strong
sense of ‘intellectual imperialism’ and the
present situation definitely maps that
imperial objectification
along with the epistemic dominance is still going on and
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