Satadru Sen
Washington University
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Why does cricket generate more popular enthusiasm than does football in India today? And why is India so much more successful in cricket than it is in football? This article argues that the answers are rooted in how the two sports are organised in the contemporary world Because Indians get many more opportunities to play international cricket than to play football at the international level, it is cricket that is recognised as a ‘national’ sport. Given a historical setting in which what is relevant and pleasurable is also what is ‘national’, Indian football has been increasingly relegated to the status of the local and the humble, even as cricket has become the glamorous carrier of political aspirations. Indians play cricket, not football: this is common wisdom about Indian popular culture today. When the Indian national football team (which does exist) played a season against English second-division clubs in 2001 and lost nearly all their matches, local journalists had to be told that Indians do in fact play some football, although obviously, they are not very good at it. All the same, the puzzled journalists were not entirely the victims of a provincial ignorance of the world outside Europe and South America: with the exception of West Bengal, Goa and a few other pockets,
the level of interest in competitive football is negligible in India, especially when compared with cricket. The question is why. The answer that I propose in this essay, only semi-facetiously, is that Sunil Gavaskar ruined Indian football.
On the surface, football should be the great Indian sport. The game has a history in the region that is nearly as old as that of cricket. Because of the colonial army’s role in the dissemination of football to Indian sepoys, the game had great potential as a popular sport for the subaltern classes. Football and cricket were both introduced to the middle class, the primary consumer of competitive sport in India, in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Both featured prominently in the closely related nationalist and colonialist projects of pedagogical gender-building.Moreover, football would appear to be much better suited to India than cricket. It is cheaper, simpler, shorter and, being less deeply
rooted in the arcana of English nostalgia, more culturally transferable, The different psychological profiles of the two sports also seem to align football with Indian cultural inclinations, or at any rate, colonial readings of Indian culture. Football is about the overtly embodied experience of emotion. After England defeated Argentina in the 2002 World Cup, most English newspapers described the victory explicitly in terms of an erasure of several years of ‘pain’ that went back at least as far as Diego Maradona’s ‘hand of God’ goal, and presumably to the sinking of the HMS Sheffield in the Falklands War. From my perspective as a follower of cricket, I found the sentiment rather embarrassing, like being confronted by a flasher on the street. My own response reminded me of C.L.R. James’ discomfiture at an American baseball game, with its open taunting of the other side and its acceptable brawling on the field.
Such flaunting of pain, pleasure and anger is alien to the normative ethos of cricket, which demands a Puritanical privileging of self- control over self-expression. Throughout the colonial era, British observers, including educators, administrators and visiting athletes, insisted that Indians were incapable of the self-control that is required to play and watch cricket in the ‘proper’ manner.
For a society of the emotionally unrestrained, football should have come relatively easy.
To some extent and up to a certain time, it did come easily. The role of football in what might be described as the ‘emotional politics’ of Indian
nationalism – the high drama of Mohun Bagan versus the East Yorkshire Regiment in 1911, and so on – is too well-known to require repetition. In his essay about the sly resistance of the subaltern in colonial Burma, George Orwell wrote about being tripped up on the football pitch, not about being knocked out by a well-aimed bouncer. Cricket in this period did not generate the same exhibitions of political passion, although English cricket writers imagined a colony-wide state of excitement when India played its first Test match in London in 1932.It was football, not cricket, that reflected the politics of the Partition in Bengal by providing new identities that corresponded with Calcutta-based clubs like East Bengal, and through the ritualistic performance of victory and defeat, feasting
Through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, while international cricket matches continued to fill the Eden Gardens and the Brabourne Stadium, it was club football that generated the hysteria. In the 1970s all this began to change, and by the 1990s the reversal was nearly complete. East Bengal versus Mohun Bagan matches still draw large crowds in Calcutta, but there is a tacit acknowledgment that this is serious football only by default. Nobody pretends that the standard of play is very good, and people come to the Salt Lake stadium from a sense of habit, out of loyalty to the sport and the teams, and because they cannot practically hope to watch Brazil or Manchester United.
Many explanations havebeen put forward to explain the ‘decline’, or rather, the under-development, of Indian football between the 1940s and the 1960s. Quite apart from more dubious suggestions of physical, dietary and climatic shortcomings, much has been made of unimaginative organisation, fiscal handicaps, bureaucratic ineptitude, indifferent coaching, inability to stay abreast of tactical developments in other parts of the world, inability to win international matches, and of course, competition from cricket. While some of these ideas undoubtedly have merit, it is often forgotten that many of the same India, and there can be little doubt that the new Indian spectator is actually less cosmopolitan and ‘sporting’ than his counterpart in the 1950s and 1960s: less willing to applaud the other team and more willing to throw missiles at the field or at the wives of offending batsmen, as even the relatively sophisticated Calcutta crowd has done since the 1980s. This ‘footballing’ behaviour, however, is an inseparable, although not quite essential, part of the masala of contemporary Indian cricket; it is a part of what makes cricket the national sport, and what persuades newspapers like the Times of India that there is nothing bizarre about exhorting readers to wish Tendulkar a happy birthday.
It has gone hand-in-hand with a historical process in which all identities, aspirations, celebrations and calamities, including the provincial, the parochial and the personal, are increasing translated into national terms even when they are bought and sold on the global market. To conclude, while it is certainly true that Indians do play football, it is also true that they do not play it in the same manner in which they play cricket. In other words, they do not play it as Indians: there is nothing ‘national’ about football in India, whereas cricket is generally played, watched, marketed, consumed and imagined as the national sport. In an historical setting where nationalism is a pervasive determinant of what is valuable in culture and society, football inevitably takes on a secondary relevance and prominence, and suffers the various institutional and demographic consequences of that lesser position.
The distance between the relative locations of cricket and football in Indian society is of fairly recent origin. It reflects, first, the differences between how cricket and football are organised in the contemporary world, which allows weaker cricket teams an international presence that their footballing counterparts cannot hope to possess. Second, it reflects an extraordinary convergence between cricket heroics and nationalist self-assertion in India that began in 1971, and was intensified after the World Cup victory of 1983. Third, it mirrors institutional changes such as the new popularity of one-day cricket, the expanded influence of television in Indian society, and the channeling into the cricket crowd of poorer and newly-affluent Indians who might have been football fans had Indian football been equipped to meet their political emotional needs at the close of the twentieth century.
The new cricket crowds of India are nothing like the emotionally restrained and ‘sporting’ spectators, infused with the so-called ‘public-school code’ 20 and steeped in the hegemonic history of the sport, that snobbish apologists for the five-day game wax nostalgic about. The new Indian cricket fan would understand the ‘pain’ that was erased by Beckham’s free-kick. Ironically, Indian football is in danger of disappearing because Indian cricket has become football. How Gavaskar Killed Indian Football
http://indiansuperleaguefootball.com/ 
