Cover -- Sport in South Asian Society -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Tables -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: The Fall and Rise of Indian Sports History -- Prologue: Stepping Stones Across a Stream -- Raj and Post Raj Identities: Sport & South Asia -- The Early Cricketing Tours: Imperial Provenance and Radical Potential -- 1911 in Retrospect: A Revisionist Perspective on a Famous Indian Sporting Victory -- Imperial Tool 'For' Nationalist Resistance: The 'Games Ethic' in Indian History -- Imperial and Post-Imperial Congruence: A Challenge to Ideological Simplification -- Narrative Histories: Sport in Colonial and Post Colonial South Asia -- 'An Inheritance from the British': The Indian Boxing Story -- 'Legacies, Halcyon Days and Thereafter': A Brief History of Indian Tennis -- Marginal Voices: Women's Sport in Colonial and Post Colonial South Asia -- Bengali Girls in Sport: A Socio-economic Study of Kabadi -- Fleshing Out Mandira: Hemming in the Women's Constituency in Cricket -- Women In Sport: The Parsis and Jews in Twentieth-Century India -- Lagaan - Undertones and Overtones: South Asian Sport, Culture, Society -- Cricket or Cricket Spectacle? Looking Beyond Cricket to Understand Lagaan -- Bollywood Motifs: Cricket Fiction and Fictional Cricket -- Cementing Ties: Sport in South Asian Diplomacy -- Manufacturing Unison: Muslims, Hindus and Indians during the India-Pakistan Match -- Globalizing Patriotism? Some Lessons from the Cricket World Cup of 2003 -- To Play Or Not To Play: Fabricating Consent over the Indo-Pak Cricket Series -- Cross Cutting Identities: Sport and the South Asian Diaspora -- Spectatorship, Fandom, and Nationalism in the South Asian Diaspora: The 2003 Cricket World Cup -- Cricketing Fervour and Islamic Fervour: Marginalisation in the Diaspora.

Epilogue: '. . . there is always change' -- Index.

A detailed study of sports' arrival, spread and advance in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. A selection of articles addresses critical issues of nationalism, communalism, commercialism and gender through the lens of sport. This book makes the point that the social histories of South Asian sport cannot be understood by simply looking at the history of the game in one province or region. Furthermore, it demonstrates that it would be wrong to understand sport in terms of the exigencies of the colonial state. Drawing inspiration from C.L.R. James' well-known epigram, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' the findings suggest that South Asian sport makes sense only when it is placed within the broader colonial and post-colonial context. The book demonstrates that sport not only influences politics and vice versa, but that the two are inseparable. Sport is not only political, it is politics, intrigue, culture and art. To deny this is to denigrate the position of sport in modern South Asian society. This volume was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.