Gender, Power, and Cricket Spectators in Calcutta, 1960s–1990s

Souvik Naha

doi:10.1017/s0018246x21000406

Abstract

AbstractHistorians of modern India have emphasized the reflexivity of men and women in the making of womanhood, paying attention to notions of gender difference emerging from both primordial, restrictive codes of behaviour and contrarian impulses towards what was popularly called progress. There have been relatively few attempts to trace gender interaction in outdoor leisure activities, public displays of femininity, and male regulatory anxieties in the post-colonial context. By studying the symbolism of women's presence in the Eden Gardens, the international cricket stadium in Calcutta, from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article reflects on the nature of power, authority, and gender hierarchy in urban Indian society. This study of questions of gender hierarchy, women's mannerisms, social identity, and informal resistance through a historical lens will enable us to understand the trajectory of women's outsider status in urban public spaces. Through a reading of the mediated parti pris impressions of female spectators, it will also map the transition in society's approach to sport from a structured homosocial community activity to a relatively unstructured field of shared experience.

Highlights

This article studies women’s attachment with sport as spectators as a means to understand the restrictive and emancipatory potentials of public spaces for gender relations in independent India
By studying the symbolism of women’s presence in the Eden Gardens, the international cricket stadium in Calcutta, from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article reflects on the nature of power, authority, and gender hierarchy in urban Indian society
It adds sport as a fresh perspective to explore the problematic connection between women and public space in India, which has so far been examined in mostly colonial contexts and from perspectives of class, caste, marriage, labour, nationalism, migration, and so on, but not sport.[5]

Summary

Introduction

This article studies women’s attachment with sport as spectators as a means to understand the restrictive and emancipatory potentials of public spaces for gender relations in independent India.

Results

Conclusion