Metaphors of Sport in Baul Songs: Towards an Alternate Definition of Sports

Abstract

Modern sport has increasingly become a highly specialized activity. Modern societies have tended to demarcate sport and sporting activity within highly differentiated structures, thus rendering the natal ties of sporting activities with other aspects of a society’s cultural life opaque. Historians of sport, by concentrating mainly upon a narrow definition of what is ‘sport’, have participated in this process of demarcation. That this was not always the case and that activities and ideas today almost solely associated with specialized ‘sport’ once formed part of a more extensive part of the everyday lives of societies is attested to by the continued use of ‘sporting’ words and metaphors in explicitly non-sporting contexts. This linguistic evidence—available in most languages—resists the process of abstraction, rationalization and institutionalization, through which sport has become a specific, highly differentiated and archane activity undertaken by specialists and run by its own internal logic. In this article we use the evidence from one particular linguistic register—that of the songs of the Bauls [a rural Bengali heterodoxy] in the colonial times—to show how their peculiar usages of the term khela [play/game/sport] often resisted and occasionally subverted the attitudes underlying modern, organized sport.