‘The nation and its fragments’: football and community in India1

Abstract

Football has been one of the central components of popular culture in colonial and post‐colonial India. It has been closely linked to wider historical processes which have shaped the society and culture of the region since the nineteenth century. The history of Indian football shows that community connections and identities have been strongly articulated through the game at different points in time. In India, football started as a marker of nationalist community against British imperialism. This unitary social identity, however, gave way to a series of fragmentations in terms of new forms of community and identity. These related to social differences expressed through communal and sub‐regional identities represented through club loyalties. This essay examines the ways in which the notion of ‘community’ can be theoretically reconceptualized in the context of Indian football thereby establishing football’s credibility as a viable theme in the study of national/regional/local dichotomies in Indian social history and cultural studies.