Wiping the Stain Off the Field of Plassey: Mohun Bagan in 1911

Abstract

Every soccer‐loving Indian, even in 2006, takes a legitimate pride in the first worthy indigenous club Mohun Bagan’s IFA Shield victory in 1911, defeating civil and military European teams. The present essay reconsiders the first momentous event in Indian soccer history, examining the varied responses to, and larger meaning of, the historic event in trying to destabilize rigidly imperialist or nationalist historical interpretations of this occasion. By focussing analysis on the varied responses to the phenomenon of Indians having defeated the British, the essay argues that in each case the writer of the report brought his (in all cases) ideological commitments to bear on his interpretation of the victory. The analysis of an entire range of newspaper reports documents how the larger meaning of Mohun Bagan’s victory came into being only through the very particular connotations football had acquired in the cultural and political schema of early twentieth‐century Bengali society. The essay also tries to reveal how received notions of modernity, tradition, race, governance and masculinity acquired significantly different and, at times, conflicting meanings in the minds of the football and Mohun Bagan crazed newspaper correspondents, and presumably, the newspaper‐reading public. It accounts for the larger significance of this event in terms of the differences and similarities both between and within nationalist (Indian) and imperialist (British) interpretations.