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Dart, J. (2017) Book Review: Nation at play: a history of sport in India. In Sport in History 37(2):1-3
DOI 10.1080/17460263.2017.1315006

Ronojoy Sen, Nation at Play. A History of Sport in India (Columbia University Press, 2015). Pp 382.
Price???? ISBN-10: 0231164904 / ISBN-13: 978-0231164900

Ronojoy Sen sets out to debunk the myth that India does not have a culture of sport and across
twelve chapters covers an impressive amount of ground: caste and class, region and religion,
community and communalism, nationalism and nation. The book adopts a chronological structure,
beginning in antiquity, India’s ancient texts and the sports of archery and wrestling. Starting with the
early kings and princely states the book moves to discuss the class background of early sporting
clubs, physical culture and nationalist revolutionary movements, barefoot football, partition, new
nationhood, the public sector era, globalisation and the economic liberalisation currently being
unleashed in the country. The author traces India’s changing rivalries, first with England and then as
memories of colonial rule faded, the transference of nationalist emotions to Pakistan with sporting
encounters seen as thinly disguised national wars.

The book rattles through how the early sports clubs acted as a sanctuary of English life in an alien
environment, strictly for whites only, with the British strongly opposed to Indians taking up ‘English’
sports. However, it was not all one-way traffic with polo, favoured by the Mughal emperors,
enthusiastically adopted by the British officer class across India. ‘Rediscovered’ by the British polo
quickly spread across the subcontinent although the British were initially reluctant to take up the
sport for fear of being beaten the locals. Despite the British having no formal policy on sport in India,
colonial officials played a central role in the transmission of imperial and national ideas with public
schools central the transmission of these ideas; Sen notes that many of these schools continuing to
flourish, populated no longer by princely families, but by India’s growing middle class. Sen explores
the role of sport and the physical culture movement in the growth of anticolonial revolutionary
organisations and explains the role of communalism and nationalism and the tensions between the
Indian National Congress and Muslim League. Gandhi’s indifference to cricket contrasted with
Nehru’s great interest with Sen questioning if the popularity of cricket was a simple love of the sport
or communal one-upmanship, and concludes it was probably a bit of both.

The successes of field hockey in the early Olympic games is covered in detail. Like football, hockey
was introduced in India by the British army, with the country sending a hockey team to the 1924
Olympic, two decades before it became independent. Hockey also provided India’s first sports
superstar, Dhyan Chand, whose statue in Vienna shows him with four hands and four sticks
illustrating his ‘unreal’ skill. Another sport given extensively coverage is wrestling which, unlike those
sports introduced (or adopted) by the British, was the reserve of rural and often illiterate Indians.
Entertaining accounts are given on the mythical figures, the Great Gama and Gobor Guha, and their
astonishing physical regimes, fantastic diets and invincibility in the ring which saw them become
symbols of Indian masculinity and national pride.

In the early years of India’s independence, Nehru’s government neglected sport, but soon
recognised its potential in projecting the country’s aspirations with the hosting the first Asian Games
in New Delhi in 1951 an important milestone for postcolonial Asia. In Nehru’s socialist India public
sector organisations became the largest employers of sportspersons with Sen explaining why state-
run organisations and private companies were so important to Indian sport. Few sports paid enough
allow a stable livelihood and so securing a post in a state-run organisation allowed athletes a regular
income and time to train and compete.
1971 is seen by Sen as a watershed with India securing its first overseas test series wins against the
West Indies and England. The latter half of the book questions how and why cricket became the
dominant sport in India and why hockey and football, popular in the 1950s and 1960s, declined. Sen
points to the number of factors and suggests it was the ‘perfect marriage’ of cricket and (radio, then
television) media which hastened the decline of football and hockey. Sen questions whether the
launch of the IPL in 2008 has completely revolutionised or destroyed cricket before offering a
personal comment on the IPL which he sees as a metaphor for an increasingly affluent and growing
middle class which thrives on spectacle and excess. Despite this criticism, the success of the IPL has
spawned several professional leagues (hockey, volleyball, badminton, and boxing) with Western
football clubs establishing youth academies which seek to cater for the offspring of a growing middle
class. Sen usefully discusses how Indian women have been largely absent from the history of sports
in pre-independence India, but encouraged by number of women and girls who participate in sport,
recognises that females are still, typically, not encouraged to exercise. Although the successes of PT
Usha and Mary Kom are discussed, the tennis player Sania Mirza, is notably absent from the book.

The leisure class in India has always been small with the majority of Indians too poor and lacking
time to devote to sport. Sen highlights India’s vastness and diversity and the difficulty in fielding a
national team in a country with so many religions, languages and dialects, customs and ideals. With
a population of 1.3 billion India is set to become the world’s most populous nation, yet it has the
lowest ratio of medals to population. Indian athletes have won 24 Olympic medals since 1924, with
eight of the nine gold medals won by field hockey team between 1928 and 1980. Sen points to a
number of reasons for the lack of international success: poor levels of health and education, power
shortages, poor air quality, water shortages/pollution, and a lack of physical connectedness
(information about and access to sport – including facilities, infrastructure, and legacy). These
barriers are compounded by the ineptitude of Indian sports administrators, who use sports
organisations as personal fiefdoms replete with nepotism and corruption.

Sen engages with India’s lack of international sporting success, but ducks certain issues. There is
limited discussion of corruption, financial mismanagement, doping, and resultant court cases, the
exclusion of Sri Lankan players in southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and participation of Pakistani
cricketers in IPL, and the case of Indian runner Dutee Chand. There is also very little commentary on
the Commonwealth Games. Some experts might spot some very minor editing errors in names.
Written by a former journalist and current senior research fellow at the National University of
Singapore, Sen offers a clear, concise and very readable account of Indian sport in an accessible and
entertaining style. The writing easily switches between broad strokes and colourful detail and
combines the historical, social, economic and political and draws upon mythology and popular
culture, as he rattles though monarchy, colonialism, independence, and economic neo-liberalism.
Sen demonstrates that whilst cricket has dominated, India is not the one-sport nation it is often
made out to be, and shows why it had failed in many other sports.

Dr Jon Dart
Carnegie Faculty, Leeds Beckett University.
j.j.dart@leedsbeckett.ac.uk