Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India (Contemporary Asia in the World) - Hardcover

Ronojoy Sen has produced a fascinating, rich, and thoroughly engaging history of sport in India. He manages to paint at once with powerful, evocative, and very convincing broad strokes and with the finely gauged brush of an ethno-historian concerned as much with the intricacies and nuances of embodied experience as with quirky personalities and the odd politics of everyday life. All of this adds up to a book that fully captures the imagination to generate deep and often unexpected insight on the serious business of play in modern India. -- Joseph S. Alter, Yale-NUS College, author of The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in North India His ambitious book examines Indian sports in a largely chronological manner and does not duck the more awkward questions, such as the perceived athletic limitations of Indians. The narrative has an attractive sweep to it, starting with the place of sports and martial competition in Hindu epics such as the "Mahabharata" and the "Ramayana." Wall Street Journal Rich in detail and nuanced in terms of analysis... [Ronojoy Sen] is to be praised for adding to the understanding of sport in India by looking at how it intersects with culture and politics, and for using sport to provide insights about Indian history and society. Choice Sen is to be applauded for writing such an ambitious book, enriching our understanding of the history of sport in India. Journal of Sport History

Reaching as far back as ancient times, Ronojoy Sen pairs a novel history of India's engagement with sport and a probing analysis of its cultural and political development under monarchy and colonialism, and as an independent nation. Some sports that originated in India have fallen out of favor, while others, such as cricket, have been adopted and made wholly India's own. Sen's innovative project casts sport less as a natural expression of human competition than as an instructive practice reflecting a unique play with power, morality, aesthetics, identity, and money. Sen follows the transformation of sport from an elite, kingly pastime to a national obsession tied to colonialism, nationalism, and free market liberalization. He pays special attention to two modern phenomena: the dominance of cricket in the Indian consciousness and the chronic failure of a billion-strong nation to compete successfully in international sporting competitions, such as the Olympics. Innovatively incorporating examples from popular media and other unconventional sources, Sen not only captures the political nature of sport in India but also reveals the patterns of patronage, clientage, and institutionalization that have bound this diverse nation together for centuries.