Order and resistance

As football became more popular, it took on new connotations. In Burma, where the indigenous population disliked and actively resisted most colonial institutions, football, despite its superseding local Burmese games, allegedly became ‘the chief item on the credit side of imperial governance’.¹³ Its popularity in the early twentieth century stemmed partly from it being the one means of actively challenging the colonialists with impunity and without fear of retribution: an outlet for virulent anti-European feeling and a means of striking back and resisting empire.

George Orwell, a colonial bureaucrat before becoming a distinguished author, reported being fouled, a possibility absent from cricket, with the Burmese referee turning a blind eye. To Andrew Marshall, a historian of colonial Burma, ‘For the British, football was a way of communicating ideas of fair play and respect for authority. For the Burmese it was something else: a rare opportunity to thrash their colonial masters at their own game.’¹⁴ Similar opportunities and challenges existed elsewhere; beating the British regimental teams was all-important to the early Maltese teams, and in Algeria occasional games between European settlers and local people in the 1920s, at a time of embryonic nationalism, were marked by physical confrontations, both on the pitch and among the spectators; colonial authorities responded by restricting games between ethnic groups.

When local clubs did play against colonials, interest was enormous and tensions considerable. Indian teams in Calcutta, and elsewhere in India, played in bare feet, which made victories over colonial teams more impressive and more satisfying, and indicated a degree of masculinity that some of the English felt the smaller Indians lacked. Crowds were huge, especially where there was a prospect of victory.

Some 50,000 people turned up for the 1911 Indian Football Association Shield final when the local Bengali team Mohan Bagan defeated the East Yorkshire Regiment 2—1. The English press remarked on the value of providing sports facilities for native people; the local Bengali press recorded that Mohan Bagan had proved a unifying force for Bengalis, across a Bengal partitioned to local anger in 1905. Indians had shown themselves not merely equal to their colonial masters but entirely capable of beating them. As one Bengali-language newspaper put it: ‘It fills every Indian with pride and joy to know that rice-eating, malaria-ridden, barefooted Bengalis have got the better of beef-eating, Herculean booted John Bull in the peculiarly English sport.’¹⁵ The victory of Mohan Bagan temporarily united Indians across the subcontinent, four days of celebration ensued and, as an Indian scholar put it, ‘Football began to be identified with something very akin to fighting the colonial masters’.¹⁶ Victory did much to overcome any local sense of physical, racial and cultural inferiority.

Football competitions and teams provided individuals from poor and socially marginal backgrounds with avenues for achieving status, titles and positions of authority, often within a ritualised atmosphere in which they could challenge their otherwise ‘superiors’. Such challenges brought large and partisan crowds. Football provided one means of turning back and directly challenging some impositions of empire and of developing a nationalist consciousness. It was inseparable from local politics, a means of resistance to colonialism and, in the post-colonial era, to oppressive successor governments. Conversely, therefore, it was unsurprising that the British, in particular, continued to see that sport, and especially football, ‘could and should be used to reinforce European hegemony, counter the potential emergence of African nationalism and create a more disciplined working class’.¹⁷ Yet studies from Malta and Algeria illustrate how football took on an indigenous life of its own, and became an arena of populism and nationalism.

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Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

Order and resistance

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