Sport in a Broader Social Matrix

We have seen Bengalis assembled on various occasions of danger, distress and sorrow, such as that of the Partition – Mohun Bagan has infused a new life intro the lifeless and cheerless Bengali – By your victory sport has been turned into a unifying force –

(Basumati, 5 August 1911)

The victory seems in retrospect to have been a triumph of the moral force which Gandhi extolled and advocated in Hind Swaraj-the win over a white team in football seemed a moment of national pride. It appeared as some sort of recovery of dignity and self-respect in the year that Calcutta was to lose its status as the capital. It was the inhe-rent inequality of the encounter in which the apparently weak trounced the obviously strong that made Mohun Bagan’s victory the stuff of legends. (Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘Elegy on the Maidan’, The Telegraph, 5 March 2002)

Mohun Bagan’s unanticipated victory over East York in the 1911 IFA Shield Final has since spawned in its wake a gamut of writings extolling the salutary effect it had on the psy-che of the colonized Bengali. The Bengali squirming under the oppressive yoke of colo-nial rule and the virtually daily insults and humiliations which came in its wake chaffed at the further ignominy of being dubbed as an effeminate species if these writings are to be believed. Mohun Bagan’s victory vindicated these charges of physical inadequacy. The Bengali proved that he could take on the colonial master in the master’s own manly pursuits and eke out decisive triumphs.