Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors to this Volume
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Kalarippayattu is Eighty Percent Mental and Only the Remainder is Physical’: Power, Agency and Self in a South Asian Martial Art
- 2 Empowering Yourself: Sport, Sexuality and Autoeroticism in North Indian Jori Swinging
- 3 Indigenous Polo in Northern Pakistan: Game and Power on the Periphery
- 4 ‘The Moral that can be Safely Drawn from the Hindus' Magnificent Victory’: Cricket, Caste and the Palwankar Brothers
- 5 The Peasants are Revolting: Race, Culture and Ownership in Cricket
- 6 The Social History of the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, 1829–2003
- 7 Warrior Goddess Versus Bipedal Cow: Sport, Space, Performance and Planning in an Indian City
- 8 ‘Nupilal’: Women's War, Football and the History of Modern Manipur
- 9 ‘Playing for the Tibetan People’: Football and History in the High Himalayas
- 10 Community, Identity and Sport: Anglo-Indians in Colonial and Postcolonial India
- Notes
- Bibliography
10 - Community, Identity and Sport: Anglo-Indians in Colonial and Postcolonial India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors to this Volume
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Kalarippayattu is Eighty Percent Mental and Only the Remainder is Physical’: Power, Agency and Self in a South Asian Martial Art
- 2 Empowering Yourself: Sport, Sexuality and Autoeroticism in North Indian Jori Swinging
- 3 Indigenous Polo in Northern Pakistan: Game and Power on the Periphery
- 4 ‘The Moral that can be Safely Drawn from the Hindus' Magnificent Victory’: Cricket, Caste and the Palwankar Brothers
- 5 The Peasants are Revolting: Race, Culture and Ownership in Cricket
- 6 The Social History of the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, 1829–2003
- 7 Warrior Goddess Versus Bipedal Cow: Sport, Space, Performance and Planning in an Indian City
- 8 ‘Nupilal’: Women's War, Football and the History of Modern Manipur
- 9 ‘Playing for the Tibetan People’: Football and History in the High Himalayas
- 10 Community, Identity and Sport: Anglo-Indians in Colonial and Postcolonial India
- Notes
- Bibliography
Summary
Introduction
The Anglo-Indian community is a tiny remnant of a class that represents some of the uncomfortable paradoxes of colonial legacies (Carton 2000). Once granted privileges as a social group because of the blood relations with the colonial masters at the same time they were rejected and kept at a distance both by the colonizers and the colonized as somehow tainted by the ‘Other’. Now that those colonial masters have departed they nevertheless remain in India as an uneasy reminder of the presence of the former. In the postcolonial nation they find themselves stranded with community institutions and practices that had been developed to emphasize separateness from all things Indian and at one with all things British. Their identity as ‘almost-British’ sits at odds with the urge, in postcolonial India, to privilege all things Indian.1 This essay considers the place of sport in the development of an Anglo- Indian identity and the search for a role in postcolonial India by members of the community. In 1947 there were around 500,000 Anglo-Indians in South Asia and current assessments suggest an ongoing presence of 250,000 to 300,000 in a total Indian population of 1 billion. Another 300,000 Anglo- Indians have resettled in the West since India obtained Independence. In spite of the community's microscopic size, it has produced numerous Olympians as well as coaches, organizers and technical delegates at every level.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Subaltern SportsPolitics and Sport in South Asia, pp. 205 - 216Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2005