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"This book examines how football, as a mass spectator sport, came to represent a novel and unique cultural identity of Bengali people in terms of nation, community, region/locality and club, contributing to the continuity of everyday socio-cultural life. It offers original arguments in treating football as a cultural phenomenon, setting it squarely in the context of Bengali politics and society, and outlines how football became a viable popular social force with rare emotional spontaneity and peculiar self-expressive fan culture against the background of the anti-imperial nationalist movement, and later, postcolonial political tension and social transformation.
The author strengthens the premise that the social history of South Asian sport can be meaningfully understood only by looking beyond the sports field. The study, using sport as a lens, considers some relevant themes of social history, and brings forth important issues of political and cultural history of 20th-century Bengal. Simultaneously, it highlights the transformed role of football as an instrument of reaction, resistance and subversion, arguing that the football field of Bengal proves to be a mirror image of what society experiences in its cultural and political field, through a series of historical projections of identity, difference and culture.
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ISBN - 9780415678001
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Pages : 320
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