Goalless

Author:

By Boria Mojumdar

Format:

Hardback

Availability:

Price:

£23.99

Tagged with:

Football, History, Politics, India

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Further Details

• Published: 28th Feb 2006
• ISBN: 0670058742
• Pages: 312

From the Publisher:

Was soccer the unique Indian answer to the imperial charge of effeminacy held against the educated Indian male in the late nineteenth century? Was Mohun Bagan's victory in 1911, a triumph of Indian nationalism? Is there a significant relationship between football, politics and economics in colonial and post-colonial India? Cricket is undoubtedly what moves the majority of the subcontinent, but isn't there a niche that tracks and lives football in ways that impact social attitudes and divisions even today? These are some of the questions that the authors, avid football watchers and sports historians, set out to explore five years ago, and the result of their enquiries is this fascinating account of Indian football. Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, right down to obscure episodes and previously unavailable data on games long forgotten, Goalless constitutes the first serious attempt to document India's football history. Its sweep is impressive: from the moment in 1877 when a young Bengali boy kicked a football back to a group of British soldiers at the Maidan in Calcutta, through the ups and downs of football administration and match management in the Santosh Trophy, to an analysis of the game as it is played in present-day Jammu and Kashmir in an atmosphere that screams violence.