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
6 - The Social History of the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, 1829–2003
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
As this volume demonstrates, the cultures of recreation, sport and the body in South Asia have increasingly attracted the attention of academic researchers interested in exploring aspects of South Asian society. Understandably, the more obviously ‘important’ pastimes were the focus of early work. For instance, the histories of cricket (Cashman 1980; Bose 1990; Guha 2002) and football (Dimeo and Mills 2001; Dimeo 2002) have been well documented as have some of the more salient indigenous body cultures (Alter 1992; Zarrilli 1998). Other studies have focused on specific individuals or times and places, thus drawing out the micro-level motivations and strategies of key participants. Such studies were bold and innovative, bridging the gap between sports studies and South Asian studies, and leading to a wider awareness of sport among social historians.
Golf has been in South Asia for over a century, playing an important role in colonial relations but failing to keep up with global developments in the period after Independence. In this, the sport's fate mirrored that of football. Unlike football, however, golf has been almost entirely ignored by historians, perhaps because there are no moments of historical gravity to compel nationalist re-visioning or no radical oppression of indigenous traditions to fire up post-colonial critics. Yet golf is full of potential to the historian because of its value-laden institutional culture and the demands that it makes upon the individual's behaviour patterns and somatic styles.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Subaltern SportsPolitics and Sport in South Asia, pp. 123 - 138Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2005