ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century was pre-eminently the European century in world history, the period in which Europe was able to impose its will and its ideas on the whole of the
inhabited world. With the European conquerors of Africa and Asia went the religion of Europe – Christianity. [2]
Following on from previous work on the subject by the author, this essay will argue that the introduction of football into northern India was closely integrated with the
colonial projects of the British and with the evangelical objectives of English Christian groups in the later part of the nineteenth century. The game was considered by the
colonizers to carry with it a series of moral lessons, regarding hard work and perseverance, about team loyalty and obedience to authority and, indeed, involving
concepts of correct physical development and ‘manliness’. As such, it was used as a key weapon in the battle to win over local populations and to begin transforming them from their ‘uncivilized’ and ‘heathen’ state to one where they might be
considered ‘civilized’ and ‘Christian’. The place of missionaries in the European colonialism of the nineteenth century
was the consequence of European religious revivalism that was born in the second half of the eighteenth century and came to maturity in the late nineteenth. In Britain
it resulted in the creation of numerous missionary societies committed to the conversion of those that such groups considered heathen. A number of these societies
were Anglican and offered an image of evangelization as one with
A number of these missionary societies made a virtue of recruiting public schoolboys.
This fact gave rise to a particular kind of missionary endeavour which reflected the style and purpose of English education of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The
endeavours of these societies were therefore imbued with the values of ‘missionary muscularity’. [4] Two excellent examples of evangelists who came from within these traditions are Theodore Leighton Pennell and Cecil Earle Tyndale-Biscoe who were
active in the North-West Frontier Provinces and in Kashmir respectively.
