ABSTRACT
This chapter is a modified and extended version of the paper I presented at an international conference on ‘Sport, Culture and Society in Modern India’ held in Calcutta University in 2003. I am delighted to offer it as a part of the effort to celebrate the achievements of Professor. J.A. Mangan, who has shaped the course of the development of sports studies in South Asia. His keynote address at the department of history, University of Calcutta, in September 2003 inspired many social science students, with the result that sports studies is today formally a part of the postgraduate teaching curriculum in India.
And across the globe, sport is now too important to be left in the hands of sportsmen and women. More and more, it is the property of the ‘People’ in their various manifestations as politicians, entrepreneurs, educationists, commercialists, publicists, and, not least, academics. [ 1 ]
As such the history of sport gives a unique insight into the way a society changes and impacts on other societies it comes into contact with and, conversely, the way those societies react back upon it. [ 2 ]
Sport was one of the most important new social practices of the Europe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as such played a central role in the creation of politically and socially cohesive ‘invented traditions’. [ 3 ]
