ABSTRACT
When, in 1998, the pop group Cornershop reached the top of the British charts singing about ‘A Brimful of Asha’, only a select minority of those discerning pop music consumers who bought the single fully understood or even referentially appreciated the song’s somewhat esoteric celebration. ‘A Brimful of Asha’ was the band’s founder member, lead singer and song writer Tjinder Singh’s personalized tribute to one of Bollywood’s1 greatest female vocalists Asha Bhosle. Whilst the eponymous recipient of this musical homage may have remained an obscure, indeed anonymous, lyrical figure for most people who experienced the song, the ethno-specific, or rather culture-specific, theme and language of the song did not preclude its massive chart success.2 The British popular music scene can boast an innovative and insurgent contribution being made to the industry by British Asian artists. As well as those already mentioned, others such as Apache Indian, Sonia (lead singer of indie band Echobelly) Talvin Singh (winner of the 1999 Mercury Music Award), Black Star Liner, Bally Sagoo, Asian Dub Foundation are all recognized performers from across the musical generic spectrum, and all of whom variously bask in the ephemeral glow of pop’s transient glory. The wide world of television outwardly broadcasts its own visible/visual multi-
culturalism. From newscasters, reporters and presenters to soap-opera characters, actors and comedians, South Asians command a relatively pervasive presence on television screens across Britain. In the professional sporting arena the English Test cricket team has called upon the respective talents of Mark Ramprakash and Nasser Hussain (awarded the England captaincy in 1999) – both players of ‘mixed race’ parentage with fathers who are of South Asian descent.3 Sport completes a self-ordained holy pop-cultural trinity that also embraces television and popular music, and each member of this triumvirate (to differing degrees) can point to a particular participation and contribution by British South Asians. However, football, arguably sport’s most emergent global marker, has historically and contemporaneously refused to admit its expansive popularity amongst Britain’s varied South Asian communities. Indeed the authoritative gatekeepers of British football have blindly shackled, and at times
culpably ignored, the input and ambition that these communities harbour toward the national game. When Jas Bains (1995) deployed that much vaunted British penchant for
irony in the title of his report Asians Can’t Play Football, his satirical assertion was somewhat lost on many of those for whom the report would have been of greatest benefit, i.e. the controlling football authorities. For many, the title merely served to crystallize an ill-conceived and erroneous sporting axiom, the mechanics of which the body of the report successfully evinced. More recent work (Bains and Johal 1998; 1999) has illustrated that South Asians in Britain can and do play football, and that they enjoy a multifarious association with the sport that cuts across the playing, spectating and commercial aspects of the game. In this chapter I will examine the principal forms by which South Asian football and South Asian footballers have been denied recognition, development and access by and to the predominantly white-controlled world of British football. In the course of such an examination, the implications of this exclusion will also be drawn out through an overview of the establishment of all-South Asian teams, the Asian Games tournaments, and the Khalsa Football Federation. The first-hand accounts of South Asian players will be used to highlight a common experience of racism endured by many South Asian teams and players, but without assigning racist sentiments to all white teams and players. With the subject of South Asians and sport receiving minimal sociological enquiry, such treatment must first be redressed by situating existing studies within their appropriate spheres. With such a task in mind, the tendency to view South Asian association with sport in recognized and officially demarcated arenas is challenged, and the case to look beyond the mainstream of sporting/leisure pursuits is put forward.
