ABSTRACT
This chapter considers existing studies of sport in South Asia and the insights that they provide into the relationship between sporting activities and the body in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. After this introductory historiogrpahy, it will then use the body as an analytical tool in approaching the early history of football in South Asia. The chapter demonstrates that football there acted for the colonizers both as an idiom and as a technology for imagining and transforming the Indian body. However, and perhaps more importantly, it will show that the game also became implicated in Indian attempts to resist these colonial corporal politics. For the society around the wrestler however, it was the achievement of moral status through physical training of the body that gave the wrestler a position as ‘an icon of the individual self’.
