ABSTRACT
The relationship between sports and politics has been apprehensive with the ways in which nation states seek to endorse themselves or carry out their business, using sport as an expedient and highly discernible instrument. Despite kabaddi (often termed Ha Du Du in rural Bengal) being the national sport of Bangladesh, neither has the sport received mass national recognition nor has its popularity elapsed beyond the rural spheres. This chapter investigates the construction of the origin of kabaddi as a national sport in Bangladesh and how it contends with modern times with other more conventional sports. The study presents two interlinked arguments. Kabaddi’s presence is historically political because it defines its game in terms of nationalism, which suggests that a sporting event will be supported by the masses. The institutionalized classification of many traditional sports encompasses mythologization, often with the goal of making a sport seem more customary, nationalistic, or patriotic than it truly is. By contrast, its lack of mass popularity and recognition is also political, which affirms the political strategy or modernization project of other sports (cricket and football) as being the virtue of the colonial legacy or the assertion of a shared post-colonial condition such as “hybridity.” Kabaddi was neglected due to cultural colonialism. The domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class manipulated the culture of the Bengali society. The rural people of Bangladesh were set back with their customary activity and, within colonial popular urban sporting culture, gradually came into a shared sphere of post-colonialism and Bangladeshis.
