ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical historical analysis of how sport in Pakistan and Afghanistan has been shaped by overlapping precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial forces. It first situates Mughal-era physical culture alongside earlier indigenous leisure practices such as Basant, highlighting how sport functioned simultaneously as an expression of imperial masculinity and as a vehicle for community cohesion. The chapter then examines British Anglicization policies and the introduction of cricket, field hockey, and squash as instruments of social control, communal division, and elite formation, tracing how colonial provincial structures and religiously segmented competitions underpin contemporary Indo-Pak rivalries and the Kashmir dispute. Turning to the postcolonial period, the analysis examines Pakistan’s centralized sport governance, the effects of the 18th Amendment, and the symbolic politics of the Kashmir Premier League (KPL). Finally, the chapter interrogates US-led soft power projects in Afghanistan, including sport for development programs, basketball, baseball, and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), compared with the regionally rooted rise of Afghan cricket, showing how sport remains entangled with security, nationalism, and contested sovereignty.
