Nation at Play

Ronojoy Sen is senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He has worked for over a decade with leading Indian newspapers, most recently as an editor for The Times of India. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago and read history at Presidency College, Calcutta. He is also the author of Articles of Faith: Religion, Secularism, and the Indian Supreme Court.

Ronojoy Sen has produced a fascinating, rich, and thoroughly engaging history of sport in India. He manages to paint at once with powerful, evocative, and very convincing broad strokes and with the finely gauged brush of an ethno-historian concerned as much with the intricacies and nuances of embodied experience as with quirky personalities and the odd politics of everyday life. All of this adds up to a book that fully captures the imagination to generate deep and often unexpected insight on the serious business of play in modern India. -- Joseph S. Alter, Yale-NUS College, author of The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in North India His ambitious book examines Indian sports in a largely chronological manner and does not duck the more awkward questions, such as the perceived athletic limitations of Indians. The narrative has an attractive sweep to it, starting with the place of sports and martial competition in Hindu epics such as the "Mahabharata" and the "Ramayana." Wall Street Journal Rich in detail and nuanced in terms of analysis... [Ronojoy Sen] is to be praised for adding to the understanding of sport in India by looking at how it intersects with culture and politics, and for using sport to provide insights about Indian history and society. Choice Sen is to be applauded for writing such an ambitious book, enriching our understanding of the history of sport in India. Journal of Sport History

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Down the Ages: Sport in Ancient and Medieval India 2. Empire of Sport: The Early British Impact on Recreation 3. White Man's Burden: Teachers, Missionaries, and Administrators 4. Players and Patrons: Indian Princes and Sports 5. The Empire Strikes Back: The 1911 IFA Shield and Football in Calcutta 6. Politics on the Maidan: Sport, Communalism, and Nationalism 7. The Early Olympics: India's Hockey Triumphs 8. Lords of the Ring: Tales of Wrestlers and Boxers 9. Freedom Games: The First Two Decades of Independence 10. Domestic Sports: State, Club, Office, and Regiment (1947-1970) 11. 1971 and After: The Religion Called Cricket 12. Life Beyond Cricket Notes Index