Abstract
Sport and South Asian Diasporas: Playing through Time and Space was originally published as a special issue in the journal South Asian Popular Culture. In their opening introduction, the editors are quick to dismiss the notion that sport and being South Asian do not mix. They argue that the spaces and practices of sport are, and have always been, important features of South Asian identities and cultural pastimes. Moreover, for migrant communities, they can serve as an important means of remembering and celebrating cultures of ‘home’.
Central to the editors’ understanding of sport and being South Asian is the concept of diaspora. It is used to trouble the notion that the identities of migrants are intrinsically tied to their cultural ‘roots’; in this case, links back to the Indian sub-continent. Moving beyond this assumption, they argue that diasporic identities and cultures are constantly in tension, and in-transition. The editors claim that they are not hermetically ‘sealed units’ played out in the same manner across different parts of the world, but are altered within and across the spaces and places of settlement (p. 2). Hence, practices of sport evolve whilst simultaneously disrupting the local, national and global cultures and structures of sport in the process. Consequently, the editors argue that the ways of playing and watching sport have immeasurably changed over the last half-century. Furthermore, the editors argue that this change has led to progressive developments in the field of sport that should not be ignored, but in other ways recognise that practices of sport continue to subjugate and to exclude. Thus, chapters within this book accumulatively offer new understandings of South Asian subjectivities, emerging sporting possibilities as well as how continuing inequalities are grappled with and challenged.
A key strength of this book is that the relationship between sport and being South Asian is never taken-for-granted. Indeed, by focusing upon a number of sporting practices, capturing different and interlinked subject positions, and exploring a number of social, cultural and political contexts, the reader is forced to think, and re-think the multifarious, nuanced and complex relationship between sport and being South Asian. As a result, the editors have been successful in their ambition to complicate, rupture and reconsider dominant understandings of sport and South Asian communities. As a whole, the book specifically aims to do the following: 1) To analyse how sport is watched, played and consumed by different members of the South Asian diasporic community, across a number of varied sites (Afghanistan, India, Norway, England and America). This analysis is further made complex by exploring how racial identities are constituted in and through gender, class, religion and other social dispositions; 2) To question ‘South Asia/n/s’ as a place, geographical location and a descriptor of individual and collective identity, that recognises the heterogeneity of the population as well as national variations in meanings and uses of the term; and 3) To centralise the concept of diaspora to not only understand what it means but ‘how it is lived’ (original emphasis, page 3). In their introductory review, the editors argue that sport, being South Asian and diaspora are not distinct concepts, but are experienced as mutually constitutive. In summary, this book uses the lens of sport to situate, explore and unpack the complex, multiple and dynamic lives of (post-) migrant communities, in a changing and increasingly inter-connected world.
Many of the chapters in this book focus upon how sport is represented in and through popular cultural forms such as films, books, advertising and various media outlets. Pandya, Khan and Barron in their respective chapters, explore how such cultural representations reify South Asian culture as backward, and South Asian men as physically inept. Khan argues that in the film Out of the Ashes, the sport of cricket is depicted as having a civilising effect: Afghani South Asian males can be assimilated to English social values, although nevertheless still as sub-ordinates. She goes on to explain how the popular book The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, draws the audience to share a hyper-real vision of Afghanistan. Indeed, this representation predominantly asserts blame for the historical situation of Afghanis upon rogue elements of their own culture (referring to the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalists). Thus a selective image of Afghanistan as a country that is unmarked by a history of western, military interference is popularised. The relationship between the Occidents (read: Western superiors, moral guardians) and the Orientals (read: non-Western inferiors in need of saving/civilising), is explored as a common theme across the different chapters of the book. Indeed, Pandya’s media analysis of the golfer Vijay Singh reveals that this top golfer is predominantly portrayed as an uncooperative outsider from the generally progressive post-racial landscape of America. This cultural trope presents a selective image of America, and more broadly the West, as tolerant and progressive, which in the analysis of the media text is actually shown to be a fallacy. This western amnesia is also debated in Barron’s chapter about newspaper representations of the boxer Haroon Khan. Barron argues that the representation of Haroon’s career, and decision to represent Pakistan at the Delhi 2010 Games, is centrally based around a narrative to preserve a postcolonial nostalgia for Empire – when the West was perceived to be better than the rest. By comparing Haroon to his older brother Amir Khan, who is predominantly embraced as a successful British boxer by the English press, he is nonetheless portrayed as a ‘foreigner’ disloyal to his country of birth (p. 107). The dominant narrative reproduces the simplistic assumption that his affiliation should be to England. Haroon’s assumed lack of identification to the nation, in the context of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, are used to promulgate the ‘threat’ of South Asian male bodies to England’s imagined cultural stability and colonial past.
Shankar’s analysis of the South Asian diasporic relationship to sport in advertising presents a nuanced understanding of gender and generation. It is also different to the aforementioned cultural representations, as it specifically targets South Asian and not pre-dominantly Western ‘white’ audiences. Through the deconstruction of various advertising campaigns, Shankar argues that sport and physical culture are used to promote Western norms of beauty – ‘sexy’ fit and trim ‘yoginis’ (p. 29) – which are desired by South Asian women in America and in turn, enhance their consumption of the advertised products. De’s chapter about sport and sporting allegiances in the films Chak de! India and Patiala House respectively, further complicates discourses about South Asian culture in relation to questions about gender, religion, national identity, cosmopolitanism and living in an increasingly global world. Although De explores how traditional South Asian masculinities and femininities are disrupted in both films, the patriarchal figure of the father/mentor is nevertheless firmly reinforced. Joseph’s chapter also explores South Asian femininities in relation to class by reflecting on her memories of cycling in the changing urban landscape of Bangalore, India. Referring back to De, and relevant to Joseph’s chapter, the cultural power of South Asian women to mobilise around practices of sport and leisure, enables them to push the boundaries of social respectability, destabilising taken-for-granted assumptions about what women can do and should do. Indeed, in Chak de! India, this social transformation is evident as women’s bodies become metaphorical symbols of Indian national esteem, and social progress.
Using rich empirical data, Walle troubles the diasporic relationship between places of settlement and places of origin. He claims that Pakistani men predominantly experience themselves to be Pakistani, in and through their affinity to cricket, from within their diasporic spaces of ‘home’ in Norway. The ideas they cherish about Pakistan are imagined, disconnected from the place they knew as ‘home’ when living there as young men. Building on understanding lived subjectivities, the chapters by Farooq-Samie and Thangaraj focus upon the experiences of female and male basketball players respectively. Farooq-Samie, in her analysis of UK Muslim players at the Islamic Women’s World Games, provides an important contribution to the ways Muslim women’s bodies are pre-dominantly read in the West. Farooq-Samie argues that these women represent a diverse group that negotiate religious/cultural orthodoxies as well as Western symbols of the body beautiful to perform versions of their bodily self. In his chapter, Thangaraj reveals the complex identity positionings of South Asian Americans in and through the bodily displays of desi ballers. By mapping the pre-dominant black–white racial binary prevalent in the States, he locates the position and politics of South Asian male bodies in terms of this racial binary as well as in regards to ‘Asian’ men (those from the Far East), those of ‘South Asian’ heritage (men from the Indian sub-continent) and those of mixed-race identities (those whose heritages are combined across white, black, Asian and/or South Asian). In both chapters, South Asian men and women use and experience their bodies in a way that counters post/colonial notions of them as culturally different, physically inept and powerless. They both assert that South Asian men and women have the agency to challenge pre-dominant readings of their racialised and gendered bodies. Yet, despite the vagaries of femininities and masculinities being displayed within the spaces of basketball, outside of this cultural context, South Asian men and women are still nevertheless positioned as ‘Other’ (Farooq-Samie) and/or ‘queer’ (Thangaraj).
The dogma that sport was antithetical to South Asian culture and religions has for far too long been prevalent in various academic and media debates. With a few exceptions in academic study, this narrow trope was reproduced as fixed and unchanging. This book is the first to provide an analysis of sport and being South Asian, which achieves the aim of critically exploring the multiplicity of this connection. A commendable feature of this book is that it is not just a collection of papers edited by three men, for men, about men’s sports. The editors have been successful in providing a platform for both men and women scholars to debate and discuss men’s as well as women’s sports. This is worth noting as quite often research about sport and race has been about men, to the neglect of women. The editors also have selected work written by an array of emerging and established scholars, some of who are similar to the South Asian diasporic communities that they are representing in their work. The point raised here is not about matching the ethnicities of researcher and research participants in order to garner meaningful research, but that it is important to make space for black scholars who are in a minority in sports academia – and academia more generally – beginning in small ways to counter the historical legacy of white academic privilege.
In reflection, many of the contributors provide a cultural analysis of films and various media outlets to explore discourses about sport and being South Asian. Arguably, cultural representations have far-reaching mass appeal, shaping as well as challenging dominant ways of seeing and thinking about sport and South Asian men and women locally, nationally and globally. This book opens up dialogue for further and future research about sport, ‘South Asia/n/s’ and diaspora, including cultural analysis and empirically grounded sociological research. This book is a must read for sociologists of sport and more broadly, scholars of South Asian studies, theorists of race, ethnicity and gender, mass media and cultural studies researchers and writers. Future studies about South Asians and sport must cite this book as a pivotal text.