Abhinava Srivastava on Enacting ‘speed’ as Samman (honour): Fast bowling and sporting masculinity in Contemporary India

Sport in History

In this seminar paper, the enabling potential of ‘speed’ is theorized to study how bowling fast on cricket field has increasingly allowed a section of working-class and lower-middle class young Indian males to assert their claim over the metropolitan and cosmopolitan world of the game in contemporary India. The argument developed in this paper is how a bodily ideal and aspiration espoused by a group of working-class fast bowlers can be taken as a form of negotiation and upward mobility as against to an elite, upper-caste bodily ideology celebrated and enthusiastically embraced by batters. It begins by examining how the problem of not having enough fast bowlers shaped the colonial and postcolonial imagination on a discursive level. The chapter then attends the possibilities inaugurated by the raftaar (speed) for a group of interlocutors to theorize their bodily-world and the various alternative meanings they deploy to challenge dominant, upper caste masculinity and claim national and international stage of the game.

Abhinava Srivastava is a fifth-year PhD scholar in the department of sociology at Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida, India. His research project is centred on locating postcolonial subjectivities through an ethnographic encounter with India’s rapidly changing ‘Cricket Culture’. His thesis explores meanings, values, and claims that are produced through the appropriation of the game at various demographic level that range from the international to local. Such an exploration offers a promising account of the distinct cosmopolitan sensibility, idiom and expectation around Cricket Culture that goes into the making of new postcolonial culture and social identity in India.

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