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Football,
a great passion in today’s Calcutta was important in the sporting life of our
city even in the 1940s.
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There was a neighbourhood football club, Badurbagan Sporting Club, which occasionally used to visit the YMCA to play friendly matches with us. Usually it was football, but sometimes cricket and basketball too. They always were a much better team and defeated us virtually every time, except in basketball. We had a natural advantage in basketball, because they did not play it much. But they were also an exceedingly friendly lot and we used to love their company. The members were mostly in their teens and they all belonged to the Hindu neighbourhood diagonally opposite our home and sandwiched between two non-Bengali-speaking Muslim communities. The riots turned the club into a new kind of formation. They became the protectors of their community and some of them openly and proudly turned into killers. The community, too, began to look at them as self-sacrificing heroes.
Such new heroes mushroomed all over Calcutta, the reprisals they visited on the Muslims were savage.
(source pages 3-4 of Ashis Nandy: “Death of an Empire” in Persimmon. Asian Literature, Arts and Culture (Volume III, Number 1, New York, Spring 200r also www.sarai.net/journal/02PDF/03morphologies/ 04death_empire.pdf pp 14-20 Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life.)
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Ashis Nandy)
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I was
determined to make the best of it here in Calcutta, which I was beginning to
call my second home, visiting the cinema, the various service clubs, watching
cricket matches at the Eden Gardens cricket ground, watching the Bengalis
playing excellent football in their bare feet on the "Maidan",
bargaining with locals in the Bazaars, etc., etc.
(source: A4254103 AN RAF WIRELESS OPERATOR ON THE BURMA FRONT (Part 3 of 3) at BBC WW2 People's War' on http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/ Oct 2006)
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with the original submitter/author)
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Last
updated: 11-March-2009
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