Introduction: Centres and Subjects

Cricket is no longer England's national game. It might be argued that the sport now belongs to India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and to the South Asian diaspora in the Persian Gulf, Canada and elsewhere. England's status as a cricketing periphery has been accompanied by its fading reputation as a strong side and by its declining influence in regulatory bodies such as the International Cricket Council (ICC). Some observers have attributed this shift at the centre of the sport to the innate ‘Indian-ness’ of cricket (Nandy 1989). Whatever the merits of this supposition, international cricket today reflects a series of fundamental changes in the ability of old elites to claim and defend ‘their’ culture. As Appadurai (1996: 23–48) has noted, cricket in the decolonizing world provides marginal populations with the means of overcoming their marginality in global popular culture. What I intend to do in this essay is examine the tensions that are generated in the process of this reconfiguration of centre and margin and make a broad observation. The primary rivalry in cricket today is not between India and Pakistan or England and Australia. It is a moral, economic and political clash between the colony and the metropole both of which have outgrown those labels. The sport functions both as a mirror of the disjunctures between ‘how things stand’ and ‘how things should be’ and as an instrument that continuously widens the gap.

Introduction

As this volume demonstrates, the cultures of recreation, sport and the body in South Asia have increasingly attracted the attention of academic researchers interested in exploring aspects of South Asian society. Understandably, the more obviously ‘important’ pastimes were the focus of early work. For instance, the histories of cricket (Cashman 1980; Bose 1990; Guha 2002) and football (Dimeo and Mills 2001; Dimeo 2002) have been well documented as have some of the more salient indigenous body cultures (Alter 1992; Zarrilli 1998). Other studies have focused on specific individuals or times and places, thus drawing out the micro-level motivations and strategies of key participants. Such studies were bold and innovative, bridging the gap between sports studies and South Asian studies, and leading to a wider awareness of sport among social historians.

Golf has been in South Asia for over a century, playing an important role in colonial relations but failing to keep up with global developments in the period after Independence. In this, the sport's fate mirrored that of football. Unlike football, however, golf has been almost entirely ignored by historians, perhaps because there are no moments of historical gravity to compel nationalist re-visioning or no radical oppression of indigenous traditions to fire up post-colonial critics. Yet golf is full of potential to the historian because of its value-laden institutional culture and the demands that it makes upon the individual's behaviour patterns and somatic styles.

The Gymnasium, Jori-Clubs, Sexuality and Culture

In The Mythology of Sex Sarah Dening argues that the Hebrew prohibition against eating the ‘sinew of the hip which is upon the hollow of the thigh’ should be understood symbolically as a prohibition against the practice common among neighboring tribes whereby a new king would eat the penis of his predecessor in order to imbibe his power and authority. Dening and others point out that the ‘thigh’ was a biblical euphemism for the penis and that the penis was clearly associated with the power to rule and proclaim the truth. In the Genesis story God wrestles with Jacob and ‘touches the hollow of his thigh’.With this almighty ‘goose’ God metaphorically ‘eats Jacobs penis’ thus setting in place the rationale for the dietary prohibition, making himself the King of Kings, the one true God. In this myth sex, sacredness, power and sportive competition are linked together both figuratively and literally. The homoerotics of touching if not actually eating penises is also evident. Homoerotics are most clearly reflected in the classical Greek gymnasium, an institution that can arguably be held accountable for putting ‘civilization’ in modern Western history. Gymnasiums in Athens were places where men went to become men and develop themselves into citizens of the city state. For Plato and Aristotle they were institutions of embodied knowledge, to an extent that tends to get forgotten in the disembodied philosophical abstractions of the modern intellectual academy, where departments of philosophy and physical education are decidedly separate and unequal.

Introduction

G. Whitney Azoy's Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan (1982) is an exemplary ethnography of Asian sport. Focusing on the social and political mobilization of this dramatic equestrian game, Azoy moved well beyond a conventional hermeneutic interpretation of sport as ritual display, and highlighted the broader social and performative functions of buzkashi tournaments. These were force-fields of national and regional ethnicity: they enacted a distinctive ethnic identity among minority Uzbeks of northern Afghanistan, conveying their own regional aspirations of rugged autonomy from the alien hegemony of Pashtun officials in Kabul, who were attempting to appropriate this prestigious tribal game as a national Afghan sport. The patronage of Uzbek khans sponsoring the game was thereby reduced to brokerage with the regional Afghan Governor and his bureaucratic entourage of Pashtun athletic officials. By the 1970s these had already imposed their own disciplinary apparatus of civilizing rules and penalties on the game, together with national (Pashtunist) civilizing discourses of government propaganda. Azoy's historical ethnography of successive Afghan appropriations of the tribal Uzbek game from the 1950s thus exemplified societal changes of Weberian magnitude: a political transition from ‘traditional, patrimonial’ to ‘national-bureaucratic’ modes of authority and ideology which occurred within a single generation in mid-twentieth century Afghanistan and the repercussions of which, in terms of regional, ethnic and sectarian strife, remain unresolved.

This essay outlines a comparable historical ethnography of the similar equestrian sport of indigenous polo in neighbouring regions of northern Pakistan.

Introduction: Of Cities and Spectacles

David Harvey (1985a; 1985b) describes a concentration of artifacts of consumption such as entertainment complexes, convention centers, gentrified neighborhoods or amusement parks as one type of development strategy available to cities under the conditions of late capitalism. Other authors, describing the city as a ‘theme park’ in the late twentieth century, have critiqued the end of public space and the increasing surveillance of citizens in American cities such as Los Angeles, New York, or Minneapolis (Sorkin 1992). More recently, by analyzing gentrification programs, beauty contests and sports events in Atlanta (Ruthesier 1996), Istanbul (Keyder 1999) and Beijing (Brownell 2001) scholars have theorized the relationship between cities and spectacles under conditions of globalization and liberalization. By contrast Orsi (1999) and Srinivas (2001) describe the continuing relevance of religious maps, architectural complexes and sacred processions for presenting alternative topographies and emotional geographies of the city in relation to suburbanization, capital accumulation and diasporic or regional labor movements. This article will attempt to contribute to this debate about cities and spectacles by tracing the embeddedness of specific body cultures, wrestling and martial arts disciplines of considerable antiquity and ‘sportized’ athletics, within the larger space of ‘urban performative genres’. The article suggests that we need to consider an entire range of performances, ranging from festivals and sacred processions to political rallies, sports events and beauty contests, in order to understand the relationship between urban planning, environmental history, and politico-symbolic contests over public space.

Introduction

The Anglo-Indian community is a tiny remnant of a class that represents some of the uncomfortable paradoxes of colonial legacies (Carton 2000). Once granted privileges as a social group because of the blood relations with the colonial masters at the same time they were rejected and kept at a distance both by the colonizers and the colonized as somehow tainted by the ‘Other’. Now that those colonial masters have departed they nevertheless remain in India as an uneasy reminder of the presence of the former. In the postcolonial nation they find themselves stranded with community institutions and practices that had been developed to emphasize separateness from all things Indian and at one with all things British. Their identity as ‘almost-British’ sits at odds with the urge, in postcolonial India, to privilege all things Indian.1 This essay considers the place of sport in the development of an Anglo- Indian identity and the search for a role in postcolonial India by members of the community. In 1947 there were around 500,000 Anglo-Indians in South Asia and current assessments suggest an ongoing presence of 250,000 to 300,000 in a total Indian population of 1 billion. Another 300,000 Anglo- Indians have resettled in the West since India obtained Independence. In spite of the community's microscopic size, it has produced numerous Olympians as well as coaches, organizers and technical delegates at every level.

After ten years of intense conflict with the federal centre, Chechnya remains one of the most intractable problems for Russia. Various ideas have been advanced for its solution, some of which draw on comparisons between the rebellious republic and Tatarstan, another republic of the Russian Federation that once proclaimed its desire for independence but has now considerably tempered its demands. Such comparisons are usually based on a number of incidents during 1991–2, when tensions between Tatarstan and the federal centre ran high. During the same period, the media reported that ethnic relations within Tatarstan had also deteriorated considerably. On this basis a number of authors have argued that there are grounds for drawing direct parallels between Tatarstan and events in Chechnya.

Context and Comparisons

Edward W. Walker describes Tatarstan as ‘the ethnic republic within Russia that, along with Chechnya, seemed the most likely to secede in late 1991’. This is the mildest perspective on the situation in the republic; others characterized it in much stronger terms. For instance, Radio Liberty reported in 1997 that on the eve of the 21 March 1992 referendum on Tatarstan's status ‘it seemed that Tatarstan was on the verge of bloodshed. The situation was no less heated than in Chechnya two years later’. While suggesting that ‘in the beginning, the nationalist stances of Chechnya and Tatarstan were similar’, Ravil Bukharaev poses the following question: ‘Why then has Tatarstan avoided war with Moscow, while being so close to it at the second stage of obtaining state sovereignty?’

In May 2004, at a ceremony in Grozny commemorating victory over Nazi Germany, an explosion ripped through the main stands, killing Akhmad Kadyrov, the Moscow loyalist Chechen President. One could argue that this meticulously planned assassination was part of a conflict very different in its roots, reasons, rationale, and even results from the war whose end was being observed that day. World War Two was a ‘modern’ war pitting state against state with territory and power as the key factors. Conversely, the war in Chechnya that began in 1994 – half a century after Germany's defeat – has been identified as a postmodern or ‘new’ war, in an era of globalization in which traditional notions of power, space and conflict seem not to apply. But are wars changing so radically? In this chapter we deal with two central concepts: ‘globalization’ and ‘new wars’. The first has become a cliché and suffers from multiple and unworkable (indeed, sometimes contradictory) definitions. The second is more recent. Its adherents claim that ‘new wars’ differ from earlier low-intensity conflicts and guerrilla warfare. We deal with these concepts together because those that have developed ideas on new wars explain them with reference to processes of globalization.

A variety of theories assert that we have entered a new era, one in which modernist notions of violent conflict between political communities are moribund.

The Chechen crisis is a complex phenomenon, and there are many aspects of it that cannot be understood to this day. The conflict does not have a simple explanation, and each side has its own truth. However, a scholarly analysis of events makes it possible to draw a number of general conclusions.

Major Factors of the Crisis

The August 1991 events in Moscow, when a conservative group led by the State Committee for the State of Emergency (SCSE) tried to seize power and force Mikhail Gorbachev to moderate his programme of reforms, was followed soon after by the dissolution of the USSR. This gave the multinational people of the Chechen-Ingush Republic a unique chance to replace the communist bureaucracy with a democratic system of power by peaceful constitutional means, and to define the status of the republic by means of a national referendum. It also made possible an acceptable form of relations with the Russian Federation, through which Chechnya might gradually acquire real economic and political independence in the framework of a renewed federal union of equal nations and republics of the new democratic Russia.

However, this way of resolving the aggravated problem of power and sovereignty proposed by the democratic community of Chechnya did not suit certain political structures in Moscow or in the republic itself. As a result, the Chechen-Ingush Republic and its political elites found themselves at the epicentre of the Russian leadership's struggle with the union centre (representing the Soviet Union) over the division of power and property.

Since it emerged from the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has fought two wars in Chechnya, the first, from December 1994 to August 1996, and the second, from October 1999 to the present. During both these wars, Russia has committed political errors and military crimes that have merited the criticism that they have received from Russians and Westerners alike. Yet while focusing upon the faulty execution of these wars, many critics have failed fully to consider the deeper causes behind them. Some observers have based their analyses upon assumptions and sentiments that have much to do with the myths of another historical era and little to do with the realities that have haunted the North Caucasus throughout the last decade. Indeed, many have failed to consider the region at all, preferring to see the conflicts along a North/South axis running from Moscow to Grozny while neglecting the tensions between Chechnya and its Caucasian neighbours to the East and West. The result of this neglect has often been a mix of misconceptions and partial truths that have only made it easier for Russian officials to dismiss legitimate criticism of their errors and excesses. Because it inadvertently strengthens the hands of hardliners on all sides, an imbalanced critique can only serve to perpetuate instability in Chechnya.

Why has Chechnya spent the past 15 years lurching from one political failure to the next? The Chechen wars are mired within a multi-layered mythology that has flourished, in no small part, because this region is so little visited and so much misunderstood.

Following a sequence of terrorism-related incidents, most notably the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the Putin administration in Russia portrayed its entire conflict with Chechnya (1994–6 and from 1999 onwards) successfully to the outside world as part of the global war against terrorism. Internationally, the need to maintain the US-led coalition against Islamic fundamentalism persuaded foreign leaders to downplay other crucial elements in this complex and multi-layered confrontation. In Russia, the demonization of all shades of Chechen resistance, intensified since the apartment bombs of Autumn 1999 and reinforced by the sieges of Dubrovka and Beslan, helped maintain support for Putin's hard line and uncompromising policy in Chechnya.

A War Like No Other

A curious feature of the Russo-Chechen conflict is the lengths that successive Russian administrations have gone to avoid depicting the confrontation as a ‘war’, while throughout Russia, Chechnya and the rest of the world it is routinely referred to as the ‘Russo-Chechen war’ or the ‘war in Chechnya’.

Whereas President Yeltsin's campaign (1994–6) for the ‘restoration of constitutional order’ was generally perceived, both in Russia and abroad, to be little more than a fig leaf for a war aimed at preventing Chechnya's secession, President Putin's equally euphemistic ‘counter-terrorism operation’ (1999 to date), has not been subjected to the same disparagement. Indeed, Putin has managed, albeit not entirely successfully, to have the entire Russo-Chechen conflict retrospectively viewed as part of the global war against terrorism.

It was April 2000. Together with several colleagues I stood in the middle of Grozny. This was the second of nine visits I was to make to the Chechen Republic in the years 2000–3; the first had been in January, when the fighting made access to the capital impossible. Our group fell totally silent. In all directions the devastation of the city was terrible and total. Of those buildings still standing most would have to be demolished before effective reconstruction could begin. The streets through the rubble were deserted except for the Russian military and a handful of courageous citizens, mainly women, struggling to survive in the ruins of their homes. And this was at the beginning of the new millennium in a member state of the Council of Europe with all its commitment to peace, human rights and accountable democratic government. It would have been easy to despair.

By contrast, four years later, in July 2004, I was at Covent Garden in London. The stage of the Linbury Studio Theatre had been taken by storm by a group of incredible youth dancers from Grozny, who had travelled across Europe by bus. The audience was gripped. Their skill, style, vigour, vitality and enthusiasm were exhilarating. Not for the first or last time, I reflected on the extraordinary resilience and spirit of the oppressed. Back at home their conditions were still grim. The humanitarian situation remained bad and the economy was in tatters.