An Essay in Cultural Politics
-Ananya Dutta Gupta
Abstract:
This essay seeks to understand Bengalis’ long-standing love for South American football as a social history of identity-formation. Taking cue from R├йne Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, I argue that Bengalis’ identification with the South American footballing nations is a projection of its own aspirations and anxieties. Moored nostalgically in pre-and post-Independence Bengal’s cultural and political pre-eminence, Bengalis’ self-abnegating, vicarious participation in Brazil and Argentina’s global success in inter-national, as opposed to inter-club, football comes closest to harnessing what William James called in 1910 essay “the moral equivalent of war”. The sanitised, contained, time-bound, televised proxy-war helps mobilise and galvanise latent communitarian solidarity by using the bodily thrill of a team sport that has traditionally been seen as the common man’s game.
Methodologically, this essay is ethnographic and offers first-hand empirical and anecdotal illustrations in support of its observations. The authorial stance is that of a neutral but critically aware participant-observer.
Keywords: football, sports and society, Kolkata and Bengal, World Cup, South America, spectacle, war, mimetic desire, imagined community, catharsis, middle class, self-fashioning, new India, Messi visit.
Main Article
The World Cup final in football last Sunday presented a classic political conundrum for those whose sporting sympathies are somewhat inflected by the history of colonialism and global dominance. Does your heart go out to the once enslaved people of African descent? Then you must have chosen the French team over the relatively whiter-skinned Argentinians? Do you go by the geography of colonisation? Then your hearts must have leapt with Messi’s Argentina?
Bengalis, with their recent history of protracted Leftist rule seamlessly conjoined to the far longer memory of colonial plight, continue to project onto “Latin American” football their own unfulfilled sporting and political aspirations of global leadership. The fireworks and revelry on the night of the 18th of December 2022 thus marked a fairy-tale ending to Bengalis’ passionate, unapologetic, work-ethic-destroying month-long immersion in the “greatest spectacle on earth”.
Sports seems to have retained more than a semblance of its old cultural anthropological associations with war and hunting. In the twentieth century, it has emerged in national/regional/gendered imaginaries as the arena for the underdog to overturn political injustice. Escape to Victory (1981) Lagaan (2001), the Iranian film Offside (2006) and Chak De! India (2007) are notable examples of how mainstream cinema successfully disseminates and instrumentalises this revisionist flip around sports among an intra- or inter-national spectatorship. Football, with its emphasis on teamwork and its long-standing openness to talent from the underprivileged strata, has emerged in post-colonial societies as a key site of Girardian mimetic desire.
Bengalis, long doomed to a reputation for cerebrality, remain caught between the reflected glory of two Nobel Laureates among countless other luminaries of the Bengal Renaissance and their equally strong but latent ambition to be seen by the rest of India and the West as having a fair share of the brawn. Bengalis’ preoccupation with football ought to be juxtaposed, in this connection, with other habits and pastimes. Their compulsive travelling habit and their self-congratulatory fanfare around neighbourhood cricket and badminton are manifestations of the same catholically sampled self-fashioning as a sport-loving people. It is such desire again that makes us reiterate late nineteenth century Bengali nationalists’ invocation of a reserve of quasi-martial credentials in the Bengali gene. If the reader will excuse this pointedly random clustering, Swami Vivekananda’s rousing call for agile youthfulness, Satish Chandra Basu’s Anushilan Samiti (1902), Priyanath Basu’s constitution of the Great Bengal circus (1920), Gurusaday Dutt’s Bratachari movement (1932), the legends around Vidyasagar crossing the Damodar River to heed his mother’s call, or of Baghajatin fighting barehanded with a tiger, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s fictional explorer Sankar in Chander Pahar (1937) and Jogendranath Gupta’s Banglar Dakat (1951), each and all may be seen as progeny of this sportive, athletic, even heroic Bengali imaginary. Indeed, the continued popularity of Ray’s Feluda too is founded upon this idealised coalescence of brain-power (magaj─Бstra), trained physique and strictly non-violent trigger-skills (Colt .32 gun).
It is in turn the post-Independence Bengali, primarily middle-class and educated, steeped in the vestigial ethos of service and sacrifice, that has possibly handed down this intense love affair with “Latin American” football, projecting onto the two national teams with the best World Cup track record and individual genius, Brazil and Argentina, an inherited political brotherhood in underdog triumphalism. Brazil and Argentina’s successes on the global football field have afforded a strangely complex exercise in vicarious wish fulfilment. Middle-class Bengalis re-lived their predecessors’ early leadership of the revolutionary struggle for freedom through the likes of Castro and Che Guevara, South American exemplars of underdog victory against colonial exploitation. No wonder my academic nerd of a father extended to the bearded Brazilian physician turned footballer Socrates a slice of the same adulation.
War heroes and sporting heroes mingle in the theatre of desire of a people fighting their reputation and the risk of losing the centrality they had ironically enjoyed in nineteenth and early twentieth century India. As in Girard's concept of mimetic desire and in its ancient Platonic prefiguration as lack, these enormously gifted South American footballers embody the prowess we Bengalis do not have. Desire is always an acknowledgement of a lack in the subjective consciousness. Girard conceptualises desire of another as essentially the desire to emulate, imitate and possess something or everything that another has but one does not. Let us say, after Girard, that the former is the subject emulating the mediator, i.e. the other person’s desire for something. If this mediator is within access, then they end up appearing as a rival and obstacle to the subject’s attainment or realisation of the desired object. If, however, the mediator is too remote to pose a threat, the mediation remains manageably external and there is no perceived obstacle (Girard 35, 38). This is exactly how Bengalis end up lionizing Brazilian and Argentinian teams without feeling an iota of envy and hatred. In the Bengali imaginary, World Cup success is an unreachable goal; so the fulfilment must be mediated and vicarious. Contrast the existing politics of rivalry among the limited number of cricketing nations. The league includes the erstwhile colonial master, England, and erstwhile distant colonies like South Africa and Australia. The frisson, however, is at its tautest and sharpest among subcontinental neighbours. It is the latter who find themselves trapped and triangulated in reflected, rival desires of regional dominance.
If my peers and I are anything to go by, Bengalis celebrating the World Cup on a Sunday of 2022 are not necessarily all into regular active sports. I cannot vouch that young boys I have seen at play braving rain and heat in remote villages of Birbhum have participated in the football mania quite to the extent that Kolkata and its diaspora’s non-playing spectators have. It is also then the post-globalisation Bengali upper middle class’s fantasy of returning to their commoner beginnings via football’s profile as the common man’s game. Bengalis attached to the ideal of genteel poverty wax eloquent over a Pele or a Maradona, hailing from underprivileged families, practising barefoot with a makeshift ball of socks.
This is not to say Bengalis are naively unaware that international football is no common man’s game, and that global oligarchies have a massive stake in the prestigious European football clubs and their tournaments. Yet how many Bengalis seriously follow these Premier Leagues? A fraction compared to the manic frenzy around World Cup, and this disproportion has everything to do with the World Cup’s continued reception as a global feast of patriotism. I remember long discussions around the relative musicality of this or that national anthem before each televised match in the Kolkata of the 80s and 90s.
The World Cup spectacle is also the closest that today’s Bengalis come to reliving structures of social living and socialization that they have left behind. My own nostalgia around the Fifa World Cup is inevitably wound up with childhood scenes of apartment complex neighbours getting together to watch late-night matches on somebody’s prized possession, the new colour TV set. Onida TV’s popular advertising tag line, “neighbour’s envy, owners’ pride” never got in the way of this celebration of neighbourliness. Even today the ubiquity of giant flags and banners representing Brazil and Argentina in practically every Kolkata neighbourhood suggests that this is the only occasion when the national flag and political graffiti stand overshadowed.
World Cup football is the carnival of Bengali nostalgia. It is sanctioned by a society forced to re-negotiate its place in a new India that defines itself in opposition to everything that the Bengali Left-minded educated intelligentsia professes to hold dear: cultural eclecticism and a bourgeois class consciousness at once elitist and egalitarian, secular and faith-conscious. While the Prime Minister envisions India as host of some future edition of the World Cup, while Deepika Padukone’s unveiling of the trophy confirms Bollywood’s high recall value in the Arab world, Bengalis in Kolkata and Bengal reinforce cultural continuities by immersing themselves in the moment. For Bengalis, the event is an opportunity for immediate, spontaneous un-organized exorcism of their anxieties about the place of their province in this assertive, neo-capitalist India. It is this Bengali, navigating everyday tangles posed by the pull of tradition on the one hand and the combined tugs of technology, market and media on the other, that finds a certain anchor and comfort in nostalgia. Nostalgia is best digested as a collective, for it helps leverage the past to forge future alignments within and without the collective. This is exactly the kind of service history and culture tend to harnessed for.
The football World Cup is the equivalent of Aristotle's theatrical catharsis, a periodic re-enactment of shared mythology designed to evoke in the changing present irrepressible, primal feelings of identification, harnessing this orchestrated release to forge new solidarities and allegiances. In this dynamic, then, all spectacles and plays are more or less equally complicit: theatre, cinema, and sports. The operative words here are spectacle, i.e. visual splurge, and play, implying the thrill of uncertainty. Team sporting events metonymically representing nations of the world offer a particularly effective mechanism for generating mass hysteria in order that it may be catharsised and alchemised into a spirit of social cohesion. The ocean of revellers on the streets of Buenos Aires leaves us in no doubt what this victory means to Messi’s country as it battles high inflation and currency devaluation.
Proxy wars, even proxy wars on the very idea of war, such as the Olympics and the World Cup, are designed to effect powerful catharses because they allow modern communities to feel attached to something bigger than themselves; something bearing a trace of utopian, non-violent altruism. It is hardly surprising that referees in crucial matches come in for an inordinate amount of attention, negative or affirmative, depending upon the graph of team popularity. Referees are invested with almost godlike powers of law enforcement and retribution precisely because they are placed in charge of ensuring that the warlike sport called football does not fall foul of the fine line of distinction separating it from bloody war. For the spectacle to be sustained, the friendly war must not collapse into the mayhem of actual war. War mustn't be allowed to look like war; and sport has been capitalised in societies ancient and modern for its potential to galvanise community feeling to the extent that war does but without the latter's collateral damages.
Just to put things into perspective, the funeral games in Book V of Virgil’s Aeneid and the Ashwamedha Yajna in the Mahabharata are not too distant in function from our present-day digitally “dished” out World Cup Final extravaganza. Football in particular, with its fast-paced unpredictability, its artful intricacy combined with brute force, its athleticism coupled with unimaginably balletique gymnastics, seems to demonstrate a concentrated thrill akin to that of a pitched battle.
Moreover, football is not a “gentleman's game”, unlike cricket, despite the latter’s courting of the masses today with colourful jerseys and compact T-20s. In football, one sees one's heroes spit and sweat and roll around in grime. It is a contact sport where both friendships and enmities are played out in the unrestrained language of the body. When footballers score, they tumble over each other. When they win, they hug and kiss. When they fall down in injury, their faces contort with pain. In no other sport is the male body and male bodily camaraderie so unabashedly and so unselfconsciously put on display. No wonder so many Bengali men within and without families, within and without Bengal, if not India, bond so passionately over World Cup. This is also their passport back into the rough and tumble of gleeful toddlerhood. This then is also relatable for the so-called proletariat. And in place of intricacy of rules such as in cricket, there is the infectious simplicity of grammar. The language and power of football is direct and universal. The skills that make good players have nothing to do with esoteric punditry, acquired and perfected instead through training rather than learning.
World Cup football is war as entertainment, paying homage to the finest collective sentiments handed down by tribe mentality. In the case of Bengalis, it is a celebration of one tribe mentality riding pillion on another. The interesting variation lies in that the appropriating “tribe” must project a certain kind of moral and affective unselfishness in participating so immersively in another culture's sporting achievements at the expense of one’s own self-aggrandisement. This is a key element in the self-consciously boundary-bending internationalism of the Bengali middle class: a relativism that unwittingly strings together Tagore’s legacy of critical cosmopolitanism and Indian Communists’ professed solidarity with China, the Soviet Bloc, and Cuba.
Are the dividends of this inter-continental romance over football purely non-material and entirely abstract? Perhaps not. While Argentina and Lionel Messi remain blissfully unaware of the frenzied adulation they engender among Bengalis across generations and countries, Bengalis in turn might well claim that their channelisation of community aspirations into selfless support of a distant land and people bears reverse dividends in the boost it gives to local commerce. Think of the flag makers. Think of the tea stalls and eateries where arm-chair analysts gather for their World Cup adda. Think also of digital revenue generated by viral memes on social media. Spectacles use money to spin money.
On another level, there are more direct, life-affirming social benefits. The splurge of celebratory memes in circulation among Bengalis around the world unleashes the levelling politics of laughter. Blue and white Bengali sweetmeat aping the Argentine jersey have been hobnobbing with morphed images of Messi and his wife at the gates of Rabindranath Tagore's ashrama in Santiniketan. These memes showcase how reaching out and drawing in are two sides of the same coin, and effect a raucously good-humoured indigenisation of our Latin American superstars.
Later that year the Indian women’s hockey team won a major international tournament. Earlier this year, 2025, Indian women crickets have brought home the World Cup. One doubts though if they will surpass the quantum of animated discussion on Kolkata buses devoted to the Messis and Neymars of football.
Works Cited:
Bhattacharya, Chandrima S. “Yesterdate: This day from Kolkata’s past, May 21, 1920. Priyanath Bose, died on this day at the age of 55.” The Telegraph. 21 May 2023. https://www.telegraphindia.com/my-kolkata/news/yesterdate-this-day-from-kolkatas-past-may-21-1920/cid/1938490, accessed 17 December 2025.
Bratachari Movement. Banglapedia. https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Bratachari_Movement, accessed 17 December 2025.
Girard, R├йne (2000). The Girard Reader. Ed. James G. Williams. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company.
James, William. “The Moral Equivalent of War” in Keith E. Whittington, American Political Thought. Supplementary Material. Chapter 8: The Progressive Era – America and the World. https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/fdscontent/uscompanion/us/static/companion.websites/9780199338863/ch_8/edited_James_Moral_Equivalent_of_War.docx , accessed 17 December 2025.
“Secret Societies: Anushilan Samiti.” Indian Culture. https://indianculture.gov.in/digital-district-repository/district-repository/secret-societies-anushilan-samiti , accessed 17 December 2025.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. London: Viking, 2006.
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Bio: Ananya
Dutta Gupta has taught at
Visva-Bharati for nearly two decades. She secured an MPhil degree in early
modern English literature as a post-graduate Felix Scholar at Oxford University
in 2001. She successfully completed her doctoral work on the early modern
representation of war in 2014 from Jadavpur University. Her revised Orient Blackswan Annotated
edition of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I (2012),
continues to be in worldwide circulation and she has several other scholarly
articles, reflective essays, translations and book reviews published in
national and international journals and magazines to her credit. She was
Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the
Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cambridge, in 2015.
