One of the reasons for being seduced by Anandabazar Patrika as an adolescent was the section titled ‘Naam o Padabi Paribartan’. The memory of wonder and a faint whiff of scandal at a certain Balai Guin metamorphosing, with a few tweaks of the alphabet, into Bula Guin remains fresh.
But Alex — the Keralite who was gifted a Messi jersey by the Argentine team management before the World Cup began — has not chosen to christen himself ‘Lionel’. Neither does Nagenbabu, the quintessential, if fictive, neighbourhood Bengali football fanatic, go by the name of Neymar even though the football World Cup is already 10 days old.
The speculation on such rechristenings is not unwarranted. All the more so because numerous Indians, eternal outsiders when it comes to football’s premier competition, seem to have no qualms about taking on dual — symbolic — nationalities during the quadrennial madness. These days, Calcutta is, as usual, neatly divided into favelas draped in Brazil’s green and gold as well as barrios painted in the Argentine blue-white. Down south, Kerala, having caught Fifa’s attention by installing giant cutouts of Lionel Messi and Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior in Kozhikode’s Pullavoor river, is busy hosting ‘mini World Cups’ — local competitions featuring carbon copies of the 32 participants in Qatar. There were also reports of a Hindu nationalist receiving the Malayali version of the Dum Dum dawai from the admirers of Cristiano Ronaldo after he tore up the Portuguese national flag having mistaken it for the banner of the Socialist Democratic Party of India. In Kolhapur, Maharashtra, the Beautiful Game also got Mr and Mrs Suryavanshi to bare their ugly side. The Missus wanted the akashkandil, the traditional Diwali lantern, to be in Brazilian colours. Mr Suryavanshi would have none of it: the lantern, he argued, could only be in — you guessed it right — blue and white stripes. The final scoreline of this contestation remains unknown.
The motives for this temporary transnationality are numerous. Latin America’s flamboyant style blends well with Indian sensibilities and aesthetics. The association could also be the consequence of an enduring ideological mooring even though India is being taught to be mukt of Jawaharlal Nehru: post-colonial India readily basked in the reflected glory of developing nations preferably with socialist leanings triumphing against formidable opponents if not in the comity of nations then on the football field.
This public endorsement of an amorphous national identity — the willingness to be, simultaneously, more than one nation, if only in spirit — would have puzzled George Orwell. Fiercely competitive nation-states were central to the English novelist’s imagination, which led to his immortal pronouncement of sport being ‘war minus the shooting’. Indeed, the genesis of the World Cup went along strict Orwellian lines, with the founders conceiving the tournament as a form of pageantry among nation-states. As Kanishk Tharoor noted in an article in The New York Times, “The tournament was conceived in an early-20th-century Europe when nations… were emerging from the wreckage of foundering empires, when Woodrow Wilson’s gospel of national self-determination spread far and wide, and when new forms of media, including radio, expanded the reach of the sport. Along with a flag and an anthem, a soccer team gave a country a tangible form... The memorable stories of each World Cup are often ones of national apotheosis and national calamity.”
Yet, nationalists — a burgeoning species in this nation and the world — would be disappointed upon a careful examination of the World Cup’s countenance since the globalisation of football. This is because, much like Qatar’s stadiums, migrants and refugees — dirty words in the nationalist dictionary — are central to the architecture of many modern football teams. It has been estimated that in this World Cup, around 150 players are representing 28 countries other than the nations of their birth, with the number of indigenous teams, those comprising sons of soil only, being merely four — Argentina, Brazil, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. As for their rivals, they present a heady mix. A Frenchman will represent Die Mannschaft; there is a German in the Welsh team; Wales, meanwhile, has roped in players of English blood; England, similarly, has as its ace a player of Nigerian ancestry.
But none has done it like the French and the Africans.
The contribution of immigrants to the French footballing cause has been significant. In 2018, the French — the world champions — toasted their totem, Kylian Mbappé, whose father is from Cameroon. This time, a total of 37 players of French ethnicity will wear jerseys different from the one worn by Les Bleus. The figure of Africans playing for adopted countries is even more impressive: over 50. Little wonder then that anthropologists are increasingly perceiving football competitions as mirrors that reflect the global cross-currents in migration and identity politics.
Football nourishes itself on the subnational. The popularity of club competitions — the Champions League, for instance — can rival that of Fifa’s marquee fixture. That is a testament to the fans’ affinity to the local, the community, as opposed to the national. Worryingly for the zealots, the subnational is not merely football’s fief. Over the years, cricket’s most popular competition, the Indian Premier League, has, its title notwithstanding, succeeded in generating mass fidelity towards regional identities. The tribalisation of, arguably, India’s national sport is particularly refreshing in a polity that has otherwise been unrepentant about embracing a model of majoritarian nationalism.
The fraying of the symbiotic relationship between the football World Cup and toxic nationalism would have enraged the Il Duce. Benito Mussolini, who had relied on the World Cup of 1934 to seek legitimacy for his fascist regime, had apparently sent a note to the coach of the Azzurri that said, “May God help you if you do not win.” Four years earlier, King Carlos II had looked upon the inaugural World Cup as an occasion to pander to Romanian national prowess.
Ninety years later, even though a narrower version of Woodrow Wilson’s nationalism spreads its tentacles around the globe, the über nationalist is likely to loathe the World Cup. With teams of mixed ethnicity and the primacy of the immigrant in the sport and its cultural economy, the World Cup bears evidence of the intimacy between the global and the local, with the nation looking in.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in