All Play and No Work? The Sporting Body Inside the Classroom in Kerala

Abstract

The body has been one of the central tools in analysing connections between sport and postcolonialism in India, given how sport was an essential part of the colonial ‘civilising’ mission, which involved disciplining and controlling Indian bodies. Any discursive understanding of sport and postcolonialism in India must consider how it relates to existing concepts of the body and shapes the experiences of the people involved in it – acknowledging not just the power of colonialism in moulding sporting experiences but also the force of internal hierarchies that exist in Indian society. This chapter explores the experiences of students who studied in higher educational institutions in Kerala under the ‘sports quota’, a system that reserves seats in colleges/universities for high-performing sportspersons in India. Through their interviews, the sustained exclusion of the sporting body in contemporary Indian pedagogy is illustrated here. Specifically, the continuing prevalence of the colonial emphasis on the sporting body, as one whose strength and instrumentality are paramount, as well as its corollary postcolonial position, which treats this sporting body as inferior to the ‘refined mind’ of studious pupils, can be observed. Approaching the sports quota with a decolonising lens would require re-examining the disembodied nature of pedagogy in India’s higher educational institutions, acknowledging sporting students’ lived experiences, and a seamless integration – as opposed to separation/exclusion – of the sportsperson into higher education.

Citation

Mohan, A. (2024), "All Play and No Work? The Sporting Body Inside the Classroom in Kerala", Mani, V. and Krishnamurthy, M. (Ed.) The Postcolonial Sporting Body: Contemporary Indian Investigations (Research in the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 20), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 111-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1476-285420240000020007