Word: indianism
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...Madrid and Barcelona and deeper than the glossy rivalries of the money-spinning English Premier League. India, of course, is not a football power - at home, the sport is dwarfed by cricket, which has captured the country's popular imagination and advertising revenue. Despite a few recent successes, the Indian national side is still a minnow in the pool of world football. It's ranked a woeful 145th overall by FIFA, football's global governing body, and 24th in Asia - 13 spots below Bahrain, whose population is less than one-thousandth of India...
...roared on in an atmosphere of intensity and passion unparalleled anywhere else in Asia. The enmity between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, the teams respectively of the city's West and East Bengali populations, mirrors the Catholic-Protestant sectarianism of Glasgow's Celtic versus Rangers. It stretches back before Indian independence and is embedded into the very fabric of Kolkata society. Prices for prawn and hilsa, the preferred seafood of each community, fluctuate depending on the results of the clubs' matches. An entire canon of Bengali films, plays and poems surrounds the eight-decade-old rivalry...
...Sepp Blatter, toured India in April with Mohammad bin Hamman, head of the Asian Football Confederation, he attended the derby fixture and was reportedly impressed by the match's feverish atmosphere. But that didn't make up for the shambolic management and crippling lack of infrastructure that dogs the Indian game. Hamman spoke bluntly: "Frankly speaking, they only have the history. I did not see any future...
...payoff occurred a few decades later. In 1911, the Mohun Bagan football squad won the prestigious Indian Football Association Shield tournament - once the preserve of whites-only clubs - toppling the crack East Yorkshire Regiment, the best British team in India, barefoot in the final. Boria Majumdar, India's leading sports historian and author of Goalless, a history of Indian football, describes it as "India's Lagaan moment" - referring to the 2001 Bollywood blockbuster about a fictional cricket-playing village that beat the ruling British at their own game. This was real life, however, and Kolkata erupted in cele-brations, with...
...keeping with the legacy of Indian independence, the aura of nationalism that surrounded Mohun Bagan soon faded with the conflicts of partition. The well-heeled Calcuttans who ran Mohun Bagan often discriminated against athletes from the eastern parts of Bengal, whose accents, culinary tastes and even modes of dress differed. A contingent of eastern officials and players broke away from Mohun Bagan and set up the East Bengal club in 1920. The rivalry was ramped up after 1947, when the departing British divided Bengal along religious lines, its east becoming East Pakistan. Millions of Hindu refugees fled west to Kolkata...