Word: kolkata
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...clouds burst, the crowds gather. It's an hour before the kick-off of Kolkata's biggest sporting event and the rain keeps pouring. The pitch at the cavernous Salt Lake Stadium is now little better than a mud pit, pockmarked by spreading pools of brackish water and streaks of brown slush. Were this a cricket match, officials would have canceled proceedings and sent fans home. But this is football in the most football-crazy city in India: over 100,000 boisterous Calcuttans fill the divided sides of the stadium, one half festooned in the maroon and green of Mohun...
...Kolkata derby, which most recently took place during this mid-August deluge, is an epic contest older than the Spanish civil war waged between Real 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...
...rankings do not lie. At Kolkata's packed derby match, the play is hapless. But it is 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...
...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 Hindus and Muslims, poor and rich, all united in anticolonial sentiment. The glory of the moment cemented football's place in the soul of the city...
...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. With livelihoods and loved ones lost, many had to struggle for their place among the city's better-established West Bengalis. "East Bengal gave them a banner to fly," says Majumdar. "It was their ray of hope...