At the time of the last World Cup, in 1998, I wrote a jokey piece in The Telegraph suggesting that the popularity of football in Bengal was a consequence of the province's political militancy. Indians who were non-violent and socially quiescent preferred cricket, but those who were oriented towards more masculine forms of collective expression - bomb throwing, shall we say, or land-grab movements - had a natural preference for soccer. As additional proof of the thesis that to love football was to be politically progressive I adduced the lack of interest in the game of those notorious imperialists, the Americans. And, in passing, I claimed that the British shifted the capital of the raj from Calcutta to Delhi in 1912 because of Mohun Bagan's victory in the IFA Shield the previous year. 'One was the cause of the other,' I had written, for 'to preempt further humiliation the British adroitly and deliberately moved the seat of power from Bengal, away from its skilful footballers and its bomb-wielding nationalists.' This last remark, offered wholly in mischief, I now find has been taken at face value by two scholarly British historians. Paul Dimeo and James Mills are the editors of Soccer in South Asia, a book just published by Frank Cass in London. Turning my tease into a certifiable sociological thesis, they suggest that Bengali footballing prowess was indeed a key reason why the capital was moved from Calcutta to New Delhi. It is gratifying to have one's jokes taken so seriously. Soccer in South Asia is a serious book, and for the most part a valuable one. It begins with a rich historical over-view by a man well-known to the readers of this newspaper, Novy Kapadia. Kapadia's account focuses on the great clubs of Indian football: the three Calcutta giants, of course, but also such celebrated teams of the Thirties as Hyderabad City Police and Bangalore Muslims. Mario Rodrigues offers a fine essay on the ups and downs of corporate sponsorship. James Mills writes suggestively of how the Goan love for football helped ease the state's integration into the Indian Union. Other chapters deal with football in the Tibetan diaspora and with coaching. But the editors should have thought of commissioning an essay on the superb footballing stories of Moti Nandi. Reading Soccer in South Asia made me nostalgic for my own early encounters with Indian football. I like to think that I must have been the only Tamil schoolboy outside of Calcutta to have been supporting East Bengal. This was a product not of my Bengali name, but of two childhood friendships forged in the town I grew up in, Dehra- dun. One was with Bir Bahadur, a legendary half-back with East Bengal in the late Fifties, who came back after retirement to his home town, there to work in my school and to reminisce about his days in the Calcutta Maidan, to talk to us kids about such giants as Kempiah and Peter Thangaraj. The second friendship was with a classmate named Deba Pratim Roy, a bangal by birth and, at junior level at any rate, a dogged centre-half much at home with the slush and mud of fields soaked by the monsoon. I played little football myself, but encouraged by Bir Bahadur and D.P. Roy chose to hitch my star to East Bengal's. This was the early Seventies, a time when the club was do- ing supremely well. It routinely won the Calcutta league as well as knockout tournaments in and out of Bengal. I read the newspapers for news of the club, and listened whenever I could to commentaries of their matches on the radio. I learnt, and learnt to love, the names of their players: names that must bring a silent cheer to many of my readers. Let's remember once more that crack forward line: the brothers Habib and Akbar, the wingers Surajit and Swapan Sengupta, the Machiavellian playmaker, Subhas Bhowmick. Move towards the centre of the field and recall those greatly gifted half-backs, the tall and slim Pintoo Chowdhury, his stockings always down to his ankles, and the short and stalky Goutam Sarkar, he of the explosive left foot. At this distance in time I can recall only one of the full-backs: the curly-haired Sudhir Karmakar, whose superb defensive technique earned him the sobriquet, 'the Sunil Gavaskar of Indian football'. But I must confess that I cannot remember the goalkeeper's name at all: not surprising, perhaps, for, like the Brazilians, the Bengalis have long disdained that particular position. In those years, my identification with East Bengal was as fierce as any true-blooded bangal's. Thus, when I finished school in December 1973, I sought as a reward from my father a trip to Delhi to see the final of the Durand Cup. The contending teams were East Bengal and Rajputana Rifles, the latter led by the lean and generously mustachioed Indian forward, Magan Singh. At last, after all that priming by Bir Bahadur and Deba Pratim Roy, I got to see my heroes in the flesh. Except that the tale had an unhappy ending: my team lost, by one goal to nil. Studying in Delhi from 1974 to 1979, I watched East Bengal each year, in the Durand and DCM tournaments. I sat with the Bengalis in the east stand and, if my team won, with them burnt torches made out of old newspapers in grateful homage. All told, I participated with a modest fervour in the affiliation with a football club that, to so many Bengali young men down the years, has constituted the key element in their adult lives. Such club loyalties have been visible in other parts of the country too: with Mumbaikars fanatically following Mafatlal or Tatas, Goans identifying with Dempo or Salgaocar, Punjabis with JCT Phagwara and Malayalis with FC Kochi or Premier Tyres, Kalamaserry. It is clubs such as these that came together in 1996 to form the National Football League. The NFL's promoters hoped that the advent of satellite television would encourage corporate sponsors and also help woo audiences: so that millions of people would see their favoured club play another on the box. In 1998, the NFL was even ambitious enough to start a second division. In the Nineties, football in India looked to television to expand its reach. In a bitter irony, in the Eighties itself, television had helped undermine the support base of the Indian game. The 1982 World Cup was definitive in this regard, as the first such competition to have all its games telecast live in the subcontinent. The coming into their homes of the world's best footballers made the followers of Mohun Bagan and East Bengal look with new eyes on their old heroes. When one had seen Bruno Conti and Zico, who had time anymore for the Choudhuris and the Banerjees? The depth of feeling for local clubs seriously diminished in the years to come. To be sure, Indians in general and Bengalis in particular like to affirm their anti-imperialist sentiments. The teams they support in any World Cup tend to come from Latin America or Africa, rather than Europe. But, and this is a crucial point, the players they worship and whose portraits they put up on their walls are usually foreigners. In Calcutta, as in Kochi and Mumbai and Panaji, for every picture of I.M. Vijayan or Bhaichung Bhutia there must be at least a hundred of Ronaldo or Zinedine Zidane. The editors of Soccer in South Asia insist that football in India has 'a promising future'. Writing in 1959, A.S. Melo claimed that 'football is, almost without question, the most popular game in India'. This remark serves as the epigraph to the book's introduction, and James Mills and Paul Dimeo clearly hope that such will once more be the case. Sadly, their optimism is demolished by two tables in the essay by Mario Rodrigues. The first table lists the five favourite sports personalities of boys and girls in India: all five, needless to say, are cricketers. The second table lists the number of schools playing football and cricket in different cities. Everywhere, the flannelled fools at the wicket win comfortably over the muddied oafs at the goal. A hundred and twenty nine schools play cricket in Bangalore, but only 70-80 play football. In Chennai the numbers are 58 and 20-25 respectively, in Mumbai 145 and 120, in Calcutta 48 and 20-30. Even in Goa, where the British never ruled, more schools now play cricket than football. Till the Eighties, at least, cricket took second place to football in Calcutta. But then came satellite television and, a decade later, Sourav Chandi Ganguly. The two phenomena in tandem, one technological, the other individual, have ensured that cricket has now conclusively supplanted football as the chosen game of the Bengalis. Some months ago, the chief minister of West Bengal told an interviewer that he has a television in his office to watch India play: play cricket, that is. (I doubt he has ever watched an NFL game.) And on the recent tour of the West Indies, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee spoke to the captain of the Indian team more than once on the telephone. Each time he did so, he made sure he told the press. But I doubt if Bhattacharjee speaks at all to leading Bengali footballers, indeed, that he even knows their names. Let me thus suggest a new thesis for future historians to chew over, that Bhattacharjee's marked preference for cricket over football is emblematic of a more portentous historical fact: namely, the embourgeoisement of Bengali communism, its throwing over of proletarian loyalties for upper-class sophistications. ramguha@vsnl.com