Peculiarities Of Soccer In Bengali Cinema

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Peculiarities of Soccer in Bengali Cinema Author(s): Sharmistha Gooptu Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan. 1-7, 2005), pp. 67-71 Published by: Economic and Political Weekly Stable Peculiarities Soccer of in Bengali Cinema Through a study of three films, this essay identifies some of the problematic elements of the Bengali identification with soccer, which in turn helps to understand the uneasy relationship between soccer and Bengali cinema. In spite of the commonly affirmed Bengali passion for soccer, there are just a handful of Bengali films that deal with soccer to any reasonable extent. Yet, given certain aspects of the history of soccer and cinema in Bengal, there should have been a more potent relationship between these two pillars of 20th century Bengali culture. SHARMISTHA GOOPTU his essay triesto understand uneasy relationshipbetween the sport and Indian cinema through a study of soccer as it figures in Bengali popular cinema.1 Of course, it needs to be mentioned at the outset that this uneasy relationship has been in the process of transformation in recent times, with a growing dynamic 'inter-textuality' between cricket and popular Hindi cinema.2 However, cricket remains an exception on account of its commercialism, which makes it part of an integrated glamour industry in contemporary India; most other sports have remained marginal to Indian cinema. In the case of Bengal, this marginality of sport in popular cinema is most striking in the case of soccer, a game that is broadly identified with the Bengali middle classes,3 as against cricket, contemporary India's most popular sport, which is still identified as elitist by sections of the Bengali intelligentsia. Through a study of three Bengali films, this essay identifies some of the problematic elements of the Bengali identification with soccer, which in turn helps to
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