Awards

• Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2016

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"Ronojoy Sen has produced a fascinating, rich, and thoroughly engaging history of sport in India. He manages to paint at once with powerful, evocative, and very convincing broad strokes and with the finely gauged brush of an ethno-historian concerned as much with the intricacies and nuances of embodied experience as with quirky personalities and the odd politics of everyday life. All of this adds up to a book that fully captures the imagination to generate deep and often unexpected insight on the serious business of play in modern India. -- Joseph S. Alter, Yale-NUS College, author of The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in North India His ambitious book examines Indian sports in a largely chronological manner and does not duck the more awkward questions, such as the perceived athletic limitations of Indians. The narrative has an attractive sweep to it, starting with the place of sports and martial competition in Hindu epics such as the ""Mahabharata"" and the ""Ramayana."" Wall Street Journal Rich in detail and nuanced in terms of analysis... [Ronojoy Sen] is to be praised for adding to the understanding of sport in India by looking at how it intersects with culture and politics, and for using sport to provide insights about Indian history and society. Choice Sen is to be applauded for writing such an ambitious book, enriching our understanding of the history of sport in India. Journal of Sport History"

Nation At Play is an ingenious history of Indian sport. It combines lucid accounts of the evolution of several sports in India (both indigenous and western) within a unified narrative that tells the story of India's mostly failed love affair with competitive sport since the nineteenth century. -- Mukul Kesavan, author of Homeless on Google Earth

Nation At Play is an ingenious history of Indian sport. It combines lucid accounts of the evolution of several sports in India (both indigenous and western) within a unified narrative that tells the story of India's mostly failed love affair with competitive sport since the nineteenth century. -- Mukul Kesavan, author of Men in White: A Book of Cricket'

Ronojoy Sen has produced a fascinating, rich, and thoroughly engaging history of sport in India. He manages to paint at once with powerful, evocative, and very convincing broad strokes and with the finely gauged brush of an ethno-historian concerned as much with the intricacies and nuances of embodied experience as with quirky personalities and the odd politics of everyday life. All of this adds up to a book that fully captures the imagination to generate deep and often unexpected insight on the serious business of play in modern India. -- Joseph S. Alter, Yale-NUS College, author of The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in North India Like other arenas of performance, organized competitive sport in a newly constituted public domain was a product of India's colonial modernity. Sen's book presents an informative and readable account of the Indian history of football, hockey, wrestling, boxing, and cricket in the last two centuries. Alongside, he provides a fascinating social history of the involvement in sports of colonial officials, missionaries, princes, teachers, soldiers, and clerks. An important addition to the growing literature in the field. -- Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University, author of Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power Nation at Play is an ingenious history of Indian sport. It combines lucid accounts of the evolution of several sports in India (both indigenous and Western) within a unified narrative that tells the story of India's mostly failed love affair with competitive sport since the nineteenth century. -- Mukul Kesavan, author of Men in White: A Book of Cricket A fine, lucid, engaging and constantly surprising study. Highly recommended. -- Gideon Haigh, author of On Warne and Uncertain Corridors: Writings on Modern Cricket

Author Information

Ronojoy Sen is senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He has worked for over a decade with leading Indian newspapers, most recently as an editor for The Times of India. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago and read history at Presidency College, Calcutta. He is also the author of Articles of Faith: Religion, Secularism, and the Indian Supreme Court.

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