Non-Leisurely Leisures: A Study on the Sevens Football Communitas of South Asia

The history of sport and leisure in India is deeply characterised by discourses of colonialism and post-colonial imaginations, imperialism and native responses, nationalism and patriotism, outperforming, etc. One finds a panoply of historical and sociological literature that deals with cricket and other favourite pastimes dating from the colonial past of India. Although many of this literature, as Guha argues, serve to illuminate themes of wider interest and relevance, it runs the risk of generalising the regional currents of particular cultural elements as national patterns (Bandyopadhyay, 2020). For instance, football in India is identified with the stints of football in Bengal.

This research attempts to break free from the ideological and methodological proclivities of the existing literature to look at a lesser-known sociological context of sevens football in North Kerala, otherwise identified as Malabar. The sevens football is a local enunciation of the globally played association football and is deeply entrenched in the culture of Malabar. Sevens football as a cultural and sporting movement unsettles the binaries between formal and non-formal, work and leisure, local and global, and passion and profession. The present study seeks to unravel the complex cultural tapestries of sevens football vis-à-vis its general patrons, forms of organisation, nature of fandom and belonging, stakeholdership, and leisurely stakes.

The research employs a cultural sociological lens to look at the unstructured and rugged communitas of sevens football and bring into relief the blurring of lines between serious life and leisurely activities. Following a biographical approach to trace the evolution and process of this particular sporting movement, the study also tries to look phenomenologically at everyday rituals and social processes associated with it. In so doing, the research seeks to critically integrate sports studies into the broader domain of leisure studies and show how it shapes the social.