Enacting Speed as Samman: Fast Bowling and sporting Masculinity in Contemporary India

This paper is aimed at studying some of the ways in which bowling fast on the cricket field has increasingly allowed a section of working-class young Indian males to assert their claim over the metropolitan and cosmopolitan world of the game in contemporary India. While the potential of sporting arena in providing certain forms of masculine and gendered identities force and visibility have been widely located in the field of the sports sociology across the world, the enabling potential of ‘speed’ in context of the changes India’s postcolonial cricketing field-especially its’s fast bowling department-has undergone in recent times remains understudied. The way fast bowling as a form of sporting masculinity is increasingly becoming a mode of upward mobility and class-based resistance as against to predominantly upper-caste Maharashtrian social base of Indian cricket for a section of working-class males needs to be taken in account for the wider understanding and re-imagination of the postcolonial cricketing field, this chapter argues. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in various parts of north India, this chapter paper asks: how do these working-class males appropriate the art of fast bowling? How do they translate their ‘raftaar’(speed) and ‘tappa’ (length) to challenge and subvert some established notions and myths about fast bowling? How can we take the upward sociocultural mobility offered and inaugurated by such notions of ‘raftaar’ and ‘tappa’ seriously to understand the newly-found aspiration for bowling quick and fast in contemporary India?