Goa’s sporting heritage is rife with myths: overstated Portuguese administrative influence, a ‘British priest’ credited with founding sport, claims that football was the only popular game in early 20th-century Goa, and so on. ‘The Diaspora, the Church and the Making of a Sporting Culture: An Exploration of the History of Football and Field Hockey in Goa’, a lecture by Ashish Krishna at Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Porvorim will address these while tracing the history of football and field hockey in Goa in this period. The lecture, which will be held on July 17, 4 p.m. and which will be moderated by André Rafael Fernandes, will also elucidate the foundational role of the Church and the diaspora in nurturing the region’s sports culture.
For instance, Church grounds hosted early football matches, with clergy promoting and even playing the game; this patronage was later overtaken by industrial sponsorship that fuelled football’s 20th-century dominance. Hockey’s growth meanwhile followed a diasporic route: Goans returning from Mumbai and East Africa brought sticks and skills home, while the victories of Mumbai’s Lusitanians Sporting Club, closely followed in Goa, made the club an icon of Goan identity. However, academic scholarship on Goa’s hockey history is sporadic, while the history of football in Goa remains under-researched and largely devoid of primary research. This study draws on gazette records, policy documents, club souvenirs, and in-depth interviews with former players, coaches, and administrators to reconstruct football’s social history. For field hockey, it uses the Lusitanians Sporting Club as a window into the sport’s diasporic institutional legacy in Mumbai and beyond.
This historical exploration carries added significance today, as nation-centric re-historicisation tends to reduce Goa’s colonial past to a narrative of mere subjugation. Sporting bodies instead reveal ground-level dissonances within the colonial project, and how they challenged and re-appropriated discourses of region and identity.
Krishna is an assistant professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University, Bhopal. He holds a PhD in the Sociology of Sport from BITS Pilani, Goa. His research focuses on the intersection of sport, gender, and post-colonialism. His work has appeared in the edited volume ‘The Postcolonial Sporting Body’ (Emerald Publishing) and in a special issue on field hockey history in The International Journal of the History of Sport (Taylor & Francis). He is currently working on a research project on the social history of football in Goa, which is forthcoming as a chapter in the ‘Routledge Handbook of Sport in South Asia’.
