Far Post: Dream Time at the World Cup

The Far Post is a co-production of Roads & Kingdoms and Sports Illustrated. Every week until the World Cup, we'll publish a new feature on global soccer culture. For more Roads & Kingdoms coverage of food, war, and music, visit its online magazine.

By Supriya Nair, The Far Post

My grandfather, born in 1919, grew up playing football in a wooded corner of the British empire. The eldest son of a family of bright-eyed troublemakers from the southern Indian district of Palakkad, Kerala, he wore knee socks and a chip on his shoulder to the local missionary high school, where beatings from teachers quivering with rage were the chief method of keeping boys in line.

Tempers ran high on the playground. Thanks to what must have been a combination of extreme arrogance and extreme vulnerability, my grandfather's boyhood was marked by a determination to start or escalate fights. Playing "soccer," as he called it from beginning to end of his lifeEdwardian slang has a certain tenacity, as North Americans will knowhe was an aggressive and inconsistent forward, not notably destined for success on the field.

Although some of his brothers and friends would play the game for a great part of their lives, my grandfather gave it up relatively quickly. In the middle of the Second World War, he boarded a train for Bombay: a metropolis then, as now, suffocating in its love of cricket. On the churning streets of the vast city, he found himself stepping aside sometimes for trucks full of European soldiers, who were either passing through on their way to other theaters of war or enforcing imperial law in a restless city.

With his mind conflating the heroics recounted in one section of the papers with the other, he thought of the professional footballers in England who sometimes heaved the football from their booted feet into the net all the way from the halfway line. How easy the English made it look, he thought; and how easy it would be for a Tommy to raise his gun and fire at a brown man if he felt like it.

Through the smoldering rubble of the 20th century, the tread of jackboots sounded often on the chalky halfway line that divides the real world from the world of the game. In a century of war, pogroms, partitions and violent revolutions of identity, football functioned as a sharp tool, loved by dictators and warmongers as much as by dissidents and democrats. (Think of AS Romathe "Jewish club" of Rome, frequent target of anti-Semitic chants from their rivalswhich came into being in 1927 because Lazio, the great traditional Roman club, were considered insufficiently sympathetic to Mussolini at the time.)

Like other sports, football had been dubiously bequeathed to many countries in Europe's colonial endeavors, and yet sometimes it helped overturn the rules it was supposed to enforce. Just before my grandfather was born, the Calcutta team Mohun Bagan won a historic footballing victory when they became the first brown team to defeat an English side in competition in 1911.

Former Italy dictator Benito Mussolini, center, poses with the 1934 World Cup-winning team.

AFP/Getty Images

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Far Post: Dream Time at the World Cup