The number of books and essays that have been written on the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing has been overwhelming, if not entirely surprising. No doubt, an additional bookshelf will be filled in review of those Games. Likewise, at the moment one cannot walk into a bookstore in England without seeing shelves of works on the London Olympics of 1908 and 1948. As London 2012 draws closer, works focused on those forthcoming Games will undoubtedly begin to appear in considerable number.
While many of these are worthy, their concentration on a particular Olympic Games necessitates a limited historical focus. This is not the case with the newly released Olympics: The India story, which flips around the usual Olympics-narrative formula to look instead at the history of a particular country at the Games, and on that country's relationship with the Olympic movement in general. As a result, sports historians Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta are able to present readers with a work of great scope, one that might not be entirely evident in the book's title.
This is not merely a sports book, retelling stories of athletic triumph and downfall. Olympics is a work of serious cultural history in which, at every turn, political and social themes are explored and interwoven with discussion of sporting matters. As such, it is no overstatement to say that, in addition to their titular subject matter, the authors make an important contribution to the study of Indian history. Sport, as a significant social institution in India, offers a telling point of connection with broader social and political events in the country (both pre- and post-Independence). It is to the credit of Majumdar and Mehta that they are successful in clarifying this connection.
The authors are both historians, and their book is rightly to be regarded as a work of scholarship. But this is not to suggest that Olympics is exclusively a book for academics and university students. As with Majumdar's previous works on cricket, this new volume is written in a highly accessible style, and will be of interest to those keen to understand the evolving relationship between colonialism and postcolonialism in the Subcontinent. Indeed, by the end of the book, one ends up asking how the history of this relationship could be meaningfully traced without the type of articulation of sporting themes that Majumdar and Mehta provide.