Making a locality: the politics of land and football in North Kerala

This paper explores how a marginalized community in North Kerala uses football and football fandom in order to create a vibrant space for active citizenry. We examine how the categories of football fan and citizen foster each other and provide alternatives to the imagination of a nation that in its discursive homogeneity fosters divisiveness. At the same time, this paper is also interested in the constitution of the football fan community as resolutely local and in dynamic, and negotiated relationship with state machinery. While literature on sports in India has been overwhelmingly centered on the themes of nation and nationalism, this ethnographic study attempts to critically look at the making of a regional identity, from the margins of a nation, through the region’s popular sport, football. In this paper, we explore the ways in which Nainamvalappu football fans Association, an organization based in the coastal region of Nainamvalappu in Kozhikode, converted an open place into a football ground overnight to resist the setting up of a slaughterhouse in the same place by the city corporation, as a form of active resistance but also place making. We argue that this football fans’ association allows for new understandings of popular sovereignty and democracy through a revitalization of sporting spaces.