Lectures | 17 July 2026 | The Diaspora, the Church and the Making of a Sporting Culture: An Exploration of the History of Football and Field…
Rinald D'Souza
LECTURESThe Diaspora, the Church and |
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The Diaspora, the Church and the Making of a Sporting Culture: An Exploration of the History of Football and Field Hockey in Goa
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 twentieth-century Goa, and so on. This lecture traces the history of football and field hockey in Goa in the twentieth century, addressing these persistent myths surrounding Goan sport while elucidating the foundational role of the Church and the diaspora in nurturing the region’s sports culture.
Church grounds hosted early football matches, with clergy actively promoting and even playing the game; this patronage was later overtaken by industrial sponsorship that fuelled football’s twentieth-century dominance. Hockey’s growth followed a diasporic route: Goans returning from Bombay and East Africa brought sticks and skills home, while the victories of Bombay’s Lusitanians Sporting Club, closely followed in Goa, made the club an icon of Goan identity. 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 Bombay and beyond.
This historical exploration carries added significance today, as nation-centric re-historicization 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.
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Ashish Krishna
Ashish Krishna is 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 postcolonialism. 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.
André Rafael Fernandes
André Rafael Fernandes completed his Senior Cambridge education in Darjeeling, a BCom (Honours) and BEd in Shillong, and an MA, MPhil and PhD in Goa. He also obtained the CELTA qualification from the University of Cambridge. He has taught at various levels, from middle school to university, in Shillong and Goa, in a career spanning 44 years, including 30 years at Goa University. He retired as Professor and Head of the Department of English, Goa University. He was awarded a short-term research scholarship at the University of Porto, Portugal. His doctoral thesis was on Konkani tiatr. It was published by Goa 1556 and the Tiatr Academy of Goa under the title, When the Curtains Rise.
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Xavier Centre of Historical Research
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