In an interview on Soccer as a Second Language

What about your next book, Hem and Football by Nalinaksha Bhattacharya?

This is a hard book to find – it’s out of print and has been for some time. To me it’s one of the most extraordinary fictional works on sport that I’ve seen and certainly on women and sport. I came on it by accident looking for material for our anthology. The principal character’s name is Hemprova Mitra, or Hem for short. She’s a Bengali girl from Calcutta who is chafing at school and family restrictions, and she decides that her school should have a football team. Again, the football is rather episodic; it’s not the centre point of the novel. But what she does in football and her activism in football helps her make sense of all the other countercultural leanings that she has. She’s a gay woman, and she leaves her husband, who she’s married to as a result of an arranged marriage. She rejects her family and takes a female lover, and football seems to propel her and give her confidence as a character moving through life. It’s a two-book series, there’s Hem and Football and Hem and Maxine, and Hemprova Mitra is the central character in both of them. It’s a much more interesting story than Bend It Like Beckham was, which some might compare it to, even though it was written about ten years before that film came out.

Was Bend It Like Beckham based on the book? I guess not, since that was set in Hounslow rather than India.

No. I’d be interested if Gurinder Chadha, the director, was even aware of the book. Perhaps she was. What I do know from reading about it is that Bend It Like Beckham originally had a different storyline. It was supposed to feature a gay romance between the two principal characters, Jules and Jess. But that had to be changed. Such is cinema.

What happens to Hem? Does she end up playing professionally?

Hem ends up like a lot of female footballers in India in real life. The only way they can keep playing football is to get a job in the civil service, which is massive in India. And this is what happens to Hem as well. She gains favour by being a good footballer and is able to get the civil service job.

That’s a side of India I’ve never even heard of, women’s football.

Yes, it really is the shadow side of the sport. Hem joins an amateur team in Calcutta at some point, and her coach is a committed Communist. And one of my favourite lines from the novel is when her coach says, ‘Here in Bengal all you get for bringing in those shining trophies year after year is a cheap garland of marigolds and ... if you are lucky enough, a four-line report on the back page of the Bengali daily with your name invariably misspelt.’ I think that’s true in so much of the world for women footballers. It’s almost always a marginal activity, and an activity that women have to go against the grain to participate in. It’s not just in India, it’s in almost all societies that I can think of. Women playing football challenges gender categories, our assumptions about sexuality, and the book shows how much is at stake for women participating in sport and their identity as a woman. So in that sense it’s a novel that’s very deserving of a read. It’s a very funny book too.

A lot of the reviews say Kuper’s book is also very funny.

That’s true. All these writers really – Galeano and Goldblatt as well are very good about seeing the humour of it all, and I think that’s appropriate.