Pseudo Pride: How Bengal Lost Its Football Soul

Is it unfair to use the word pseudo for Bengalis? Friends in Calcutta and elsewhere might urge me to choose a softer expression, calling it too harsh. 

Yet, the more I reflect on what I see around me, the harder it becomes to avoid the term. 

When I watch Bengal’s Leftist leaders, the word seems unavoidable. When I watched Bengali cinema—before I stopped altogether, as producers turned into copycats churning out action-heavy remakes of Bollywood and Hollywood films—I became convinced that originality had given way to imitation.

The babumoshai (gentleman) appears to have turned into a pretender. The same sense of loss is evident in football. 

Once it was Bengal’s sera khela—its favourite sport. 

But today, it no longer seems so. Just as the simple joy of buying fresh fish or shrimp from the macher bazar (fish market) has faded, football too has lost its emotional grip on the Bong psyche. 

Old-timers will tell you cricket was once dismissed as an imperialist’s game. 

Yet Bengalis clearly love it. Eden Gardens fills up for ODIs and the high-octane drama of T20 cricket. 

Still, we were told that cricket’s passion could never match that of the “daddy of all games”—football, played on the Maidan. 

Football in Calcutta has not vanished; it has merely been repackaged—glossier, louder, and more corporate. 

The Maidan still exists, but its centrality has diminished. 

Gone are the days when offices would empty early for a Mohun Bagan–East Bengal match. 

Boseda, Ghoseda, masi, pisi, and kaku would gather around crackling transistors, faces tense, pledging allegiance to either Mohun Bagan or East Bengal. 

Life would come to a standstill. Today, such fervour doesn't surface anymore. 

Other teams exist, but mostly as a formality. For the current generation of hip-hop Bengalis—where aloo dum and jhaal muri have given way to burgers, pizza, and cola, and bharer (small tea cups made of clay) chai has been replaced by café culture—cricket has decisively overtaken football. 

Perhaps it’s the glitzy marketing of cricket, or perhaps the influence of a certain Ganguly from Behala in mid-1990s. 

Even those who still love football now follow Barcelona or Real Madrid more closely than Mohun Bagan, obsessing over Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi rather than Sunil Chhetri - India's highest goal-scorer ever. 

The result is clear: Maidan football is slowly dying. With it, a certain Bengali pride and tradition seem to be fading too. 

What remains, then, is a curious contradiction. Calcutta still calls itself the football capital of India, and perhaps emotionally it is. 

But the city no longer lives football the way it once did. 

The game has been professionalized without being deeply rooted, televised without being truly felt. As with so many aspects of Bengali cultural life, football survives more as a memory and a label than as a lived, everyday passion. 

In that sense, the word “pseudo” begins to feel less like an insult and more like a diagnosis—not of decline alone.