Chapter 5: Playing Invisible: Studying the Urban Life of Football in Bengaluru

Recent debates in urban studies and urban anthropology have revolved around the growth of neoliberal economies and their impact on postcolonial cities such as Bengaluru and invoke the phenomenon of the death of the commons. Rather than focusing on a dialectical existence of infrastructures, which suggests a life and death binary, in 2020, I turned my attention to the possibility of a life between and beyond these two binaries through the game of football and its place in Bengaluru. This essay is based on a study of two different types of football fields in Koramangala, Bengaluru, and through this exercise, it intends to examine a potential move towards the viewing of commons as sites of knowledge production for sport, culture, and the city. One of the key ideas around which urban commons are looked at in this essay is through an examination of Bengaluru as a postcolonial city, one which was supposed to uphold a Nehruvian vision, and its transformation into the Information Technology hub of India through a neoliberal turn in urban development. A major concern raised here with neoliberal models of urban development is how people who do not have the monetary capacity to access sports infrastructure end up playing in the postcolonial, neoliberal city.