Sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, a bunch of British soldiers was kicking a ball around at the Calcutta FC ground, where a very young boy had stopped to watch them. The unruly ball had rolled towards that boy, who was then asked to kick it back. That boy, Nagendra Prasad Sarbadhikari, answered with his feet to become the first Indian to kick a football. So enthused was Sarbadhikari with this experience that he galvanized his schoolmates at the Hare School into forming squads to play the game.

Among the students who took to football inspired by Sarbadhikari was Kalicharan Mitra, who had played an important role in the history of Indian football by discovering the legendary Goshtho Pal. But that’s another story. Despite being very young, Sarbadhikari used the charm of football to breach the firmament of orthodox Bengal in the late 19th century, when an acquired Patrician outlook had become a way of life for a laid-back Bengali race

Too physical an activity, football wasn’t up their street – art, culture and counter-literary critiquing in landed homes and the common man’s submission to prescribed colonial life were failing to bridge the gap between worthwhile human aspirations and consequent goals that needed to be reached around the turn of the century. It was during this period Sarbadhikary brought football into the realms of Bengali dreams, converting the man on the street, the aloof, the impervious and the high-brow into a physically-intensive game. Football soon became a common calling.