Dr. Reena Kukreja, Associate Professor of Global Development Studies, has published an article titled "Migration, Sport, and Punjabi Masculinities in Greece: Unraveling the Interconnections through Kabaddi" in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History.
Abstract:
Since the 1990s, Greece has become a new labor destination for rural, working-class young men from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Agrarian distress caused by neoliberal reforms, climate change, un- or underemployment, poverty, tightening of labor opportunities in traditional migrant labor destinations such as the Middle East, and romantic aspirations about Europe emerge as key factors facilitating their migratory trajectory toward Europe. However, a sizable majority of the South Asian men in Greece end up lacking legal status there. This migrant “illegality” makes them veer into Greece’s immigrant niche sector of agriculture—rural regions provide a modicum of respite from the continual state surveillance against undocumented migrants such as these men. Illegality and the concomitant threat of deportability are key components of the efficient labor disciplining and payment of low wages in this sector. The men’s illegality also results in their dehumanization, as evidenced through their harsh living and housing conditions. Working-class South Asian migrant men also find themselves caught in the dilemma of shaking off their culturally perceived and internalized failure to be responsible breadwinners as they struggle to eke out a living as farmworkers. Remittances and the men’s continued stays in Europe emerge as big factors in the ability to shake off the tag of failed masculinity with which they are burdened from back home.
While migrant labor regimes leave them time poor, indigenous sports such as kabaddi appear to offer such marginalized men an opportunity to showcase diverse forms of masculinities that place them higher in their culturally specific masculine hierarchies. Among the migrant Indian and Pakistani men, muscular masculinity is displayed through athleticism and muscular prowess. Suthra, or masculinity “clean of drugs,” a reaction against rampant substance abuse in the Indian Punjab, also gets valorized through this sport. However, an unresolved tension emerges for the men between a responsible masculinity devoted to meeting familial responsibilities and a muscular masculinity that demands allocation of precious time and money as an investment for keeping their bodies fit for sport.
Kabaddi tournaments organized by co-ethnic sponsors allow Indian and Pakistani Punjabi migrant men to take a day off and spectate communally. It gives them a brief respite from the surveillance of the Greek state and rural communities that often targets racialized, masculine bodies such as theirs. The sport, while affirming their cultural identity, also ends up acting as an unintentional salve against the men’s everyday labor precarity. The tournaments and the collective gatherings also offer the men an opportunity to resist exploitative migrant labor regimes through networking for better labor opportunities elsewhere in the country.
Kukreja, Reena, 'Migration, Sport, and Punjabi Masculinities in Greece: Unraveling the Interconnections through Kabadi' (21 July 2026), in David Ludden (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (New York, NY, online edn, Oxford Academic, 27 Feb. 2017 - ), https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197851739.003.0862