Documentary infrastructures and the vernacular state: reclassifying belonging in the Kolkata Derby

This paper examines how the bureaucratic language of citizenship permeates the emotional and performative world of football fandom in contemporary Kolkata. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2019–2025) and netnographic analysis of East Bengal – Mohun Bagan interactions, we show how categories such as refugee, Bangladeshi, and illegal immigrant circulate as taunts, memes, and chants, transforming the Kolkata Derby into a vernacular arena where belonging is publicly adjudicated. A rivalry once rooted in regional memory and humour now absorbs the state’s classificatory logic – its demands for proof, documentation, and verification. Through observations across seven derbies and analysis of high-engagement online posts, we trace how fans mimic, contest, and internalise bureaucratic vocabularies, turning football into a medium for enacting legality and exclusion, even as East Bengal supporters reclaim refugee identity as moral legitimacy. We argue that fandom functions as an infrastructure of citizenship, where humour, rivalry, and affect reproduce and modify the state’s classificatory authority.