India has better sports writers than sportsmen. We are not a sporting race. So when someone sets out to chronicle the history of Indian sport, you can be assured that there will not be any reportage of stirring conquests nor last second bursts to land a gold. Journalist-turned-academic Ronojoy Sen’s book suffers from this deficit but is a very vibrant, tidy account of India’s very scanty record.
For this year’s Rio Olympics, the Sports Authority of India’s estimate is 12 medals, up from the six we won at London. For comparison China won 88 and South Korea 28 medals. This betrays the fact that India is dismally ill-equipped to compete in the world stage.
We mostly live in denial, our sporting affairs are scandalously mismanaged, more sportsmen perish every year than rise to the next level. Sports is a mix of triumphant nationalism and high fives of testosterone validation. We figure nowhere. Our greatest sporting icon even today is Milkha Singh who is actually a symbol of defeat rather than victory. But for us that will do. So a book, which sits on top of this sad scenario, is unlikely to enthuse the reader. Yet there are lessons in nationhood for us to savour.
We had a sporting history. Sen lays down the history of sport which starts from the rudimentary forms like hunting in the Mughal days onward to a primordial form of polo played in places like Manipur, then the colonial period when sports like soccer and cricket took firm roots. Indian sports began at maidans in Kolkatta (mostly soccer) and Mumbai (cricket). The Mumbai and cricket part of it has been well chronicled earlier (Ram Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field and Mihir Bose’s A History of Indian Cricket) and so Sen was stamping on well-covered territory but his purpose is different.
Soccer in India started as far back as 1802 and the first proper tournament was held in 1854. We were early beginners but failed to build on that, and the 1911 Mohun Bagan victory against a East Yorkshire regiment of Faizabad 2-1 still remains our stirring moment in soccer history. It gave rise to wild notions of sub-nationalistic Bengali pride. “The Bengali is no longer the timid and weak-kneed representative of the race whom Macaulay so foully libeled,” wrote The Bengalee newspaper.
There is an interesting nugget about Nagendra Prasad Sarvadhikari, who according to Sen, is the first Indian to kick a football. While passing by the maidans in his carriage he saw some Britishers kicking a football and got a chance to kick one! All these years later this is exactly the way a young Indian boy gets to know any sport. With no grassroots planning, destiny and accident play some role even in our sparse victories.
What then makes Indian sport colourful and attractive enough for many historians? Not counting the spectacular cricket story, it all boils down to Dhyan Chand (heroic, winner), Milkha Singh (loser but still heroic), Mohun Bagan-East Bengal football rivalry (now just history!), old style wrestlers Gama and Dara Singh, unknown, unsung Anglo Indian Norman Pritchard who won two silvers in Paris Olympics 1900. The tragedy of Indian sport is we are unlikely to win another track and field medal in Olympics for many years to come. Smaller and humbler emerging nations easily lick us hollow inside cavernous stadia where triumphant nationalism melds with individual dreams.
Sen bemoans the fact that “amid the several statues of Gandhi, Nehru and Netaji that dot the Indian countryside there are precious few of Indian sports heroes.” But we made a jingoistic movie on Milkha Singh as if to celebrate his failure. In any case, which sportsman can we mould in bronze, barring Dhyan Chand?