India and the Olympics

Boria Majumdar, Nalin Mehta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135275747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In most accounts of Olympic history across the world, India's Olympic journey is a mere footnote. This book is a corrective. Drawing on newly available and hitherto unused archival sources, it demonstrates that India was an important strategic outpost in the Olympic movement that started as a global phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century. Among the questions the authors answer are: When and how did the Olympic ideology take root in India? Who were the early players and why did they appropriate Olympic sport to further their political ambitions? What explains India's eight consecutive gold medals in Olympic men's hockey between 1928 and 1956 and what altered the situation drastically, so much so that the team failed to qualify for the 2008 Beijing Games? India and the Olympics also explores why the Indian elite became obsessed with the Olympic ideal at the turn of the twentieth century and how this obsession relates to India's quest for a national and international identity. It conclusively validates the contention that the essence of Olympism does not reside in medals won, records broken or television rights sold as ends in themselves. Particularly for India, the Olympic movement, including the relevant records and statistics, is important because it provides a unique prism to understand the complex evolution of modern Indian society.

1
Games of Self-Respect A Colony at the Olympics

There are so many communities, so many different religions, so many languages and dialects, so many different customs and ideals, that it is almost impossible to select a national team.

—Sir Dorabji Tata, IOA president, 1929¹

India was the first colonized Asian nation to take part in the Olympic Games. Its embrace of the Olympic movement, while still a British colony, was no mere coincidence. It was intricately linked to the forces of nationalism, the politics of self-respect and indeed the inculcation of what has been called the British ‘Games Ethic’ among Indian elites. Colonial India’s early Olympic encounter was born out of a complex interplay of all three factors and it forms a crucial missing link in the story of Indian nationhood. Historians now widely recognize the important role played by sport in the creation of identities and social imaginaries. Indeed it is now widely recognized that Japan, the only Asian country with a longer Olympic history than India’s, embraced Olympism partly because of a deep-rooted desire to showcase Japanese modernity after the Meiji Restoration and to take on the ‘West’ on equal terms. Olympism became so important for modern Japanese identity that when Tokyo bid for the 1940 Games, it went so far as to tie its candidature to the celebrations of the ‘2,600th anniversary of the Japanese empire’, pulling out all stops in an aggressive diplomatic campaign that split European nations down the middle.² Tokyo’s emotional gambit, combined with some smart cultural hardsell, succeeded when Mussolini withdrew Rome’s bid. Though the 1940 Games never took place, the politics of the 1940 Games provide a fascinating study of just how central sport can become for nationalistic identity-making.³ In this context, in India, a number of historians have finely documented how the imperial game of cricket became an arena for colonial Indians to fight for political recognition.⁴ Yet, despite its great importance, cricket never gave ‘India’—the nation—any significant international triumph until well after independence. It was in Indian hockey, and in the Olympic Games, that the nationalist aspirations of colonial India found full expression. This chapter draws out the pre-history of how this came to be so, of why colonial India embraced the Olympics, and why the still nascent and obscure Games started by a French aristocrat in 1896 became so important for the creation of a nascent Indian identity

The history of Indian sport can only be understood in light of the fact that sport was always inculcated as a crucial binding factor in the British empire. Forged in the 19th century by traders, military officers, missionaries and proponents of ‘muscular Christianity’, the sporting bond was not only maintained and extended by governing circles, but carefully cultivated among a selective section of the population through informal forms of exchange rather than authoritative imposition. Sport became a source of considerable cultural power, conveying through its different forms a moral and behavioural code—the Games Ethic—to connect and unite the far-flung British territories in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America, Oceania, and of course, the British Isles. The introduction of all organized Western sport in India, from hockey to cricket to soccer, can all be traced to this idea. It took until 1920 for India to participate in the Olympic Games and no formal institutional mechanism for supporting Olympic sport was established in the subcontinent until the early 1920s. But by the mid-1920s, driven by nationalist enterprise and princely patronage, India’s Olympic structure was well in place.

The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) as we know it today was formed in 1927⁵ and a strong Indian contingent participated in the Amsterdam Games of 1928, winning India her first gold medal in hockey in the very first year of official participation. A precursor to the IOA had been formed in 1923 with the same name and it had served the Olympic cause for three years until 1926 before being shut down. At a time when nationalist sentiment in India was gaining pace, the Olympics were the only international arena where Indian-ness could be projected on the sporting field. India’s participation in the Olympics, from the 1920s, was an important watershed for the politics of colonialism. Indians went to participate in the Olympics on equal terms with the British, at a time when the colony was not even invited to the first British Empire Games (1930) (later Commonwealth Games) in Canada.⁶ Apart from Bermuda, British Guyana and Newfoundland, only the white settler dominions of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand were invited to the first Empire Games. The organizers even paid for the costs of athletes from the white settler dominions. The exclusion of non-white athletes from big colonies, despite India’s success at the Olympic Games, meant that the Empire Games were fraught with tension.⁷ The decision to prohibit India from competing at the first British Empire Games ignited angry demonstrations from both the pro-British aristocracy and the nationalist middle classes.⁸ In fact, it has been argued that it was partly the chance to participate in the Games that persuaded Prime Minister Nehru to keep India in the Commonwealth. The Games helped provide an arena for nationalist ambition and anti-colonial sentiment and while they extended imperial cultural power, they also offered an opportunity for the once subordinate and colonized to ‘beat the master at his own game’. This was now true for the African, Asian and Caribbean Commonwealth as it already was for the white settler dominions such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

This chapter documents the origins of Olympism in India and what it meant for India, for the British empire and for the global Olympic movement. As a movement led by nationalist elites and princes, the early story of Indian Olympism is also the story of a global league of upper-class elites, connected through patronage networks in Europe, who passionately pushed the Olympic ideal. Until the 1920s, the Olympics were largely a Euro-centric enterprise, but India’s embrace of Olympism in the 1920s was also simultaneously accompanied by a powerful push for diffusing the Olympic ideal in Latin America and South-East Asia. As this chapter will show, in all three cases, the same strategy was followed: the use of the global network of the YMCA and the co-option of local elites with enough private resources and European contacts to liaise with the Olympic movement’s centre. In that sense, the origins of Olympic sport in India that this chapter documents is a missing piece in the global story of Olympism. In a Europe divided by war, the IOC pushed this expansion as a strategy for survival and in India the ideal was appropriated by elite nationalists as a new avenue for self-respect, modernity and identity politics in the sporting arena. Olympism came to India as part of the processes of globalization, decades before the term itself became fashionable. But once it was initiated, it was appropriated by and became inseparable from the forces of nationalism to begin with, and the centrifugal regional tendencies thereafter.

‘100 YARDS ROUND A BEND’ TO ANTWERP: PEASANTS ON THE ATHLETICS TRACK

To Sir Dorab Tata goes the credit of starting systematic Olympic activity on Indian soil in 1920. Son of the pioneering nationalist steel baron Jamsetji Tata, Dorabji was intimately involved in fulfilling his father’s idea of creating an indigenous and modern steel industry in India. He is widely credited with the establishment of the Tata Steel Company in Jamsetpur (now Jamshedpur) that became India’s largest private enterprise of the time. Simultaneously, in the great tradition of Parsi philanthropists in colonial India, some of his most valuable contributions came as a benefactor for sport, culture and education.⁹ Before taking an interest in Olympism, Sir Dorabji had already played a key role in the establishment of school and college cricket in Mumbai in the 1880s. Until the 1890s, the structure of cricket in Mumbai educational institutions was ‘crude and indefinite’. It was under Sir Dorabji’s initiative that the move to form the Bombay High School Athletic Association gathered momentum. Determined to eliminate differences of caste and creed on the sporting field, he wished to unite local clubs and inculcate notions of ‘fair play’ among young boys. At first, the success of the scheme seemed doubtful as there was a question mark over whether European schools would join such a union.

However, with the elite Cathedral School joining hands with Sir Dorabji, the Association came into existence in 1893 and initiated the famous Harris Shield tournament in 1896. It is now the oldest surviving inter-school cricket tournament in India and has served as a nursery for many Indian cricketers, most prominently Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli. It was in a Harris Shield game that Tendulkar first hit the headlines when he shared a world record partnership of 664 with Kambli. The Association also propelled the formation of cricket clubs in each school and ensured the appointment of coaches, which served the dual purpose of providing employment to veteran cricketers while also promoting the game.

A principal obstacle that Sir Dorabji and his men faced was the paucity of playgrounds in late 19th and early 20th century Bombay (now Mumbai). To redress this, a games fee was levied in most high schools, but in order to safeguard the interests of poorer students, those from modest backgrounds were exempted. With aristocratic and upper-class patronage coming their way, many schools revoked the levy in course of time.¹⁰

Sir Dorabji was largely educated in England and his interest in sport was a product of his Western upbringing, which exposed him to the period ideology of athleticism and the ‘Games Ethic’. The Games Ethic saw sport as a form of moral education and it was central to the ideology of English education at the time, in public schools and in universities. It was the key to the socialization in metropolitan Britain of future administrators and conquerors of the Empire.¹¹ This concept of sport as an element of cultural power may also be set in the wider context of a strong theoretical literature emanating largely from the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose analysis of hegemony shifted the Marxist analytical emphasis from the economic base to the cultural superstructure. Gramsci showed how even severe deprivation could not easily shake the belief of the masses in values shared with the ruling groups and conditioned by cultural attitudes formed in the superstructure. In that sense, sport was central to the British imperial setting as a powerful but largely informal social institution that could create shared beliefs and attitudes between the rulers and the ruled while at the same time enhancing the social distance between them. Such was its power as a cultural edifice that Cecil Headlam could write of cricket in 1902:

First the hunter, the missionary, and the merchant, next the soldier and the politician, and then the cricketer—that is the history of British colonisation… The hunter may exterminate deserving species, the missionary may cause quarrels, the soldier may hector, the politician blunder—but cricket unites, as in India, the rulers and the ruled. It also provides a moral training, an education in pluck, and nerve, and self restraint, far more valuable to the character of the ordinary native than the mere learning by heart of Shakespeare or an essay of Macaulay which is reckoned education in India.¹²

This was the underlying philosophy behind the colonial policy of most sports. Of course, ‘it is wise to appreciate that there was no culturally monolithic response to attempts to utilize sport as an imperial bond…the nature of interpretation, assimilation and adaptation and the extent of resistance and rejection’ varied.¹³ But there is no doubt that the appropriated virtues of athleticism, as taught in the British public school, were in turn reformulated by the educated colonial middle classes and subsequently imposed upon the masses. In Sir Dorabji’s words:

Having been educated in my youth in England I had shared in nearly every kind of English Athletics and acquired a great love for them. On my return to India I conceived the idea of introducing a love for such things there. I helped set up with the support of English friends, as General Secretary, a High School Athletic Association amongst numerous schools of Bombay, in the first place for cricket, and then for Athletic Sports Meetings which embraced nearly all the events which form part of the Inter-University contests every year in London.¹⁴

Adopting a game also meant adopting the entire paraphernalia of modernity that went with it. It didn’t just mean playing a foreign game, it also meant adopting European clothes, European rules and European notions of order and ‘fair play’.

Sport became the playing field where tradition and modernity met, clashed, and fused. A good example here is that of the Deccan Gymkhana. After the successful start of the Harris Shield, the idea was modified in Poona (now Pune) with the creation of the Gymkhana. The committee which ran the Gymkhana was not conversant with the details of managing such athletic meets on European lines and wanted to develop their sports programme more in line with established Indian traditions. Sir Dorabji, who was nominated the president of the Gymkhana, played a central role in the fusion of foreign and indigenous cultures that ensued. At the first athletic meet the Gymkahana organized, Dorabji found that the competitors were ‘all boys of the peasant class working in the fields and living off poor fare…’¹⁵ Naturally they had no idea of European rules or modern training of any kind. On attending a meeting of the Gymkhana, Sir Dorabji found that they were proposing to run their 100-yard heats round a bend without strings. This was because their sports ground was very small and the track was part of a rough unrolled grass field....

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Sport, Culture and Society
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Games of Self-Respect A Colony at the Olympics
• 2 ‘Everyone Wants a Bite of the Cherry’
• 3 The Golden Years
• 4 Hitler’s Games
• 5 The ‘National’ Game
• 6 ‘The Fall of Rome’
• 7 ‘The Big Brother of Asia’
• 8 Appu on Television
• 9 When Olympic Sports Lost Out
• 10 The Army, Indian-ness and Sport
• 11 Torchbearers of a Billion
• Epilogue
• Postscript
• Endnotes
• Index
• Note on the Appendix
• Appendix