Olympics:
The India Story
Boria Majumdar
Nalin Mehta
For John MacAloon and Bruce Kidd—the two people
who inducted me into Olympic Studies
—Boria Majumdar
For my late grandfather who came out of retirement to
help organize the 1982 Asiad and gave me
my first memory of Appu
—Nalin Mehta
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Prologue by Boria Majumdar
Games of Self-Respect: A Colony at the Olympics
‘Everyone Wants a Bite of the Cherry’: The Struggle for Control of Olympic Sports in India
The Golden Years: ‘We Climb the Victory Stand’
Hitler’s Games: Captain Dhyan Chand and Indian Nationalism in the Third Reich
The ‘National’ Game: Hockey in the Life of Independent India
‘The Fall of Rome’: The Fall and Decline of Indian Hockey
‘The Big Brother of Asia’: Nehruvian India, Sport Diplomacy and a New Order
Appu on Television: The 1982 Asiad and the Creation of a New Indian Public
When Olympic Sports Lost Out: Cricket, Television and Globalization in India
The Army, Indian-ness and Sport: The Nation in the Olympic Ideal
Torchbearers of a Billion: India at the Games
Indian Sport on the Eve of London 2012: Will the Turnaround Finally Happen? (New for the Second Edition)
Epilogue
Postscript
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Appendix
Praise for the Book
Copyright Page
Endnotes
Preface to the Second Edition
The Tricolour since Beijing: Indian Sport,
Olympism and Nationalism
When Sir Dorabji Tata organized the first modern meet of Indian athletes with an eye on the 1920 Antwerp Olympic Games, he found that despite running barefoot, their performance compared ‘well with the times done in Europe or elsewhere’. Suitably impressed, Tata personally financed three of the best runners for Antwerp, a move that in his own words ‘fired the ambition of the nationalist element in the city’.1 Eighty-nine years after that wind-swept day in Pune, when Tata first dreamt of an individual Olympic gold for India, shooting prodigy Abhinav Bindra finally found the Holy Grail in the 2008 Beijing Games. As the Indian tricolour was hoisted in Beijing, the poise and pride on the bespectacled shooter’s visage spoke to a billion Indians, becoming a leitmotif of gung-ho chest thumping in media commentaries and nationalist iconography. In a country undergoing a media revolution like no other—India now has about 700 satellite TV networks, more than 300 of which broadcast news—the Beijing victory created an unprecedented national frenzy.2 In a country of a billion, and a competitive media industry looking for new heroes and new stories, the lone gold medal was justification enough to spark off celebrations worthy of topping the medals tally.
This book was written and first published in India just before the 2008 Beijing Games and the Indian performance necessitated a suitable Afterword. It was added in the updated version published by Routledge in the Beijing aftermath in April 2009. With London just months away and promising to be a defining moment in the history of India’s Olympic sport, a further revised and updated edition was a necessity. Here it is.
For Indian sport, Beijing and the years that followed proved to be a watershed. Beijing 2008 was much more than a sporting spectacle not just because India’s performance was its best ever at the Games but also because it heralded the promise of a new beginning for Indian sports. Bindra was not an aberration. His performance was followed by near-podium finishes in badminton, tennis and archery and the gains have been consolidated since, written about at length in the chapter on Indian sport later on in the book. Just when it was turning out to be a tale of so near yet so far in China, Vijender Kumar (bronze in boxing, 75 kg) and Sushil Kumar (bronze in wrestling, 66 kg freestyle) ensured that the Indian tricolour went up twice more at Beijing. Their achievements, analysed for hours on television, turned them into national celebrities overnight. If the media catharsis that followed was any indication, for the first time, Olympic sports, apart from hockey, was at the centre stage of what could be termed as the national consciousness.
It was an indication that decades of ill treatment and neglect, which had reduced Olympic sport to a footnote in India, might just change. At a time when the country was reeling under the impact of serial blasts in Gujarat and Karnataka, the medal successes helped emphasize the point that across contexts and timeframes an Olympic gold can catapult sport to the forefront of a nation’s imagination. Three major themes emerged in the discourse that followed: renewed media focus on Olympism as a nationalist playing field, the promise of a new Indian Olympic culture and the fear that without systemic change in Indian sporting structures, this would be yet another false dawn.
For the first time in Indian Olympic history, the media appropriated these accomplishments in a manner associated commonly with cricket. All of a sudden, Bindra was flooded with sponsorship offers that had long since been reserved for over-pampered cricket stars alone. A poll on Times Now, India’s most popular English TV news channel, revealed that the national religion of cricket had slid in the popularity charts. According to the survey, 53 per cent of sports fans in Chennai and 44 per cent in Kolkata were glued to the Olympics. In contrast, 41 per cent of sports fans in Chennai and 29 per cent in Kolkata watched the Indian cricket team in action against the Sri Lankans. In Mumbai, an amazing 64 per cent of the fans interviewed were unaware of the cricket series between India and Sri Lanka.3
The medal haul—by Indian standards—it seemed, had suddenly woken up the country to the significance of the Olympics as an event that Indians could win at as well.
The medal winners seemed to satisfy a national yearning and in the process made a statement about the significance of sport in an era of escalating political turmoil. Olympic success, the victories demonstrated, held the promise of uniting Indians across the country. With some of India’s greatest sporting achievements at the Olympics coming at a time when the nation was seeking answers to sudden terror attacks, their impact was all the more visible. In the days before the Olympic Games, most Indians were grappling with the political crisis at hand and were hardly concerned about what the small contingent of 56 could achieve in Beijing. So much so that Suresh Kalmadi, then President of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) and now facing serious charges for alleged misappropriation of CWG 2010 funds, had issued a statement asking sports fans not to expect miracles from the athletes. Set against this backdrop of gloom and limited expectations, India’s successes shone even brighter.
The success of the three Beijing winners was as much a testament to their own skills as it was a metaphor for the larger story of India. They had arguably shattered the grand narrative of failure that has characterized Indian sport just as the emergence of the IT industry in the 1990s signified the end of the ‘Hindu rate of growth’ that defined the economy since the 1950s. Just as a Narayan Murthy or an Azim Premji—founders of the IT giants Infosys and Wipro—created the self-belief for Indian business to act as a global player after decades of isolationism and the license-permit raj, so did the Beijing victories usher in a new era of self-confidence in sport. As John MacAloon argues, the Olympics are a ‘crucible of symbolic force’ into which the world pours its energies and a stage upon which, every four years, it plays ‘out its hopes and its terrors’.4 For every Indian, that terror always came in the form of a question: A billion people and
no gold medal. Why? Beijing provided that answer, and hence the nationalist frenzy that ensued.
The annals of Indian sports writing have been full of complaints about sporting failures for far too long. Analysts have blamed the system, they have blamed the politicians who run it, they have even questioned Indian genetics. Every four years, it has become a collective national ritual to blame everyone else when found wanting in the global mirror of the Olympics, only to move on and repeat the same catharsis four years later. The Beijing athletes showed that it is possible to succeed in spite of the system. The BJP’s late General Secretary and former Cabinet minister Pramod Mahajan once said only half-jokingly that the Indian IT and beauty industries rose to great heights only because the government did not realize their presence until they had already made a mark.
Abhinav Bindra’s success too followed a similar template, at least with respect to the national sporting superstructure. Born with the luxury of affluence and an indoor shooting range in his backyard, he emerged as a child prodigy, only to taste initial defeat at Sydney and Athens. He could as easily have given up, blamed the system and have been content with his World Championship and Commonwealth Games medals. But he persevered. His was a victory born out of the pain of loss and an iron will to succeed. Here at last was India’s answer to those who point to the success of Surinam’s Anthony Nesty or that of the Ethiopian runners, for that matter. It is indeed possible to succeed without access to government-sponsored sporting facilities. This is not to argue against creating efficient systems—that would be a terrible folly—but in sports there are moments when all it boils down to is self-belief.
Did Beijing mark the arrival of a national Olympic culture? The three medals won at Beijing were certainly the catalyst to help correct years of frustration at India’s poor sporting performances. With various state governments setting up academies to promote boxing, wrestling and shooting, India looked poised to have an Olympic sporting culture of its own, a belief further consolidated by India’s performances at the 2010 Commonwealth Games and the subsequent Asian Games at Guangzhou.
Beijing was no flash-in-the-pan success. Bindra, for instance, was only part of a phalanx of world-class Indian shooters that have emerged in the past decade. Beijing was his moment but each member of the Indian shooting team was capable of winning a medal. Similarly, Vijender Kumar was part of a boxing team where his compatriot Akhil, and not him, was tipped for a medal in the run-up to the Games. His defeat of the reigning world champion, Russian Sergei Vodapoyanov, in the 54 kg pre-quarterfinal round turned him into a national hero before he crashed out in the quarter finals, just like his 19-year old roommate Jitender Kumar, who fought valiantly despite ten stitches on his chin. This is the terrifying beauty of sport, its unpredictability. This is why we watch it—because it showcases all that is glorious and tragic about human nature, all that is uncertain and indescribable. The key for the future is to invest in having enough people at the top echelon of any sport, for one to click when the moment comes.
What now of the future? There are many in India who look longingly across the border at China’s awe-inspiring sporting machine. The Chinese too built their success by focusing on key sports initially —gymnastics, table tennis, badminton and athletics. India, however, cannot hope to replicate the Chinese model blindly. The organization of Indian sport is far too complicated and far too political to allow for a uni-linear approach like the Chinese or the East Europeans before them.5 Like Indian democracy, Indian sport too has evolved its own unique model, distinct from everyone else.
When Kapil Dev’s unfancied team won the cricket World Cup in 1983, no one could have predicted that the surprise victory, coinciding with the television revolution, would ignite deeper processes that would ultimately turn India into the spiritual and financial heart of the global game. Successes at Beijing, Delhi and Gunagzhou have created opportunities that if harnessed well could well usher in a new era in Indian sport. As Bindra grabbed gold and the boxers charged through the early rounds, for the first time, a national television audience, led on by a cheerleading media focused on Olympic sports.
The fact that the entire boxing team had emerged from the small north-Indian town of Bhiwani with few facilities or that Sushil Kumar had trained in Delhi’s Chatrasal stadium with rotting wresting mats and twenty other wrestlers as room-mates provided too irresistible a story of human triumph against all odds. The hype was such that even the Haryana chief minister turned up at Vijender’s house to watch his semifinal bout. It was a televised photo opportunity for the politician but also an event that led government officials to build a new paved road overnight to show their boss that developmental schemes were working. Similarly, the Delhi chief minister immediately announced a huge cash award for Sushil Kumar on his return to India.
When K.D. Jadhav won India’s last wrestling medal at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 the celebrations at home were extremely muted, restricted to the sports pages of newspapers unlike the mega hype around Sushil Kumar and the new phalanx of Indian boxers. To compound Jadhav’s agony, the political class gave the victorious hockey team of 1952 a tumultuous welcome in ceremonies across the country while he had to make do with a localized cavalcade of a hundred bullock carts from his native village. In 1952, hockey was a potent symbol of Indian nationalism and Jadhav despite winning independent India’s first individual Olympic medal was left to ultimately die in poverty. He was forced to sell off his wife’s jewels to build a modest cottage and won a posthumous Arjuna award only in 2001. In sharp contrast, governmental coffers opened up for the Kumars after Beijing. Even more so, in a nation starved of sporting glory, the intense media focus on the Beijing and Guangzhou battlers turned them into new nationalist heroes. Clearly, the registers of iconicity have changed in the intervening years, with individual success becoming an important barometer of nationalist triumph.
What explains the change? Let us be clear: this is not necessarily about some newly found love or understanding of sports. There is a marked disconnect between the hype about a resurgent India that the Beijing, Delhi and the Guangzhou boys supposedly represent and the reality. On the morning Sushil Kumar won the bronze medal, most media outlets carried online stories saying he had ‘crashed out’ of the Olympics. There was an even an undertone that he had somehow wasted his first round bye. Few, at least on television or in the immediate internet discourse, remembered the repechage rule until the Jat from Najafgarh pleasantly shocked the nation with his marathon string of victories to clinch bronze.
Television helped in the creation of a national public focused on boxing, a process that has gained in momentum since with Indian boxers regularly winning at the world stage. A caveat, however, is in order here. While celebrating their achievements, it is important to remember that the boxers have emerged from a town which goes sometimes for days without electricity, where the rains have made it impossible to drive a car faster than 5 km/hour on most roads and where most people had to rely on inverters to watch the home boys win. In such a setting, sport has emerged as a way out for many. The real success of Bhiwani lies in the rock-solid confidence of the new generation of athletes and a nascent public-private partnership which has allowed them to transcend a system used to mediocrity. They have not been content to merely repeat the past and this is the new Indian spirit that needs to be celebrated.
Like K.D. Jadhav sixty years ago, virtually every winning athlete from Bhiwani in the past—at the Commonwealth Games, the Asiad and the SAF Games—has been welcomed home by celebratory motorcades of locals, except that they were rarely noticed by the mainstream press. Perhaps, the next time this will change, with a more concerted national focus on sport—an approach where the likes of Akhil Kumar who did not win are not forgotten.
In an atmosphere of relative optimism, a note of caution is necessary. India’s sporting system needs an overhaul and the years since Beijing have created a possibility for such a change to come about. However, unless the government, sports administr
ators, the IOA, and, finally, the corporates come forward to embrace Olympic sport, Beijing 2008 will remain an aberration. Private efforts such as the Mittal Champions Trust and Olympic Gold Quest must contribute more towards Indian sport. Tough questions need to be asked. What happened, for instance, to the Indian Army’s celebrated Mission Olympics and why couldn’t it be integrated with the larger national effort?
While India celebrates Bhiwani for what it has done to place boxing on the national map, it is time to replicate such achievements across the country. With boxing being a television-friendly sport and with 24-hour television channels multiplying almost daily, the media would surely embrace boxing if properly marketed and managed. With such a systemic overhaul, India can expect more medals in boxing in the 2012 Games and Vijender’s bronze will then have the significance of being more than an Olympic medal in the overall sporting context.
If India fails to take advantage of the fertile condition created by Beijing and its aftermath, its lasting legacy will have been confined to sports history books by the end of London 2012.
To finish off with an interesting story: A senior journalist had asked Abhinav on his return to India: ‘Is this Abhinav’s gold or India’s gold?’ Abhinav, epitome of political correctness, was quick to suggest that it was India’s without question. India has a real chance of winning medals in at least six disciplines at London, and if that happens, it will certainly be India’s gold for all time. However, if London 2012 doesn’t go to plan, Abhinav’s gold will forever remain his, a moment of individual brilliance lost amidst countless failures since independence.
Prologue
‘History consists of the corpus of ascertainable facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the monger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.’ So writes E.H. Carr in What is History? Carr goes on to define history as ‘an unending dialogue between the past and the present’; for him the chief function of the historian ‘is to master and understand the past as a key to understand the present.’ That key, though, is of use only if there is a lock it can fit into, secrets it can prise open, lost stories it can resurrect.
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