At a time when historians around the world are increasingly recognizing global stories of Olympism as crucial to understand the working of societies, there has been no detailed history of India’s Olympic experience. This is a glaring anomaly for a country that became the first colonized nation to join the Olympic movement, one that dazzled the world with its early hockey wins and one whose Olympic history contains within its folds hitherto unknown chapters of the development of Indian nationalism and identity. So far, however, historians of Indian sport, or more specifically historians of Olympism, have met an insurmountable barrier as they sought to decipher the Indian story. To unlock the past and to achieve what Carr has outlined above, the historian needs to have at his or her disposal the best and most authentic of sources, that is, letters, artefacts, photographs, correspondence and private papers containing information on the history of the Games in India, from its inception in the early 20th century. Yet, until now, little material of this kind has been available in the public domain. All that we have had so far are memoirs of a few hockey players—Dhyan Chand, Aslam Sher Khan—and books written on the achievements of some rare Indians on the Olympic stage by sports writers.1 By themselves, these are invaluable, but they are not enough to piece together a comprehensive and complete history.
In that sense, this monograph is unique because it is built on an as yet virgin archive of Indian history. For the first time we had unlimited access to the hitherto inaccessible ‘official’ archive of the International Olympic Committee at the IOC museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, an archive that contains virtually every piece of correspondence ever exchanged between Indian sports, administrators and the IOC, alongside much more. As such, it was like hoping to find Alladin’s lamp and finding not just the magic lamp, but Alladin’s cave as well. The treasure trove of material we uncovered in the vaults of the IOC forms the nuts and bolts of the story that we have pieced together.
Some things are destined to happen. This monograph was one such. Neither of us started our academic careers as historians of Olympism or the Olympic movement. Yet, in our view, this monograph has come together with consummate ease; not because we have some special expertise, but because the material we found locked up in the archives was in part self-explanatory. Ticking away in the air-conditioned chambers of the Olympic museum, exciting but forgotten moments of Indian sport leapt up at us from the dusty files. Filed away with Swiss precision, all they needed was meticulous analysis. The material was so complete, we are confident that this is not only the first, but also the most eclectic history of India’s Olympic encounter. How it came together is in itself a lesson in the vagaries of history writing, the beauty of the chance encounter that leads to vital clues and the element of good luck that all historians sometimes need to uncover the right trail.
ON THE IOC’S TRAIL: DISCOVERING THE ARCHIVE
The book is entirely the product of a decision in the mid-1990s by the International Olympic Committee to set up a public archive for scholars, in the guise of the Olympic Studies Center at Lausanne, Switzerland. It was a rare gesture for an institution of this nature. The IOC has also taken the initiative to encourage scholars from around the world to make use of the resource. Funding scholars to dig into this fascinating archive, the IOC has tried to live up to the declared ideals of the centre, to ‘preserve and disseminate the collective memory of the Olympic movement and to coordinate and promote research, teaching and publications about Olympism’. Yet, no Indian scholar had ever dug into the centre’s resources before. This is not surprising since the IOC’s fellowship programme is of rather recent vintage and not too well known outside sport history departments in the West where Olympic studies is now among the fastest growing disciplines. For us, it boiled down to a fortuitous, chance suggestion to apply for the fellowship. I was teaching at the University of Chicago in early 2004 when John Macaloon, one of the leading scholars of Olympism, suggested that I apply for the fellowship. It tickled my curiosity, as it would add to the cricket and football stories that I had retold in print over the years.
As fellows of the museum, with total access to the archive it has been a matter of great satisfaction personally to be able to document this story. We are extremely confident that as more Indian scholars find their way to this unique archive in the future, our efforts will be revised and subsequently improved upon.
LAUSANNE: THE THRILL OF DISCOVERY
By the banks of Lake Geneva, the IOC Museum makes a wonderfully picturesque setting. It is post-card Switzerland: the Alps all around, rural France across the lake and the pristine mountainous air. Could it be possible that this building, Juan Antonio Samaranch’s last gift to the IOC before he quit office, situated so far from the dusty playing fields of India, contained the real answers to the riddles that plague India’s Olympic story? Why did Indian hockey rise the way it did? Why did it collapse equally suddenly? Why does India not win Olympic medals? What indeed does India’s Olympic progression tell us about the nature of Indian society and politics and the manner in which these have evolved?
Soon after my formal introduction to the staff of the Studies Center in December 2004, I casually inquired into what the archive contained on India. Much had not been written on the subject: except the occasional tribute to our rare Olympic achievers or the scathing critiques following dismal outings at various Games, literature on India at the Olympics is minimal. The answer I got from the museum staff was startling. I was told there was hardly anything that would be of significance to an Indian historian in what is the world’s largest repository of Olympic records. It was a reality check, and for the first two weeks I was left with nothing to do but read the voluminous tomes of the IOC’s Executive Council minutes through the years. The Indian presence in these records was limited to saying a mere ‘yes’ or ‘no’ every two or three years. With my search looking like a wild goose chase, I had almost given up by the end of the second week. I had gone to uncover India’s Olympic history but there seemed no such thing in the records. Feeling deflated, I was preparing to use the remaining time on my fellowship as an opportunity to explore Switzerland.
Then, like so often in academic research, pure chance brought us the vital clue that we needed. Nuria Puig, a very senior IOC employee, casually mentioned over coffee in the first-floor restaurant that I should read some of the letters exchanged between the IOC’s successive presidents and the heads of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA), for they made fascinating reading. After two weeks of being told that there was absolutely no specific material on India, after two weeks of sympathetic glances from the IOC’s librarians, this casual remark was like raindrops after a long drought. This was the precisely the kind of thing I was looking for and hadn’t found. Nuria hadn’t even finished her sentence before I dragged her off to the library to show me some of the letters. What opened up before me was a virtual treasure: an entire cabinet full of files containing memos, letters and documents exchanged between the IOC and Indian sports administrators over the last 75 years. There were thousands of these documents and god knows how many more cabinets inside. I was suddenly aware that here, right in front of me, was the material which would help us piece together the story of India’s Olympic encounter. The librarians had not pointed these out to me simply because this correspondence had been filed away as part of normal bureaucratic procedure. No one had ever asked for an Indian collection, so a dossier had never been created.
Reading some of the material over the next three weeks, I realized that it was impossible for me to finish researching the entire collection in the time I had at Lausanne. Going back was an option, and I have gone back on numerous occasions since, but what a project of this size desperately needed was a collaborator, a co-author who would finish researching the archive and help piece the story together.
It was then that I happened to bump into Nalin Mehta on a sunny Melbourne afternoon while on a fellowship at La Trobe University. He was just finishing his research on the impact of satellite televisi
on on the Indian polity and was, as luck would have it, in the process of applying for a fellowship to visit Lausanne to study the role played by the army in the development of Indian sport. It was a fortuitous meeting and the synergy took little time to develop. Once Nalin too won the IOC fellowship and finished scouring the archive, it was only a matter of time before we started writing.
It is essential to declare at the outset that two fundamental motives inspired our decision to move ahead with the project. The first was the determination to contribute to the growing corpus of research in Olympic history, a discipline much developed in recent years. The second was to understand the Olympic story against the backdrop of what was happening inside a colony fighting for independence and then in a young, independent nation trying to establish its post-colonial identity in the world. This motivation has subsequently emerged as the central theme of the book. The thread running through the entire book is the politicized nature of India’s Olympic encounter. The Indian Olympic story, the book demonstrates, is also a story of Indian politics, of power equations, regionalism and the failed commercialism of Olympic sports vis-à-vis cricket.
A HISTORY OF INDIA’S OLYMPIC ENCOUNTER: A POLITICAL STORY
In his justly celebrated essay on the dynamics of the Balinese notion of cock-fighting, anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously noted: ‘The Balinese cockfight is—or more exactly, deliberately is made to be—a simulation of the social matrix, the involved system of crosscutting, overlapping, highly corporate groups—villages, kin groups, irrigation societies, temple congregations, “castes”—in which its devotees live. And as prestige, the necessity to affirm it, defend it, celebrate it, justify it, and just plain bask in it…is perhaps the central driving force in the society.’2 By transposing the terms ‘cockfight’ with hockey or cricket and ‘Bali’ with India, one may in essence capture the significance of sport in the subcontinent. India’s cricket, hockey and football teams represent India; and not Bengal, Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu. Sport is perhaps the most visible site for the playing out of the erotic passions of nationhood, where being Indian matters more than anything else. This has become marked in recent years with the passionate display of the tricolour during international sports tournaments.3 If only for a few weeks every year, Indian sports fans, from home and the diaspora, celebrate the cardinal truth of being ‘Indian’. For a country obsessed with history and transformed by its well-spread post-colonial diaspora, the need to find a common barometer of ‘Indian-ness’ may seem unlikely, even unnecessary. But look beneath the surface and the central role of sport in fashioning a common national identity is difficult to doubt.
Indians across the country, it is known, learn varied versions of their history in school textbooks. While for school kids in the east it is Subhas Chandra Bose who led the nation to freedom; in pockets of the west dominated by lower caste groupings it may be Ambedkar or Phule; in the north Indian heartland it is Gandhi. Modern textbooks of political history in Bihar even extol Lalu Prasad Yadav as a social reformer, while Mayawati may peer out of certain textbooks in Uttar Pradesh. India’s plural education system is the playing field for as many political ‘histories’ as there are claimants and political masters. In stark contrast to this peculiar situation, most discussions of ‘Indian’ hockey/cricket and issues governing their fortunes are still relatively uniform and are mentioned almost daily in the national/local media. The intersecting vectors of politics and commerce continually influence sport in India but there is no doubt that sport itself is intrinsically linked to ideas of identity, of self and of nationalism.
Yet, in the vast literature on Indian history, sport, one of the most important cultural practices of the 20th and 21st centuries, finds little mention. The reason behind this absence, not only in the Indian context but worldwide more generally, scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty have pointed out, are varied and complex. For Chakrabarty, the contours of the (British) social history or ‘history from below’ movement, which influenced much of the writing of Indian social history and into which sports scholars wanted to be integrated, had certain built-in intellectual priorities. Sporting events, he argues, were seen as less important than strikes or some other act of overt class conflict or class resistance.4 Chakrabarty is thus of the opinion that even though the defenders of sports history in the 1970s and 1980s perceived it as central to the business of social history, it ‘never quite became a mainstream subject to historians who saw themselves as engaged in that trade’.5
If we advance Chakrabarty’s argument to the present, it can be argued that historians can hardly attempt to understand the workings of contemporary Indian societies without bringing sport or cinema into their ambit. Cricket, it is widely acknowledged today, is the single most important realm for the articulation of Indian nationalism. It is for this reason that cricket often obscures the importance of other sports, pushing them to the backburner in studies attempting to understand contemporary India’s sporting contours. However, as this book will demonstrate, a study of India’s Olympic encounter not only enriches our understanding of the present, it also enhances the comprehension of our nationalist past by introducing nuances that conventional historical narratives have tended to gloss over.
It is important to reiterate that the story of Indian cricket cannot pass as the story of Indian sport. Cricket in contemporary India is imbued with a frenzied sense of hyper-nationalistic jingoism and is certainly one of the strongest of contemporary Indian allegiances. It is also true that nothing beyond international cricket or a hyper commercialized spectacle like the Indian Premier League matters in India. Regional domestic competitions like the Ranji and Duleep trophies are almost in disarray, with no fan loyalty whatsoever, deflating the argument that India is a cricket-crazy country. If only India had done well in Olympic sports, as was the case with hockey until the 1960s, the popularity and commercial currency of international cricket would surely be under threat. Yet, stories of failure on the Olympic stage, often for reasons unconnected to sport, help us understand post-colonial India better, an attempt that lies at the very heart of this effort.
To wrap up, when we formally proposed to our publishers, that we wanted to document this hitherto untold story, their initial reaction was one of surprise. ‘How long can it be? One chapter? How much can there be to the story of India at the Olympics?’ they asked. Did it even merit a book? Clearly, they were converted to the cause. We now leave it to our readers to make up their minds on the matter.
Boria Majumdar
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 w
ith 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.
Olympics-The India Story Page 2
