Olympics-The India Story

by Boria Majumdar

  The similarity between instances of politicization of sports, though located in completely different conditions and timeframes, are difficult to miss. While in the case of soccer, Bengali sports patrons had sought to enlist British support, in the case of hockey almost half a century later the IOA and the IHF tried to garner international support—from the IOC and the International Hockey Federation (FIH). Such attempts to internationalize internal rifts have adversely affected India’s international standing, although this has hardly been recorded in India’s political history.

  In post-independence, hockey was one sport where the nation had a resounding global presence. However, with the rise of regionalism at the national level, concurrent with the move to astro-turf, India’s dominance soon gave way to subjection. And despite signs of resurgence in the last two years, culminating in the brilliant demolition of France 8–1 to qualify for the London Olympics, doubts persist over India’s ability to compete with the best European and Australian talent. Failure to qualify for the Champions Trophy and a string of unexpected defeats like in the hands of Malaysia at the 2010 Asian Games have raised a number of questions over the current team’s ability to compete at the highest level. While Michael Nobbs has brought about a sea change in the team’s mentality, London 2012 will be his ultimate test.

  For India, historically, hockey has been a vehicle to express both national and regional achievement and ambition, but in quite different ways. This chapter has expanded the political analysis of hockey in arguing that even at periods when performances were at a low ebb (1970–90), the sport was a site to settle regional discord. This was an uneasy phase, with the unwilling intervention of the central government in sport, evident from its apathy over checking Sikandar Bakht’s intrusion into the affairs of the IOA. Such apathy was part of the general official neglect of sport. With the government continuing to view sport as entertainment and leisure until the early 1970s, there were no incentives for bureaucrats or politicians to perceive a sporting portfolio as special. This had its roots in the government’s difficulty to understand the political significance of sport and it changed only partly during the organization of the 1982 Asian Games, when the Indian state put its full weight behind the popular appeal of sport.

  Even today, the dynamics of how sport and contemporary Indian society influence each other seldom finds mention in histories of modern India. Suffice it to say that sport has globally become crucial to modern human existence, having made itself indispensable to a world infested by terror. Sport and politics in any country are inextricably linked, and India is no exception. The sooner Indian social science recognizes this reality, the better. This will help provide a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of modern India.

  7

  ‘The Big Brother of Asia’

  Nehruvian India, Sports Diplomacy and a New Order

  You have certainly made New Delhi the capital of Asia.

  —Anthony De Mello to Jawaharlal Nehru after first

  Asian Games, 1951.1

  At the IOC museum in the sleepy Swiss town of Lausanne, the waters of the picturesque Lake Geneva wash up on the doorstep. On the other side of the Lake’s glistening waters one can see France—it seems to be in touching distance—and all around are mountains, of the kind made famous by Yash Chopra films and Swiss tourism postcards. Lausanne is the quintessential Swiss town: there is the famous medieval Gothic cathedral, the modern shopping arcades built around it and, of course, the lovely villas. Almost everything is within walking distance; Lausanne is self-contained, almost still in its calmness, content with its serenity and the artistic grandeur of nature as far as the eye can see.

  It also as far as one can imagine from the wheat-growing fields of Sansarpur, the crowded training grounds of Mumbai or the bustling dust bowls of Jhansi where India’s Olympic dreams were first nurtured. The IOC museum is now the buzzing headquarters of the global Olympic movement but it staggers the mind to imagine that this town houses the headquarters of a movement that now has more member-states than the United Nations;2 it fed on globalization decades before the term became fashionable.

  In many ways, Switzerland is the headquarters of internationalism— a casual walk around Geneva with its rows of UN offices and the famous banks is enough to confirm that—but the internationalism of the Olympic movement is of a different order. The Swiss tradition of banking, the presence of UN bodies, the NGOs, the Red Cross—are all rooted in the Swiss tradition of neutrality. The Olympic movement too draws from that legacy but it is fundamentally based on the power of an idea, an idea that has meant different things to different people. At the turn of the 19th century, when Baron De Coubertin dreamt up the idea of the modern Olympic Games, it was a Eurocentric enterprise that later developed a life of its own. In a world where European powers held sway over most of the globe, the notion of a brotherhood of sportsmen ignited minds, most strikingly in the colonies. We have already seen how the ideas of the aristocrat from France struck a chord with leading members of the Indian elite like Sir Dorabji Tata and G.D. Sondhi, who sowed the first seeds of the movement in India. The great Indian successes at hockey cemented the dream further and gradually disseminated the notion of the Olympics as a global showcase of national pride. In the colonies, the Olympics came to symbolize something deeper than a simple test of athletic skills. It was about identity and equality as much as it was about westernization and about modernity. From China to India, the Olympic movement in the early years in most parts of Asia was led by a coalition of elite gentry and proselytizing officials of the YMCA, supported by imperial officials who saw the Games as a means of ushering in modernity, as defined by the standards of the time.

  Participation was one thing, but what if the Games themselves could be brought to Asia? As early as 1913, the first miniature ‘Olympics’ came to be organized in Asia, early prototypes of what later became the Asian Games. The first prototype was the short-lived Far-Eastern Championship Games, largely an exercise limited to Japan, China and the Philippines. The second was the even more short-lived Western Asiatic Games, largely an exercise by India in concert with its immediate neighbours. Finally came the modern Asian Games, in tandem with the process of decolonization. All these events owed allegiance to the Olympic movement. They were mini-Olympics, sanctioned and coordinated in collaboration with the IOC to spread the Olympic ideal but they took on a deeper meaning in Asia. They were linked to the larger ebbs and flows of global and regional politics, with the newly emerging countries of Asia jostling for identity and space. Sport and the Asian Games became a medium for this struggle.

  India is central to this story. The Olympic movement had so caught the imagination of sports administrators in India that they played a pioneering role in building the Asian Games movement. It was an Indian initiative that created the modern Asian Games, and the first Games were held in Delhi. It was also intrinsically linked to the larger Indian self-image of being a major Asian power and the Nehruvian idea of India’s centrality in a new global order. Through the years of the freedom struggle, a belief in the inherent unity of Asian countries—‘a common identity stemming from a shared aspiration of their peoples for political independence from the West and rooted in their cultural and religious similarities’3—had been an article of faith among nationalist Indians. By the 19th century, figures like Keshab Chandra Sen and Swami Vivekanand had become important proponents of Asianism. After World War I, Rabindranath Tagore became one of the first major exponents of the idea that Asia, the continent of ‘eternal light’, was united by what he saw as a common spiritual bond.4 The theme of Asian unity had emerged most prominently in Japan after its victory over Russia in 1905. The cries of ‘Asia for Asiatics’ that emerged from Japan5 and the notion of a united Asia fighting against Western imperialism struck a chord among Indian nationalists, soon becoming a central tenet of Indian nationalism.6 As Nehru put it:

  Our struggle was but a part of a far wider struggle for freedom; the forces that moved us w
ere moving millions of people all over the world and driving them to action. All Asia stirs from the Mediterranean to the Far East, from the Islamic West to the Buddhist East…7

  By the 1920s, Gandhi, C.R. Das, Srinavasa Iyengar and M.A. Ansari had mooted the idea of an Asian federation to promote the cause of freedom in ‘Eastern countries’. The Congress Working Committee even passed a resolution, initiated by S. Satyamurthi in 1928, to take steps to form a Pan-Asiatic federation.8 Central to the Indian conception of a united and rejuvenated Asia was the theme of Indian political leadership. As Satyamurthi told the Congress Working Committee in Calcutta in 1928, he saw ‘nothing less for the future of India than that she should be the leader of a renascent Asia’.9 To Indian nationalists like the Congress Mayor of Calcutta, speaking at the same Congress session, a united India was to be nothing less than the ‘leader of an Asiatic Zollverein’.10 The intellectual foundations of these ideas were later to become the well-springs of Nehru’s much-hyped engagement with China in the first years after independence— the halcyon days of Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai—followed by the spirit of Bandung in 1955 when New Delhi sought to become the natural leader, not just of a newly emerging Asia but also of Africa.

  A number of scholars have focused attention on the legacy of the internationalist vein in Indian nationalism, its implications for the foreign policy of independent India and ultimately how this vision floundered in the face of global realpolitik. The Asian Games of 1951 are a missing link in this story, are a forgotten chapter in independent India’s early steps towards Asian prominence.

  The Indian initiative for the Asian Games was more than just about sport. The Games were deeply tied to the ideals, hopes and aspirations of Nehruvian India. They are also a useful prism to understand the struggle for Asian leadership that unfolded thereafter. By 1962, the Chinese invasion was to painfully shatter some of these dreams, but there was another forgotten battle that unfolded in that year. This was a silent battle between India and Sukarno’s Indonesia, which increasingly sought to assume leadership of the developing world. A conflict between Indian and local officials at the 1962 Jakarta Asiad led to Indonesia’s suspension from the IOC. Sukarno, who had been central to the Bandung initiative, responded with the now largely forgotten Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO). GANEFO, he declared, was directly linked to the spirit of Bandung,11 and to his ideas of a ‘new world of the brotherhood of man’, which he had outlined at the UN General Assembly in 1960.12 GANEFO was nothing less than a bid for the leadership of the developing world; sport was the conduit. This chapter will uncover some of the layers of the deeper story of the Asian Games, its links with Olympism, and the competitive politics of the newly independent nations of Asia that unfolded through the Asian Games.

  ‘THE ORIENTAL OLYMPIAD’:

  THE FAR EASTERN ASIAN GAMES

  The first off-shoot of the Olympics in Asia was the Far-Eastern Asian Championship Games (FECG) that lasted from 1913 to 1934. They have been variously described as the ‘first regional sports event ever to unite Asian athletes under the banner of Asian games’13 and the ‘first Oriental Olympic Games’.14 But the Far Eastern Games were not a truly Asian event, as we understand Asia today. They were restricted almost entirely to Philippines, Japan and China. India was the first country outside the East Asian troika to take part but that was as late as 1930 and only once. Indonesia was the second, taking part in the 1934 Games.15 Of the 10 occasions on which these Games took place, four were staged in Manila, three in Shanghai and three in Japan.16 As the first assemblage of an international sporting competition in Asia, it was an important marker and a precursor of what was to come but as the name implies, the Far Eastern Games was just that: about the Far East. Fan Hong, in her study, has emphasized the ‘Asian’ nature of the FECG17 but part of the problem is the definition of Asia itself. The answers to the question of what constitutes Asia constantly shift as one moves from countries in West Asia to Japan. Even today a term like ‘Asian’ in the street language of Australia, for instance, stands as short-hand for Chinese or East Asian, while in London, the same term connotes people of South Asian descent. ‘Asia’ itself is a constructed identity. The political idea of Asia has undergone many manifestations, slowly emerging to its present form.

  The FECG was defined by three main factors: the role of the YMCA as an agent of change; colonial politics and the forces of modernity and change as they clashed with tradition; and the larger struggle for self-assertion between Japan and China that increasingly came to dominate the Games until they folded up.18 As in India and Latin America, the YMCA played a crucial role in inculcating modern Western sport in China, Japan and the Philippines. It started what was later regarded as the first national sporting event in China in 1910. It was here that the meaning of sport as an agent of modernity emerged most starkly in the form of the athlete Sun Baoqing. A high jumper, he performed poorly in the initial stage because his traditional long pigtail kept knocking off the bars. One evening, an angry Sun chopped off the pigtail—central to his identity under Manchu law—and won the high jump championship the next day. As Fan Hong points out, his ‘action was more than a symbolic gesture: for men, the body became an icon of modernity, reconstruction and rehabilitation’.19

  Accordingly, when C.H. Robertson of the Tianjin YMCA and Elwood S. Brown acting for the Philippines YMCA put together the first Far Eastern Asian Games, at the heart of the model of this new ‘Asian’ Olympiad was the notion of spreading ‘Western morality and masculinity among the weaker Oriental people’.20 For the politically subordinated Chinese athletes though, competing at the first Games with the still colonized Filipinos was about nationalist assertion and inserting themselves into ‘the struggle that modernity posed for all the world’s nation-states’.21

  From the very beginning and De Coubertin was in the picture, and the YMCA and the IOC marched in tandem. Brown even wrote to the founder of Olympism reporting that the objective of his initiative was to train ‘oriental’ athletes to participate in the Olympics. The nomenclature itself left no scope for ambiguity. The first Far Eastern Games were named the Far Eastern Olympiad. But De Coubertin’s insistence on saving the word ‘Olympic’ only for the original championship meant the Far Eastern Olympiad changed names to become the Far Eastern Championship Games from 1915 onwards.22

  There was an attempt to expand the scope of FECG by inviting India to the fifth Games at Shanghai in 1921 but the huge distance and heavy costs put paid to the hopes. Thailand, Java, Malaya and Ceylon did not participate in Shanghai for precisely the same reason and the story was repeated in every subsequent instance of the FECG. There were also disagreements over who should or should not participate and the FECG remained confined to the original three nations.23 We have seen the great lengths to which the founders of India’s Olympic movement went to ensure Indian participation at the Olympics. The East Asian equivalent of it was just not as enticing or important in their view, at least at that stage. Moreover, the idea that Asia could emerge as a power bloc on its own, one that could redefine world politics, had still not gained the currency that it would gain later in the halcyon days of non-alignment and the Bandung Conference. That would come later, as the nationalist movements of Asia gathered pace and in the early years of decolonization. It is no accident that the first truly pan-Asian Games were organized in Delhi in the first flush of Indian independence and aggressively promoted as the harbinger of a new age.

  The FECG collapsed under the weight of the Sino-Japanese political rivalry. George Orwell was referring to Western sporting rivalries when he first wrote the lines ‘war minus the shooting’ to describe modern sport but he would have been right to describe Sino-Japanese sporting contests in the same words. From 1923 onwards, Japan dominated the Games and each defeat was like a knife prick at Chinese notions of honour and self-respect. As one contemporary Chinese account noted:

  The Republic of China, with three thousand years civilization…was defeated, sent away crying, by a small
nation of three islands! This is not only a shame—it is pathetic!…If we still have hot blood…Wake up, the healthy athletes of the Republic. Use your blood and freshness and move forward to take back your position on the international sports stage.24

  The sporting rivalry mirrored the intense political gulf between the two countries and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, followed by the installation of the puppet Manzhuoguo regime, brought things to a head. Japan demanded the inclusion of Manzhuoguo as an independent state in the FECG, which the Chinese delegates absolutely refused. For them, Manchuria was an integral part of Chinese territory, a festering symbol of Chinese humiliation. On 21 May 1934, the dispute forced the dissolution of the FECG itself after China protested against what it called a Japanese–Philippines conspiracy to push the proposal through.25 Japan, in concert with the Philippines, then tried to set up a new event called the Oriental Championship Games. It was to be hosted in Tokyo in 1938, and Manzhuoguo was to participate, but the gathering clouds of World War II ensured that the new championship never took place.26

  DRESS REHEARSAL AT DELHI:

  THE WESTERN ASIATIC GAMES

  The closure of the Far Eastern Games was closely followed by a similar experiment by Indian sports administrators: the Western Asiatic Games (WAG). It was a mirror image of the Far Eastern Games, except that it replicated the model with West Asian countries and India’s immediate neighbours. As the constitution of the organizing body made clear, it was to consist of the countries ‘East of the Suez and West of Singapore’.27 If the Far Easterners could have their own games, so would the West Asians. As Indian officials clarified in an official note to the IOC, the Far East was too far for the rest of the Asian countries and ‘in too disturbed a condition’.28

  The moving force behind the Games was G.D. Sondhi, Patiala’s man, who by this time virtually controlled the Indian Olympic movement. A former hockey player for Trinity College, Cambridge, and a cross-country runner for Punjab University,29 Sondhi was the son of a renowned barrister in Jalandhar and would later become the first Indian principal of Government College, Lahore.30 As described in the first chapter, Sondhi was the prime mover in the Punjab Olympic Association and with Patiala’s support, took over the mantle of Indian Olympism in the late 1920s.