Introducing "Nation at Play"

NATION

PLAY AT

A HISTORY OF SPORT

IN INDIA

RONOJOY SEN

INTRODUCTION

A FEW YEARS BEFORE LARGE PARTS OF INDIA ROSE UP IN rebellion against British rule in 1857, Horatio Smith wrote in the Calcutta Review of the Indian that he and the rest of his countrymen were most familiar with: The most superficial observer of Bengali manners must know that their games and sports are, for the most part, sedentary . . . [h]is maxim being that “walking is better than running, standing than walking, sitting than standing, and lying down best of all,” his amusements have to be for the most part sedentary.1

He then went on to list the sports that the Bengali engaged in. Besides the usual suspects like shatranj (chess), pasha (gambling with dice), cards, marble throwing, and kite flying, some distinctly nonsedentary sports were included on the list—wrestling, hadu-gudu (better known as kabaddi, a team pursuit game), gymnastics, and swimming. While Smith’s description of a Bengali neatly dovetailed with the prevalent British theories of dividing Indians into nonmartial—of which the Bengali was the prime example—and martial races, his list of sports would probably have held true for most of India.

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Long before the British entered the scene, Indians were involved in sports.

It’s not entirely by accident that the premier awards for sportspersons in India are named Arjuna awards and those for coaches are named after Dronacharya, both central figures in the great Indian epic the Mahabharata. In a civilization in which epics such as the Mahabharata still have a greater hold on the imagination than cut-and-dried historical narratives, this is perhaps not unnatural. But the nomenclature of the awards is also a clue to the hoary origin of organized sports in India. Difficult as it might be to imagine, there was life before cricket and the various games introduced to the Indian subcontinent by the British. Not all the ancient sports have survived, and some of them are perhaps lost forever. But many sports, such as wrestling, whose origins go back several centuries, still are played. And others, like cricket, which was introduced along with other sports by the British in the long nineteenth century, Indians have made their own.

This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive history of each and every sport ever played in India. That task is best left to an encyclopedia, of which there are some available. Instead, I look broadly at the evolution of sports and play, especially those that enjoy mass popularity in India, and what it says about Indians. The book is idiosyncratic to the extent that some sports are given more attention, by both choice and accident. Lurking in the background are two questions that will occur to any sports lover, or indeed any observer of Indian society. First, how and why has cricket come to dominate the Indian consciousness? Second, why has a nation of a billion-plus people failed so miserably in international sporting competitions such as the Olympics? There are probably some fairly straightforward answers to these questions, but I have chosen to take a long and sometimes tortuous journey to answer these questions. I hope my travel will reveal much more about Indian society than the response by a prominent sports administrator in the 1980s: “Sport is against our Indian ethos, our entire cultural tradition.”2 In any study of this sort, it’s best to sort out some issues of definition right at the beginning. This is not a pedantic exercise, since either an overtly expansive or a restrictive definition runs the risk of losing sight of the larger connections between sports and society. What does one mean by sports? And do we distinguish between sports and play? Or, indeed, between sports and activities that might be more properly classified as leisure or recreation?

While the study of sports has never been central to any of the traditional aca-

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demic disciplines, from very early on, anthropologists showed a keen interest in understanding the role of sports, particularly in traditional societies. One of the earliest such efforts was by Edward Burnett Tylor—sometimes referred to as the father of anthropology—who in an 1879 article, “The History of the Games,” looked at the evolution of various games both complex and simple.

Tylor’s lead was followed by American anthropologists like James Mooney and Stewart Culin, who were particularly interested in Native American games.3 Others cast their net in more remote corners of the world, the most notable being Raymond Firth’s lengthy article on a Polynesian dart match.

However, it is the 1930s’ classic, Homo Ludens (Man the Player), by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, that is best remembered today. For Huizinga, nearly every human activity had a “play element.” Play was “freedom” or a stepping out of ordinary or real life;4 play also was the creation of order by bringing a “temporary, a limited perfection” into the confusion of life.5 In the 1960s, the French anthropologist Roger Caillois critiqued Huizinga’s work to come up with a more refined definition of play: “In effect, play is essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and space.”6 Caillois introduced different categories of play, including agonistic games that are competitive and based on speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, and ingenuity.7 I also should mention anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s classic essay, “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” which peels away the many layers of a seemingly simple event to say profound things about Balinese society.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, sports studies became a legitimate field in its own right, with a proliferation of books and articles on different aspects of sport. I don’t want to go into this literature except to flag two influential authors of the genre. The sociologists Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning analyzed the evolution of sport in the context of a gradual “civilizing process” in which it gradually came to “serve as symbolic representations of a non-violent, non-military form of competition.”8 Another important figure is American historian Allen Guttmann, who, in his From Ritual to Record, was critical of Huizinga for lumping together all contests and calling them games.

Guttmann makes a sharp distinction between modern sports, beginning around the eighteenth century, and its premodern variants, such as the ancient Olympic Games, the Mayan or Aztec ball games, and the jousting tournaments of medieval Europe. Guttmann, using a self-confessedly Weberian

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framework, lists seven characteristics that make modern sports what they are: secularism, equality of opportunity, specialization of roles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization, quantification, and a quest for records. In language reminiscent of Max Weber in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Guttmann summed up the nature of modern sport thus: “Once the gods have vanished from Mount Olympus or from Dante’s paradise, we can no longer run to appease them or to save our souls, but we can set a new record. It is a uniquely modern form of immortality.”9 Indeed, Michael Mandelbaum took this argument forward by pointing out that sports has much in common with organized religion, since it provides “a welcome diversion from the routines of daily life; a model of coherence and clarity; and heroic examples to admire and emulate.”10 While Guttmann is right on many counts on the recent origins of modern sports, my book’s approach is more catholic, as I prefer to look at sports over the longue durée and attempt to trace connections between the premodern and modern. For my purpose, the definition of sports by the anthropologist duo of Kendall Blanchard and A. T. Cheska, which brings in a sport’s different elements—play, leisure, and, yes, work—works better. They define sport as “a physical exertive activity that is aggressively competitive within constraints imposed by definition and rules. A component of culture, it is ritually patterned, gamelike and of varying amounts of play, work and leisure.” This means I won’t be discussing cerebral games like chess, which is believed to have its origins in the Indian subcontinent; indoor games of chance like card or board games; and outdoor races or fights involving animals, which were very popular during the Mughal period and can still be seen in parts of India.

Indoor games like billiards, snooker, and carrom—a game that holds a special place in Indians’ hearts—are also outside the purview of this book. But I will unavoidably be discussing notions of the body, health, and recreation in order to get a more complete picture of the place of sports in India.

A few words are also in order on why I would choose to write a book on sports when India faces so many more pressing problems. The most obvious reason is the ubiquity of sports in India, as in most other societies. In perhaps what was the first serious work on sports, Joseph Strutt wrote: “In order to form a just estimate of the character of any particular people it is absolutely necessary to investigate the sports and pastimes most prevalent amongst them.”11 If we were to add up the numbers of hours the average

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person spends (or wastes, depending on one’s perspective) playing, watching, or discussing sports, we would be very surprised. Besides, huge sums of money and sponsorship are riding on sports in India, particularly cricket.

But the more compelling reason is that sports are inherently worthy of study for what is reveals about human nature and societies. As Huizinga put it, “All play means something,” going on to add, “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” And in the Indian context, as the historian Sarvepalli Gopal pointed out, “Indeed frequently—too often alas—it [cricket] is the brightest spot of the Indian scene. When we despair of our politicians, Sachin Tendulkar keeps up our spirits.”12 With these preliminary words, we can map out the plan and scope of this book. If, as Sunil Khilnani pointed out, the agencies of modernity—“European colonial expansion, the state, nationalism, democracy, economic development”13—have shaped contemporary India, the same is true of sports in India. I thus tell the story of sports in India through their evolution from elite, kingly pastimes and their encounter in successive stages with colonialism, nationalism, the state, and globalization. This book dwells, among other things, on two issues: first, the intensely political nature of sports in both colonial and postcolonial India and, second, the patterns of the patronage, clientage, and institutionalization of sports.

Chapter 1 traces the history of Indian sports from their mythological origins to around the time of the decline of Mughal rule in the early eighteenth century. For the origin and philosophy of sports in India, it’s best to turn to mythology rather than documented history. Just as with every other aspect of Indian life, the epics, particularly the Mahabharata, are indispensable to understanding the place of sports in India. This book thus begins with the Mahabharata. The elaborate training regimen of the Pandava and Kaurava princes under the watchful eyes of their mentor Dronacharya is the earliest example of the guru-shishya (teacher-pupil) bond intrinsic to the relationship between a coach and trainee. We also find in the Mahabharata many instances of agonistic competitions bounded by rules. Many of these are for prizes far greater than the medals or trophies of our times. They were literally life and death matters. But interestingly because these contests were so important, rules were strategically broken, often with divine sanction.

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Coming to history proper, the sport that has the longest documented history in India is wrestling, with references to it going back to at least the thirteenth century. Of course, sports like hunting have survived over centuries and have now become part of modern competitions in the form of shooting and archery. Sports like polo (known as chaugan to the Mughals) also go back several centuries. Then a whole range of sports like kabaddi—which for some years have been a part of the Asian Games—still hold sway over parts of rural India and have recently been marketed to a larger audience as a television sport. However, wrestling is different in that it not only has survived over time but still is very much part of the Indian landscape as well as international sports.

As with society, politics, the economy—and indeed everything else—the entry of the British first as traders and then as rulers from the mid-eighteenth century onward had a profound impact on India. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the fascinating story of this impact on sports and ideas of leisure in India and the complex response it evoked. The British brought with them to India their many organized sports, among which were football (or soccer in America), field hockey, tennis, badminton, golf, and, of course, cricket. British soldiers, along with administrators, sailors, and traders, began playing sports in India from as early as 1721, some thirty years before Robert Clive, the future governor of Bengal, won the decisive Battle of Plassey in 1757, which marked the beginning of the British conquest of India. During this early phase, there was little contact between the sporting activities of the colonizers and those of the natives. A crucial element in the diffusion of English games was the clubs, described as “free associations of gentlemen,”14 the earliest of which—the Calcutta Cricket Club—was formed in 1792, only five years after the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was established in London. Such clubs, which for a long time were the preserve of whites, spawned several clones set up by the Indian elite. If the clubs were the center of sports activity in India, the other locus was the British regiments and cantonments spread across the length and breadth of India. For British soldiers, the best way to keep themselves occupied and healthy in the unfamiliar climes of India was sport. Accordingly, I focus here primarily on cricket, hockey, and football, the three most popular sports in the first half of the twentieth century. I also spend some time on polo, since it was the one sport that the British picked up in India and took back to England. I include as well a chapter devoted to wrestling, partly

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because of its unbroken existence from pre-British times but also because of its intriguing evolution.

From the late nineteenth century and after the 1857 uprising, there was a conscious effort to get the Indian elites, particularly the royals, to play English games, especially cricket. At the same time, British administrators and missionaries worked hard at cultivating a Victorian games ethic in Indian public school students. Notable among them were men such as Chester Macnaghten, who taught Ranjitsinhji—who was the ruler of Nawanagar as well as a great cricket player—both Victorian virtues and cricket skills; and Cecil Earle Tyndale-Biscoe, a Christian missionary who introduced football and rowing to Kashmir. Interestingly, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, was as much influenced by the ancient games in Greece as by Rugby, the English public school, and its headmaster, Thomas Arnold, that was the inspiration for Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857).

Another important element in the spread and adoption of English sports in India was princely patronage. This is the subject of chapter 4. Just as rulers in ancient and medieval India sponsored tournaments involving men and animals, Indian princes, such as the maharaja of Patiala (a princely state in northern India), became patrons of cricket, football, and other sports. A few of them, most notably Ranjitsinhji and his nephew Duleepsinhji, were excellent cricketers who also played for England, but some, like the maharaja of Vizianagram, were in it for the power and influence that came with sponsoring and managing teams.

The popularity of English sports was by no means confined to the public schools, princely playgrounds, or club greens. Not only did the common man start taking up English games, but the playing field also became the arena for contesting British supremacy. In chapter 5, I look at how sports and Indian nationalism coalesced in strange ways. The cult of body building in late nineteenth-century Bengal that fed into revolutionary terrorism against the colonial rulers and the odd victory over British teams—the win of the Calcutta club Mohun Bagan over a British regiment in the 1911 Shield (the premier football tournament in India at the time) final being a notable example—was often seen as a triumph for the nascent Indian nation. The connection between a healthy body and nation building was made very early on by influential figures like the Hindu reformer Swami Vivekananda.

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INTRODUCTION

Beginning in the 1920s, India also started sending a team to the Olympics, making it the first British colony to do so.

If nationalist euphoria was very much in evidence during Mohun Bagan’s victory in 1911, politics infiltrated the playing field in a different form, when race, caste, and, most controversially, communal identities clashed on the maidan (an open area or space in a city or town). Chapter 6 examines the two most significant examples of this sort of politics. One was the controversy over the Bombay Quadrangular (later the Pentangular), the most popular cricket tournament in preindependent India played by teams representing different communities, and the other was the spectacular rise of the Mohammedan Sporting Club in Calcutta, both occurring during the 1930s when the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League were bitterly opposed to each other.

Besides India’s relatively recent success in international cricket, hockey was the only sport in which India was the unquestioned world champion for several decades. Even more remarkably, India fielded a hockey team in the 1928 Olympic Games—nearly two decades before Indian independence—and won the gold medal. The early history of hockey, documented in chapter 7, is replete with remarkable individuals like the country’s first real sports star, Dhyan Chand, and India’s first hockey captain, Jaipal Singh, a tribal from Jharkhand (in eastern India), who was educated at Oxford and later become a leader of the Jharkhand movement.

Wrestling can claim to have the longest lineage among Indian sports if one goes back to the epics and medieval texts. It is also the only sport besides hockey in which India won an Olympic medal in its early years as an independent nation. There was a definite connection between wrestling and the efforts of physical regeneration in early twentieth-century India. Wrestlers like the legendary Gama enjoyed the patronage of different princes and was regarded as a “world champion” during his playing days. Others like the Bengali wrestler Jatindra Charan (Gobor) Guha self-consciously touted wrestling and physical culture as a means to nation building. Gama and Gobor are the subjects of chapter 8.

Chapters 9 to 12 take up the story of sports in independent India and trace the complex story of how cricket became the dominant sport, despite both the great popularity of football and hockey in the 1950s and 1960s, and the success of sports stars in individual sports like tennis and badminton. The

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story of cricket’s dominance and the place of India as the de facto center of world cricket is tied in many ways to some remarkable successes like India’s unexpected winning of the 1983 cricket World Cup and the ways in which television and radio coverage worked to the sport’s advantage. It also had something to do with the identification of the Indian elites with cricket. Now cricket has become much more than a sport in India, combining commerce, entertainment, and politics. Indeed, along with Bollywood films, cricket is the only glue that binds the diversity of India. During this period, though, the country lost its dominance in hockey, in which it had won a string of Olympic medals right up until 1980, and did not place in the top one hundred countries in football. In the Olympics, even a single medal is usually cause for great celebration. At the same time, India’s traditional sports like wrestling and more elite sports like shooting have been going through a renaissance of sorts.

This section of the book tries to understand the place of sports in contemporary India and India’s relative failure as a sports nation, despite its economic success in the past decade. In doing so, I look at several issues: the link between sport and nationalism—what George Orwell once memorably described as “war minus the shooting”—which rears its head particularly in India-Pakistan contests; the economics of sport, in terms of both its revenue generation and its opportunities for sportspersons; the role of the state, which includes public-sector companies and the armed forces as patrons of sports, plus the quality of sports administrators; the decentering of sport, with nonurban centers producing sports stars and champions; the place of women—absent from much of the story—who are doing increasingly well in sports; and the role of spectatorship at a time when most viewers are watching games on television and are not physically present at the field.

As recently as a decade ago, the entry on India in a handbook of sports studies could claim, though not entirely accurately, that the “sociological study of sport in India essentially remains virgin territory.”15 There are several books on the history of cricket in India, one of them going back as far as 1897. The other sports are, however, woefully underrepresented, with some notable exceptions. India’s tryst with the Olympic Games, which goes back to 1920, has been documented in a few books. We also have, of course, several autobiographies and biographies of Indian sportspersons, mostly again of cricket players. In recent times, many more books on and by noncricketers have been

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written. It is true, however, as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed out, “social historians of India have paid more attention to riots than to sports, to street-battles with the police than to rivalries on the soccer field.”16 Even though cricket figures prominently in my book, I’ve made every effort to look at the other pieces of India’s sports puzzle. Luckily, there are several fine books on the history of sports in other countries, particularly England, which are inspirational role models. The triumphs and tragedies of sports heroes as well as sports organizers and enthusiasts, many of them largely forgotten, are documented in the following pages. Some of them merit separate biographies, a challenge that, I hope, will be taken up by others. Admittedly, some games are given short shrift because it is virtually impossible to do justice to each and every sport in a slim volume like this. Fans of golf, horse racing, and table tennis, to name just a few—all of which are played and followed with great interest in India—will no doubt feel neglected.

One word of caution, though. Despite being a keen follower of many sports, I never graduated beyond games in the neighborhood park or interhouse matches at school. But that is not something I’m particularly ashamed of. If it weren’t for people like me, where would sports and the sports industry be? The final word should perhaps be left to the Sri Lankan writer of an intriguing novel on cricket: “Sport can unite worlds, tear down walls, and transcend race, the past, and all probability. Unlike life, sport matters.”17