A story of what-ifs

Sometime in the 1980s, Ashwini Kumar, India’s then representative to the International Olympic Committee, bemoaned: “Sport is against our Indian ethos, our entire cultural tradition.” His statement stood vindicated at the time by India’s dreadful record in the Olympics. After all, we had to wait till 2008 Beijing for Abhinav Bindra to win our first individual Olympic gold medal. But, as Ronojoy Sen writes, in clinical, effervescent prose, in his new book, Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India , Kumar’s statements are no different from those made by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay on the Bengali male’s physique. “The physical organisation of the Bengali,” Macaulay had once said, “is feeble even to effeminacy… His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid.”

Both Kumar’s and Macaulay’s statements were, at their core, lazy efforts at stereotyping the average Indian’s sporting ability. They seek to pigeonhole India as a non-sporting entity, and, in so doing, produce precisely the kind of mischief that is symptomatic of such categorisation. They provide neither the rigour of historical analysis, nor a proper explanation as to why India, as a nation, has fared so poorly in sports. It isn’t within Sen’s gamut to explicate these reasons. Instead his book explores how sports became so critical to the country’s attitude and polity. By tracing the evolution of sport in India, Nation at Play not only illuminates the manifold problems that have plagued the development of Indian sports, but also busts the myths engineered by administrators who will look anywhere but at themselves for excuses.

Nation at Play is a story told in a predominantly linear manner. Sen begins his tale with the Mahabharata, which, he tells us, “has a special place in and has greatly influenced Indian culture.” But much of sports’ place in modern-day India is a product of the British rule, and it is in locating the authority of the colonial rulers in this development that Sen is at his finest. Britain’s influence, though, was incidental rather than intentional. “For the better part of the 19th century, with some notable exceptions like the public schools and missionary institutions,” Sen writes, “the British were not really interested in extending their sports to the Indians. The English clubs represented “a sanctuary of English life in an alien environment,” where one European team played against another and then fraternised over dinner and drinks.”

Sen points out that it was through individuals — rather than any specific policy of the colonial government — that sport came to implant itself in India’s consciousness. British educators and missionaries believed that sports were vital to the Indian people, particularly to the young princes, who inculcated with English ideals, could find the physical, moral and intellectual strength to rule their subjects. One such teacher was Chester Macnaghten, the principal of Rajkumar College in Rajkot, one of the first schools established for the princes. It was Macnaghten who introduced Ranjitsinhji to cricket.

And cricket, as is only natural, occupies a substantial place in this book. However, Ranji’s influence on the growth of cricket in India, as Sen writes, was rather limited. His autocracy, and loyalty to the British throne, meant that he was more of a great cricketer than a great Indian cricketer. Several other princes who were equally enamoured of the sport, though, did substantially more to contribute towards its progress in India. It was their early patronage that ultimately resulted in cricket turning into what Sen describes as a “national obsession”.

Even while cricket is integral to any historical analysis on Indian sport, Sen writes, there is life beyond cricket in India. Part of the thesis of Nation at Play is to show us this world. He does this, not by offering dreary details, but by focusing on the greatest stories of Indian triumph, and, on occasions, defeat too, which in conjunction tell us so much about Indian society.

The tales from the 1948 London Olympics — the first that independent India competed in — are rousingly told. There is a great pathos, for instance, in the story of the country’s football team, with the majority of its players still playing barefoot, losing 1-2 to France in the first round. The result, as Sen writes, could have been quite different had the Indian team not missed two penalties and not conceded the winner just seconds before the final whistle. Even in defeat, though, the team had made quite an impression, and received an invitation from FIFA to participate in the 1950 football World Cup in Brazil. Ultimately, India wouldn’t participate in the tournament, owing to a perceived lack of funds. It’s difficult to imagine what participation in the World Cup might have done to football’s future in India, but it certainly represents yet another case of an administration grossly bereft of vision. In so many ways, this is the classic story of Indian sport: quixotic and riddled with ‘what-ifs’.

(Suhrith Parthasarathy is a Chennai-based lawyer and writer)