The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) as we know it today was formed in 19275 and a strong Indian contingent participated in the Amsterdam Games of 1928, winning India her first gold medal in hockey in the very first year of official participation. A precursor to the IOA had been formed in 1923 with the same name and it had served the Olympic cause for three years until 1926 before being shut down. At a time when nationalist sentiment in India was gaining pace, the Olympics were the only international arena where Indian-ness could be projected on the sporting field. India’s participation in the Olympics, from the 1920s, was an important watershed for the politics of colonialism. Indians went to participate in the Olympics on equal terms with the British, at a time when the colony was not even invited to the first British Empire Games (1930) (later Commonwealth Games) in Canada.6 Apart from Bermuda, British Guyana and Newfoundland, only the white settler dominions of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand were invited to the first Empire Games. The organizers even paid for the costs of athletes from the white settler dominions. The exclusion of non-white athletes from big colonies, despite India’s success at the Olympic Games, meant that the Empire Games were fraught with tension.7 The decision to prohibit India from competing at the first British Empire Games ignited angry demonstrations from both the pro-British aristocracy and the nationalist middle classes.8 In fact, it has been argued that it was partly the chance to participate in the Games that persuaded Prime Minister Nehru to keep India in the Commonwealth. The Games helped provide an arena for nationalist ambition and anti-colonial sentiment and while they extended imperial cultural power, they also offered an opportunity for the once subordinate and colonized to ‘beat the master at his own game’. This was now true for the African, Asian and Caribbean Commonwealth as it already was for the white settler dominions such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
This chapter documents the origins of Olympism in India and what it meant for India, for the British empire and for the global Olympic movement. As a movement led by nationalist elites and princes, the early story of Indian Olympism is also the story of a global league of upper-class elites, connected through patronage networks in Europe, who passionately pushed the Olympic ideal. Until the 1920s, the Olympics were largely a Euro-centric enterprise, but India’s embrace of Olympism in the 1920s was also simultaneously accompanied by a powerful push for diffusing the Olympic ideal in Latin America and South-East Asia. As this chapter will show, in all three cases, the same strategy was followed: the use of the global network of the YMCA and the co-option of local elites with enough private resources and European contacts to liaise with the Olympic movement’s centre. In that sense, the origins of Olympic sport in India that this chapter documents is a missing piece in the global story of Olympism. In a Europe divided by war, the IOC pushed this expansion as a strategy for survival and in India the ideal was appropriated by elite nationalists as a new avenue for self-respect, modernity and identity politics in the sporting arena. Olympism came to India as part of the processes of globalization, decades before the term itself became fashionable. But once it was initiated, it was appropriated by and became inseparable from the forces of nationalism to begin with, and the centrifugal regional tendencies thereafter.
‘100 YARDS ROUND A BEND’ TO ANTWERP:
PEASANTS ON THE ATHLETICS TRACK
To Sir Dorab Tata goes the credit of starting systematic Olympic activity on Indian soil in 1920. Son of the pioneering nationalist steel baron Jamsetji Tata, Dorabji was intimately involved in fulfilling his father’s idea of creating an indigenous and modern steel industry in India. He is widely credited with the establishment of the Tata Steel Company in Jamsetpur (now Jamshedpur) that became India’s largest private enterprise of the time. Simultaneously, in the great tradition of Parsi philanthropists in colonial India, some of his most valuable contributions came as a benefactor for sport, culture and education.9 Before taking an interest in Olympism, Sir Dorabji had already played a key role in the establishment of school and college cricket in Mumbai in the 1880s. Until the 1890s, the structure of cricket in Mumbai educational institutions was ‘crude and indefinite’. It was under Sir Dorabji’s initiative that the move to form the Bombay High School Athletic Association gathered momentum. Determined to eliminate differences of caste and creed on the sporting field, he wished to unite local clubs and inculcate notions of ‘fair play’ among young boys. At first, the success of the scheme seemed doubtful as there was a question mark over whether European schools would join such a union.
However, with the elite Cathedral School joining hands with Sir Dorabji, the Association came into existence in 1893 and initiated the famous Harris Shield tournament in 1896. It is now the oldest surviving inter-school cricket tournament in India and has served as a nursery for many Indian cricketers, most prominently Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli. It was in a Harris Shield game that Tendulkar first hit the headlines when he shared a world record partnership of 664 with Kambli. The Association also propelled the formation of cricket clubs in each school and ensured the appointment of coaches, which served the dual purpose of providing employment to veteran cricketers while also promoting the game.
A principal obstacle that Sir Dorabji and his men faced was the paucity of playgrounds in late 19th and early 20th century Bombay (now Mumbai). To redress this, a games fee was levied in most high schools, but in order to safeguard the interests of poorer students, those from modest backgrounds were exempted. With aristocratic and upper-class patronage coming their way, many schools revoked the levy in course of time.10
Sir Dorabji was largely educated in England and his interest in sport was a product of his Western upbringing, which exposed him to the period ideology of athleticism and the ‘Games Ethic’. The Games Ethic saw sport as a form of moral education and it was central to the ideology of English education at the time, in public schools and in universities. It was the key to the socialization in metropolitan Britain of future administrators and conquerors of the Empire.11 This concept of sport as an element of cultural power may also be set in the wider context of a strong theoretical literature emanating largely from the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose analysis of hegemony shifted the Marxist analytical emphasis from the economic base to the cultural superstructure. Gramsci showed how even severe deprivation could not easily shake the belief of the masses in values shared with the ruling groups and conditioned by cultural attitudes formed in the superstructure. In that sense, sport was central to the British imperial setting as a powerful but largely informal social institution that could create shared beliefs and attitudes between the rulers and the ruled while at the same time enhancing the social distance between them. Such was its power as a cultural edifice that Cecil Headlam could write of cricket in 1902:
First the hunter, the missionary, and the merchant, next the soldier and the politician, and then the cricketer—that is the history of British colonisation…The hunter may exterminate deserving species, the missionary may cause quarrels, the soldier may hector, the politician blunder—but cricket unites, as in India, the rulers and the ruled. It also provides a moral training, an education in pluck, and nerve, and self restraint, far more valuable to the character of the ordinary native than the mere learning by heart of Shakespeare or an essay of Macaulay which is reckoned education in India.12
This was the underlying philosophy behind the colonial policy of most sports. Of course, ‘it is wise to appreciate that there was no culturally monolithic response to attempts to utilize sport as an imperial bond… the nature of interpretation, assimilation and adaptation and the extent of resistance and rejection’ varied.13 But there is no doubt that the appropriated virtues of athleticism, as taught in the British public school, were in turn reformulated by the educated colonial middle classes and subsequently imposed upon the masses. In Sir Dorabji’s words:
Having been educated in my youth in England I had shared in nearly every kind of English Athletics and acquired a great love for them. On my return to
India I conceived the idea of introducing a love for such things there. I helped set up with the support of English friends, as General Secretary, a High School Athletic Association amongst numerous schools of Bombay, in the first place for cricket, and then for Athletic Sports Meetings which embraced nearly all the events which form part of the Inter-University contests every year in London.14
Adopting a game also meant adopting the entire paraphernalia of modernity that went with it. It didn’t just mean playing a foreign game, it also meant adopting European clothes, European rules and European notions of order and ‘fair play’.
Sport became the playing field where tradition and modernity met, clashed, and fused. A good example here is that of the Deccan Gymkhana. After the successful start of the Harris Shield, the idea was modified in Poona (now Pune) with the creation of the Gymkhana. The committee which ran the Gymkhana was not conversant with the details of managing such athletic meets on European lines and wanted to develop their sports programme more in line with established Indian traditions. Sir Dorabji, who was nominated the president of the Gymkhana, played a central role in the fusion of foreign and indigenous cultures that ensued. At the first athletic meet the Gymkhana organized, Dorabji found that the competitors were ‘all boys of the peasant class working in the fields and living off poor fare…’15 Naturally they had no idea of European rules or modern training of any kind. On attending a meeting of the Gymkhana, Sir Dorabji found that they were proposing to run their 100-yard heats round a bend without strings. This was because their sports ground was very small and the track was part of a rough unrolled grass field. To the peasants, running was running, but now it had to be undertaken under standardized and controlled conditions. In Sir Dorabji’s letters on the subject, preserved at the International Olympic Museum, the one thing that strikes the reader most palpably is his sense of wonder at this clash of peasant and Western cultures in the races at the Deccan Gymkhana.16
Other popular events included the long distance race of about 25 miles, rightly designated the Marathon. The peasants who participated were used to running barefoot on hard macadamized or dirt roads. Despite their lack of training and primitive conditions, the first three or four men ran the distance in fair time. As Sir Dorabji observed, their time ‘would compare well with the times done in Europe or elsewhere’.17 In 1919, some of their times were close to the times clocked in the Olympics. Suitably impressed, the Tata scion decided to send three of the runners, even at his own expense, to the Antwerp Games of 1920. This was the birth of India’s Olympic encounter and nationalist sentiment was at its core. As Dorabji Tata described his motives in a personal letter to the IOC president, Count Baillet Latour, in 1929:
I therefore offered to arrange for the sending of three of the best runners to Antwerp to run the Olympic Marathon at the next meeting, when I hoped that with proper training and food under English trainers and coaches they might do credit to India. This proposal fired the ambition of the nationalist element in that city to try and send a complete Olympic team.18
But the peasant athletes had little idea of what was required to participate in the Olympics nor of the standard of performance essential to qualify for any of the events. For instance, a key member of the Gymkhana, when asked what time he thought was standard for a 100-yard race replied that it could be anything ‘from half a minute to a minute’. He was ‘astounded’ when told that it was not a matter of minutes but rather of tenths of seconds.
Despite their naivety on the rules of modern sport, Deccan Gymkhana members were all fired by a strong nationalist imagination to send a team to the Olympics and started raising subscriptions to finance a team to Antwerp and set up an Indian Olympic Association. It seems that despite the enthusiasm of the organizers, public money at this early stage was not too forthcoming. This meant that India’s first tryst with international sport came to be financed largely by a combination of money from Tata, sundry princes, public collections—these increased substantially in later years—and interestingly, the Government of India. Apart from Tata’s own correspondence, a report published in the Statesman substantiates this point. The secretary of the Bombay branch of the proposed Indian Olympic Association sent the editor of the daily a letter appealing for support. The letter mentioned that a batch of six amateur athletes had been selected by a committee presided over by H.G. Weber and were soon to set sail for Antwerp by the steamer Mantua under the supervision of Dr A.H. Fyzee, India’s national tennis champion. The cost of the adventure was estimated at Rs 35,000 rupees of which only Rs 18,000 had been collected so far. Of this, the Government of India contributed Rs 6,000, apart from helping to secure a passage for the touring party. The great cricketer, the jamsaheb of Nawanagar, Ranji, was expected to represent the country at the Olympic Council in Belgium and he too had assured the team all possible assistance. The Statesman report ended with an appeal to the public to contribute to India’s Olympic cause. Contributions were to be sent to the secretary of the Indian Olympic Association located at Pragmahal in Bombay.19 The public response, though, was lukewarm. In the end, Sir Dorab personally bore a great deal of the expenditure, apart from taking a keen personal interest in selecting the participants.20 In return for his munificence, he was asked to become president of the proposed Indian Olympic Association and head the Indian cause at the meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Europe.
India’s hurriedly put together Olympic contingent hardly created an impression at Antwerp and, by extension, in India. A good barometer of this is the fact that the Olympic Games barely merited a mention in Indian newspapers. If it did, it was only in the nature of one-line news briefs. Sample this one-line update, probably inserted by a sub-editor at Amrita Bazar Patrika published from Calcutta (now Kolkata): ‘In catch-as-catch-can wrestling (featherweight) at the Olympic Games, Bernard (Britain) best Shimpe (British India) in 19 seconds.’21 Little else is known about the men who represented India at Antwerp but one thing is certain: the Indian athletes did not do well and did not catch the nationalist imagination as their backers had hoped. As is clear from the preceding paragraphs, the six or seven athletes who traveled to Europe had little idea about modern sport. Moreover, as Dorabji Tata recounts, there was plenty of discord among them, leading to a series of unpleasant incidents.22 Tata, who was not in good health, only visited Antwerp briefly to meet his colleagues at the International Olympic Committee. On account of an ailing health, he did not find time to witness the Games or meet the Indian contingent. India’s first appearance at the Olympics in Antwerp ended in sporting failure but the very fact that the athletes reached there was an achievement. At least, the journey had begun.
‘INDIA’ GOES TO PARIS
Not overtly concerned with the failure at Antwerp, India once again entered a team at the Paris Games of 1924 and this time the nine-man contingent was better organized. If the contingent for the Antwerp Games was more the result of a locally driven initiative, spearheaded by Tata and his experiences at the Deccan Gymkhana, by this time a truly national effort had developed.
The team for Antwerp had been selected largely by Tata after seeing some local runners in Poona. Now, for Paris, the Indian team was selected after rigorous screening of athletes at what was called an ‘Olympic Games’ in Delhi. These were the first ‘national’ congregation of Indian athletes in any organized form. In the words of A.G. Noehren, leader of the Madras (now Chennai) YMCA and secretary of the newly-established Indian Olympic Association, the Delhi ‘Olympic Games’ were a
unique contribution made to the country…and it is fair to state that these have been far more successful, have created a wider interest throughout the country and has produced more permanent results than any of us dared to hope for.23
In 1920, the money had largely come from Tata, the princes and the government. Back then it was largely an initiative driven from Pune and Bombay. But by 1924, the funding poured in from diverse regions across the country. The subscription drive undertaken to finance the
Games and the trips of the selected members to Paris was a success. A detailed breakdown of public funding for the Games shows the marked progress of the Olympic idea in the public mind by 1924. The Punjab Olympic Committee took the lead, contributing Rs 1,114, ‘which represented contributions made by Punjab school boys through 47 schools’. Punjab, in total, contributed Rs 2,500. UP, Bihar, Orissa and Madras contributed Rs 2,000 each while Central Provinces contributed Rs 1,500. Calcutta too contributed Rs 4,000 towards the fund.24 From the north to the west to the south, the Olympic ideal seemed to be catching the public imagination.
Besides, as before, the princes were also approached and the Maharaja of Patiala, the nation’s leading sports patron, contributed enough to fund the participation of the Patiala long jumper Dalip Singh. The army too was sounded out to contribute to the passage of its representative and the government was called upon to put in a sum of Rs 5,000. 25
That Olympic sports were gaining currency in India is evident from the manifold increase in press coverage between 1920 and 1924. Newspapers across the country carried news of multiple regional ‘Olympic Trials’ and the ‘Olympic Games’ at Delhi were reported thus:
Olympics-The India Story Page 3