The same applies to the Maharaja of Burdwan who has declined the Presidentship… It is going to be very difficult to find a prominent man in India who takes interest in running, jumping and this type of sport who can spare the time to come to Europe every year…I think that if the Maharaja Jam Saheb of Nawanagar could be persuaded to accept the appointment he would be the most suitable man as he is a good general all round sportsman.’51
Worried about the leadership vacuum, in October 1927, the IOA once again requested Tata to reconsider his resignation. His refusal to do so meant that by the end of 1927, Patiala was the lone candidate left in the race for the presidency. As he had so often done in cricket with his affluence, he successfully outmanoeuvred the others and posited himself as the saviour of the Olympic cause in India. Soon after assuming charge, he took the perfect diplomatic step in appointing Dorab Tata as honorary life president of the IOA in recognition of his efforts to promote Olympism in India.
The Patiala Era
Aside from Ranji, if there was one Indian prince who was genuinely interested in sport for its own sake, it was Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala. He first became interested in Olympic matters in 1923 when a Patiala athlete, Dalip Singh, failed to make it to the Indian Olympic team to Paris. As Anthony De Mello writes:
His failure was, apparently, because he had been unavoidably prevented from attending the trials, which had recently been held at Lahore. Dalip Singh appealed for help to the Ruler of Patiala, who not only helped the young man to get his rightful place in the team, but also ordered the formation of the Patiala State Olympic Association. 52
It was this incident that aroused Bhupinder Singh’s interest in Olympic matters and ‘already he was rehearsing for the role he was soon to play’.53
Soon after taking charge as president of the Indian Olympic Association, Bhupinder faced the difficult task of sending a team to the Amsterdam Games of 1928. With virtually no official funds available for the purpose, the task was an onerous one. It was as a result of his labours that India managed to send seven athletes and 15 hockey players to Amsterdam. As De Mello asserts, ‘Without the efforts of Bhupinder Singh it is more than likely that our hockey wizards would not then, nor for many years to come, have had the opportunity so completely to baffle the game’s experts from the rest of the world’.54 He goes on to suggest that the ‘self-imposed task of sending our Olympic team to Amsterdam was only one of many such undertaken by Bhupinder Singh. He was instrumental in sending teams to the Far Eastern Games in Tokyo (1929), the Olympic Games at Los Angeles (1932), the Western Asiatic Games at Delhi (1934), the Empire Games (Exhibition) of 1936 and also the Olympiad at Berlin in the same year’.55
But Patiala’s rise as the pre-eminent patron of Indian Olympism created serious resentment, not only among the other princes but also among the power players in the Indian Olympic structure. Efforts to discredit him and prevent him from appointing Punjab’s G.D. Sondhi as India’s delegate in the IOC continued. With the influence of Tata and the YMCA gradually decreasing, Sondhi, educationist and secretary of the Punjab Olympic Association, emerged as Patiala’s man at this early stage of India’s Olympic encounter. As early as 30 March 1931, Patiala urged the IOC president to allow Sondhi to stand in for Sir Dorabji at the IOC session in Los Angeles in case he was unable to attend. As he argued, Indian representation in the IOC session was crucial because ‘India is becoming more and more conscious of the importance of its position in international sport and we wish for as full a representation as possible on the international sports bodies’. India’s success at hockey had strengthened its case for greater representation at the highest decision-making body of the Olympics and Patiala pushed further, asking for a permanent place for Sondhi at the international Olympic table:
By winning an international event like hockey in the first year of its entrance into international competition, India has a good claim to have two members in charge of her affairs at the IOC…56
The IOC’s subsequent acceptance of Sondhi as the official Indian representative gave the formal seal to Patiala’s dominance in India’s Olympic affairs.
The one body that was most miffed at the rise of Patiala was the YMCA, which had played such an important role in the movement so far. Using his proximity to Count Baillet Latour, the IOC president, Henry Gray, national director of the YMCA for India, Burma and Ceylon, sent the IOC a scathing critique of India’s Olympic affairs on 28 December 1928. He lamented that Olympic organization was sagging nationwide and ascribed the loss of steam directly to Patiala’s ascent. Gray argued that the new leadership was not ‘representative’ and that control had passed to a very small group, chiefly three men in north India representing the Punjab and the army. He minced no words: ‘This leadership does not have the confidence of the entire country, is not familiar with conditions nor acquainted with the leaders in the other parts of the empire’. He felt that this was because most local provincial committees had lost their voting rights after failing to pay their dues to the national body. Gray specifically criticized the management of the team to Amsterdam, where Patiala had played a central role. He argued that the ‘masses continued to remain uninvolved in Olympic activity across the country’ and went on to suggest that unless immediately checked, the ‘top control of the movement will be secured by a semi-interested small group of people who do not represent the country as a whole’. Even the remedies he suggested were clearly directed at challenging the monopoly established by Patiala over India’s Olympic affairs: that a ‘really worthy’ successor be appointed to fill the vacancy left by Tata at the IOC and the restoration of the active leadership of the YMCA as the ‘best qualified body in India’ to lead the Olympic cause. 57
That nothing resulted from any of these complaints was because of the affluence and influence of the house of Patiala and the paucity of funds from other sources to promote Olympic sports in the country as a whole. Funding continued to be a crucial concern even for Sondhi, Patiala’s own envoy. As he wrote to the IOC president on 1 May 1935:
It costs me a great deal of money to attend the Olympic Games, which I regard as a work of national importance and national credit. I am therefore asking if it would be at all possible for you to write to Lord Willingdon, the Viceroy and Governor General of India, who is also the Patron of the IOA, to request him to recognize the attendance of the Indian representative on the IOC as a national service and to get me some monetary help from the Government for attending the Games.58
While Patiala was thus consolidating his position at the helm of the Indian Olympic Association, the IOC president repeatedly asked Dorab Tata to reconsider his resignation from the International Olympic Committee. Tata’s stature was such that the Maharaja of Patiala could not but support this suggestion on being asked. As Count Baillet Latour mentioned:
… after a year of troubles and inquiries, he (Patiala) wires to me that you are the only possible man. What else can I do than to say to you: Please come back, we all welcome you. What else can you do than to answer: I am coming back. Please do so.59
But Tata, by now 70 years old, steadfastly refused, citing his old age and ill-health.60 By stepping aside, he left the field open for Patiala’s complete dominance over the Indian Olympic firmament, a dominance that continued over the next few decades even after independence, as the subsequent chapters will show.
It can be suggested that Patiala, as he had done in cricket, had used his trusted weapon—patronage—to gain control of Olympic matters in India. He had not only funded Indian teams to various international meets but had also built a grand stadium in Amritsar to promote track and field competitions. Patronage worked well because at the time of his assumption of the office of president, the IOA was in a sorry financial state. Most provinces were in arrears in their contributions, some of them for a period of over two years. Rs 10,000 was all that was available to the IOA for sending the team to Amsterdam. Immediately before submitting his resignation, the YMCA’s Noehren drew attention
to the difficulties confronting the IOA:
It must be obvious that the whole success of India’s participation rests on a financial basis and that the IOA will be powerless to send even a small team abroad, unless all Provinces pay up their outstanding obligations and that this revenue be further supplemented by private donations.61
The fact that Patiala could sideline the YMCA so effectively in taking over Indian Olympism, despite the sterling role played by that organization in laying the early seeds of the Olympic idea in India and despite its influence with the IOC, is a measure of his success. The opposition, however, refused to give up the fight, borne out by the tumultuous story of India’s Olympic encounter all through the 1930s, a thread we pick up in the next chapter.
CONCLUSION
In his much acclaimed biography of Pierre De Coubertin, John J. Macaloon writes:
But in the final reckoning, his [De Coubertin’s] eyes remained too focused by the period in which he had forged an identity and the Olympics had been reborn, the 1880s and 1890s. He failed to see that the games had become not something different from, but something much more than, what he had intended. From a small public novelty of the belle époque, an athletic competition wrapped in a prepotent historical conceit and adorned with verdant social claims, the games had been transformed in four decades [by the 1920s] into a crucible of symbolic force into which the world poured its energies and a stage upon which, every four years, it played out its hopes and its terrors.62
A small part of this transformation was also enacted in India, which by the late 1920s had entered the Olympic family in earnest and where, as in other parts of the world, control of Olympic matters resulted in fascinating battles of intrigue and power play that defined and transformed established contours of the domestic political landscape. The uncovering of the story of India’s encounter with Olympism demonstrates beyond doubt that globalized sport was a potent reality in the early 20th century, from which colonial India benefited significantly. Acceptance of this truth will ensure that Indian historians bring our tryst with Olympism into their ambit of study to better understand the colonial past and dig deeper for the roots of popular culture at home and abroad.
This chapter has aimed to document the early history of Olympism in India and in doing so has attempted to demonstrate the already globalized nature of the colonial Indian elite. These men, educated in the West and inspired by the gospels of internationalism, helped to dramatically alter a narrow national outlook. Sir Dorabji J. Tata was one such. Following him, the Olympic torch passed into the hands of the Maharaja of Patiala and his trusted lieutenant G.D. Sondhi. Control of Olympic sport was, among other things, a time tested way of establishing ‘manly’ credentials. As Rosalind O’ Hanlon has argued, manly qualities:
…were displayed in very direct and physical ways: in the splendour of men’s physiques, the dazzle of equipage, the grim efficiency of their weapons and the magnificence of their fighting animals. Here, allies, troops, patrons, and rivals continually weighed and judged, challenged and affirmed each other’s possession of the manly qualities and competence deemed essential in the successful ruler, ally, military commander and warrior.63
Having already fashioned a stranglehold over cricket by the late 1920s, control over the nation’s expanding Olympic horizon allowed Patiala to establish himself as the patriarch of India’s sporting world. His monopoly was challenged on occasions but such confrontations, more often than not, proved feeble retorts rather than strong rebuffs. Yet, such attempts continued through the 1930s and 1940s and are as much a part of India’s Olympic encounter as the eight gold medals India won at hockey between 1928 and 1956. To these concealed and often profoundly intriguing side stories we turn in the following chapter.
2
‘Everyone Wants a Bite of the Cherry’
The Struggle for Control of Olympic Sports in India
Soon after its formation, the IOA became a battleground for various regional factions. This contest for control in the early decades of its existence cannot be understood in isolation. Rather, it was part of the larger story of establishing hegemony over the Indian sporting scenario, which included dominance over two of the nation’s foremost passions, cricket and football. By the late 1930s, Bengal’s dominance over football and Bombay’s dominance over cricket was relatively secure, a feature that did much to shape the fortunes of Olympic sports in India.1 Having ceded ground to the west and east over cricket and football respectively, the north led by the house of Patiala, and its trusted lieutenant G.D. Sondhi, was determined to establish a stranglehold over India’s Olympic affairs. At a time when British recognition and support proved to be pivotal in shaping the development of Indian football in the 1930s,2 Patiala was determined to enlist the support of the IOC in determining the future of Olympic sports in India. This explains the detailed updates sent by Sondhi to De Coubertin on the successful staging of the first Western Asiatic Games in Delhi in 1934.3
Just as the issue of control over the IOA had become contested by the early 1930s, the formation of the All India Football Association (AIFA) had triggered a bitter struggle between Bengal and the other Indian states for the control of soccer. This struggle, which intensified in 1930–36, was replicated in the realms of swimming, cycling, hockey and other Olympic sports, making the Indian sporting horizon of the 1930s a contested domain. Such discord between the regions continued into the 1960s and in part explains India’s poor performance at international sporting contests after independence in 1947.
Common to these power tussles is the fact that principal actors remain unchanged across sports. For example, while Patiala was a leading patron of cricket and the IOA, Pankaj Gupta led Bengal’s challenge in cricket, football and hockey. With each sports administrator having multiple designations and responsibilities,4 it was not uncommon to see the contest over football or cricket spreading to hockey or swimming and the other way round. Gupta, who had lost control over cricket to Bombay in the 1920s, got his own back in football in the 1930s. For Sondhi, on the other hand, control over the IOA was crucial to contend with the challenge posed by Bengal. The common denominator in all these skirmishes was a desperate effort to solicit the support of the international controlling body, making these encounters fascinating mini-battles of intrigue and power play. In each sport, as rival factions battled each other, support from the controlling international body provided legitimacy and so each faction lobbied hard for international recognition. In such a scenario, the IOC emerged as a sort of a neutral referee, whose patronage was pivotal in realizing the ambitions of regional sport satraps.
This chapter outlines some of the earliest skirmishes over Olympic sport in India to show that administrative and regional infighting has been a constant feature of Indian sport from the very beginning. These scuffles, highlighting the deep-rooted divides across regions, draw attention to the fragmented nature of the emerging Indian nation in the 1930s and 1940s and prove that beyond the oft-cited reasons of lack of infrastructure or failed commercialization, there are other deeper causes for India’s pathetic record in the Olympic Games for nearly a century.
‘SPECIAL’ PUNJAB:
PATIALA AND THE HUMOURING OF THE IOC
Even before G.D. Sondhi had replaced Sir Dorab Tata as India’s representative on the IOC, he emphasized to the IOC president the ‘special’ work the Punjab Olympic Association was doing to promote Olympic sports in India. Writing to the IOC in 1931, he suggested that the Punjab Olympic Association was engaged in a series of tasks, which were to be performed by individual national sporting associations. For instance, it single-handedly tried to promote swimming, volleyball, hockey, basketball and wrestling in the province, not waiting for the state associations to contribute to such efforts. In the same letter, he stressed the fact that most other Indian provinces were doing hardly anything to promote Olympic sports and weren’t organized enough to contribute to the promotion of the Olympic ideal. Bengal, he suggested, was the only other province t
hat had some ‘good organization’. ‘What we need is governmental support…If the government could sanction money to enable me to visit the headquarters of the backward provinces much more in the way of encouraging sports and athletics activity could be achieved.’5
Sondhi sent De Coubertin a chain of letters between January and May 1934, all aimed at impressing upon him the vigour with which Olympic ideals were being pursued in India. For instance, the first letter emphasized that it would be a cause of satisfaction for the founder of the Olympic movement to note that his ‘great example in founding the world international brotherhood of sport is being imitated on a small scale in the East’. Sondhi was referring to the Western Asiatic Games Federation, which was founded in 1933 and which organized the first Western Asiatic Games in New Delhi in March 1934. The Maharaja of Patiala as president of the IOA and the Viceroy of India offered support to the initiative, which eventually brought together India, Afghanistan, Ceylon and Palestine for a two-day sporting carnival. The letter ended with the request for a message of good wishes for the event from De Coubertin, ‘our revered founder of the modern Olympic Games’.6 The story of the Western Asiatic Games is recounted in detail in Chapter 7 but for now, it is pertinent to note that in letter after letter, Sondhi’s principle aim was clear: to win over De Coubertin and establish himself and Patiala as the keepers of the Olympic flame in India.
Olympics-The India Story Page 5