Olympics-The India Story

by Boria Majumdar

  THE ‘NATIONAL’ GAME:

  WHAT WAS SPECIAL ABOUT HOCKEY?

  Why was India so good at hockey in those early years? Commenting on the Indian success at Amsterdam, A.B. Rosser, the manager, declared in his report, ‘The success of the Indian team was due to positional play, combination of forwards with halves, likewise of halves with backs, the tackle back, quick movement and first time passes, deft stick work both in attack and defence, frequent use of hand to stop the ball and the feint to baffle the defence’.58 From this description it is evident that the Indians were sound in the basics and adept at tactics and strategy.

  The managers of the 1932 Indian touring team further developed Rosser’s analogies. They argued that because the grounds in India were hard, it allowed the Indians to develop a fast game. Also, the Indians were supple of wrist, making possible the dribble. They played in light footwear, which enabled quickness of movement. Swami Jagannath, a player, organizer and subsequently a professional hockey umpire, offered a similar explanation. ‘The chief factors which contribute to the success of the Indians in the field of hockey are the extensive plots of land available as playing fields, heavy rainfall over only a short period of the year giving generally dry and hard grounds, the light physique of the people and the supple movements of their bodies.’59 The comparatively low cost of practice was another reason behind India’s supremacy in world hockey.

  Writing in the 1960s, C.D. Parthasarathy argued that it was only when a series of rule changes were introduced and a series of amendments passed that India’s superiority was challenged. For example, the introduction of free hit for ‘bully’ made skill secondary. Also, the new penalty corner rule introduced in the 1950s made goal scoring easier, rendering ineffective the natural Indian flair with the ball. Gradually, crisp, sharp, short passes and the dribble, a feature of India’s play, gave way to long and powerful hits and first-time passes. Soon, power counted more than precision and the Indians lost out, unable to counter the innovative techniques of the Europeans.60

  However, none of these explanations convincingly clarifies the reasons for India’s early superiority or the subsequent decline in Indian hockey. For, even after the rule changes were introduced, the Indians won silver at Rome in 1960 and gold at Tokyo in 1964.

  Rather, it can be suggested that the most striking feature of the successful Indian tours in 1928 and 1932 was the absence of divisions among players or officials on lines of class, caste or economic privilege.

  In 1932, the entire touring party with the exception of G.D. Sondhi stayed together at the Olympic village. This also included the president of the IHF, A.M. Hayman. In his review of the tour, Hayman singled out this sense of camaraderie and fellow feeling among the players and officials as the central factor that contributed to India’s continuing dominance in world hockey. He ended his report with the words:

  I have been with the Olympic team throughout the tour. I lived with the players at the Olympic village at Los Angeles. I entered into all their frolic and fun. I have never lived with better companions. At all times and in all places everyone of them behaved as a true sportsman and gentleman.61

  It was this feeling of camaraderie among players that held the Indian team together during their amazing run of six consecutive Olympic gold medals in 1928–56 and partly explains why India could do it in hockey but was unable to scale similar heights in cricket or football in the 1930s–40s.

  It is perhaps worth suggesting that the camaraderie was a product of the players’ backgrounds and professions. Unlike in cricket, where the princes always held the upper hand because the players were dependant on them for patronage, in hockey the players were mostly professionals in other fields, with an innate sense of discipline governing their lives. Hockey players who weren’t part of the Army were professionals employed by institutions like the Railways and on most occasions had graduate degrees.

  A study of the class composition and professions of the players of the 1932 Indian Olympic team helps substantiate this point. While the captain Lal Shah Bokhari was a member of the Punjab Provincial Service, goalkeeper Richard Allen James worked for the Port Commissioners in Calcutta. Eric Penniger, who captained the team in the absence of Jaipal Singh at Amsterdam, worked for the North Western Railway, as did his second-in-command Arthur Charles Hind. Others employed by the Railways included Carlyle Tapsell (Bengal Nagpur Railway), William Sullivan (Central India Railway) and Richard John Carr (East India Railway). Dhyan Chand, as mentioned earlier, was a Lance Naik in the Army while Roop Singh, Muhammed Jaffer, Aslam Bagga, Masud Minhas and Gurmit Singh were either in college or had just finished their bachelor’s degrees from well-known institutions like Chief’s College or Islamia College in Lahore.62 In hockey, there were none like Lala Amarnath or Mushtaq Ali who could rise to prominence because the Maharaja of Patiala and the Nawab of Bhopal accorded them patronage.

  In sharp contrast to the rosy picture painted by the hockey team, the Indian cricket team which toured England in 1932 was a divided house. The sharply divided nature of the team is portrayed in Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket:

  The team that was initially united under Patiala’s leadership was deeply divided by the end. Soon after the tour was over, Vizzy donated a pavilion to the newly built Ferozeshah Kotla Stadium in Delhi, naming it after Lord Willingdon. These efforts to curry favour with the Viceroy were successful, and though Patiala was elected chancellor of the Chamber of Princes in 1933, his influence over Indian cricket was on the wane.63

  Mihir Bose also draws attention to this deep-seated internal discord in his seminal work on the history of Indian cricket:

  Willingdon’s hostility to Patiala had coincided with the waning of the latter’s cricket power. He had been the kingmaker of the 1932 tour, but in the winter of 1933–34 he was pushed to the sidelines. The emergency Board of Control meeting in Delhi on 1 May 1933 showed that the associations, which had once survived because of his generosity were now turning against him.’64

  That the scenario had not improved is evident from a letter written by Mushtaq Ali to his mentor C.K. Nayudu when on tour in England in 1946. Written on 1 August 1946 from the Carlton Hotel in Taunton, the letter goes thus:

  …Now Sir I must tell you something from this end, how Indian cricket is and how we are doing in this country. In my humble opinion this tour is worse than 1936, the same old trouble: no team work at all. Every member of the team is for himself. No one cares for the country at all. Amarnath is the cause of all these things. Pataudi is a changed man… and is very much against the Indian players. C.S. Nayudu plays in the team not as a bowler but as a fielder only…Whenever a county player is set for a big score you will find the Indian captain back in the pavilion. As a captain he is worse than a school boy…I am very much fed up with him as are the other members of the team. Believe me Sir, the second Test match was ours after such a nice start. We collapsed because he sent in Abdul Hafeez at No 3 instead of going in himself…I think Merchant is a much better captain than this fellow.65

  In football too the picture was similar, evident from the tremendous infighting between provincial football organizations in the run-up to the formation of the All India Football Federation in 1937. It started when the Indian Football Association (IFA) based in Calcutta, unhappy with its role as a regional institution, aimed to govern the development of football in the whole country, posing as the governing body for soccer in India. It was as a mark of protest against such intentions of the IFA that other state associations for soccer formed the All India Football Association (AIFA) in September 1935. The formation of the latter led to a battle for supremacy between the Indian states, Bengal on the one hand and the western and northern states on the other. Unfortunately for Indian football, players too were drawn into this conflict and were forced to take sides. When the Chinese Olympic team visited the country for a series of charity games before the Berlin Olympiad of 1936, there was a huge dispute over the venues and also over th
e players picked to represent India against the Chinese team. That there was an overwhelming majority of Bengali players in the team did not go down well with soccer players from northern and western India.

  In fact, it was only when the representative of the Army Sports Control Board, a key player in the whole controversy, decided to bring about a compromise between the provinces by taking the initiative to form AIFF that the conflict came to an end. Eventually, the Army was forced to issue a circular to all the soccer associations of the country declaring that a conference would be held at Simla (now Shimla) in May 1937 where AIFF would finally come into existence. While this solution was not something Bengal desired, it was the best result under the circumstances. Bengal was in no position to alienate the Army Sports Control Board, whose support was key to the survival of IFA. It tried its best to postpone the formation of AIFF to September but the Army Sports Board held firm. In a personal letter sent to the Maharaja of Santosh, the president of IFA, the representative of the Army Sports Control Board declared his intention to go ahead with the formation of AIFF at Simla in May 1937, solving the crisis that had plagued the fortunes of soccer in India for almost a decade.66

  In hockey, there were no early administrative and political divides, like in the other two games. The players, unsullied by administrative wrangles, played as one unit. The hockey team rose to national prominence for its performances on the international stage as a ‘national’ team. It was this nationalist link that bound it in the early years. While the politics of nationalism operated in both cricket and soccer,67 neither of these two games produced triumphs for the ‘national’ team. The great 1911 victory of the Calcutta-based Mohun Bagan Club over the British East York Regiment is seen by a number of historians as not just a sporting but also a nationalist milestone that spurred on the Swadeshi movement.68 By the 1930s, the noted literary figure Sajani Kanta Das had noted that three things personified Bengali colonial identity: Mohun Bagan, Subhash Chandra Bose and New Theatres.69 Yet soccer’s triumphs were not the triumphs of a ‘national’ team in the way that hockey’s was and soccer remained enmeshed in regional rivalries between Bengal and other rival provinces until much later.

  In sharp contrast, the astonishing success rate of Indian hockey in the late colonial and early post-colonial period, when it won six successive gold medals at the Olympics between 1928 and 1956, turned that game into a symbol of nationalist sentiment as a whole. So much so that when the IOC toyed with the idea of dropping hockey as an event in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, India offered to host the event separately in New Delhi. The success of the Indian hockey teams in beating Western teams demonstrated to the nationalists that Indians could compete on equal terms with the West. The success of the Indian hockey teams was such that after independence the ministry of sport, not surprisingly, chose hockey as the official ‘national game’ of India.

  ONWARDS TO BERLIN

  Beyond a shadow of doubt, India had established itself as the world’s foremost hockey playing nation by 1932. At the same time, there’s little doubt that the absence of leading European and Australasian nations at Los Angeles had diluted the impact of the Indian triumph. In fact, their absence transformed India’s title defence at Berlin in 1936 into something far more significant than a quest for another Olympic gold. That the Indians were in no mood to relinquish their hold on the world title was evident when on its second tour to New Zealand in 1935 the team stunned the world by winning all the 48 games played. The Indians scored a record 584 goals and conceded just 40. It was indication enough that India was ready to take on Europe at Berlin. What made the Indian dream run at the Nazi Olympiad especially momentous was that for the first time in history the legendary Dhyan Chand was named captain, an appointment that hinted at the decisive collapse of the privilege barrier in hockey. To Berlin we travel in the next chapter.

  4

  Hitler’s Games

  Captain Dhyan Chand and Indian Nationalism in the Third Reich

  Nowadays I hear of the princely comforts provided for national teams traveling overseas, and the fuss players raise if they happen to miss even a cup of tea! When we used to travel, the name of our country and the game were the only two things that mattered.

  —Dhyan Chand on India’s title defence at the 1936 Berlin

  Olympic Games1

  ‘WILL INDIA LOSE UNDER MY CHARGE?’

  DHYAN CHAND’S DELHI DILEMMA

  Despite having comprehensively beaten the world in 1928 and 1932, India’s supremacy in field hockey was still in doubt on the eve of the Berlin Games in 1936. This was because all of Europe had stayed away from the 1932 hockey competition at Los Angeles on account of the Great Depression and also because European hockey had improved by quite a few notches in the interim. Accordingly, trying to defend the title at Berlin in 1936 was the biggest challenge Indian hockey had ever faced. That India was ready for it was evident when the Indian team won all 48 matches on its tour of New Zealand in 1935.2

  But it’s the nature of sport that even the greatest of champions can have an off-day. There was a big flutter when the Indian Olympic team, picked after the inter-province trials at Calcutta in January–February 1936, lost 1–4 to a Delhi Hockey XI on 16 June at the Mori Gate ground. This was unprecedented and the shock defeat started dark murmurs. Touring international cricket sides would in later years learn to attribute their defeats in the Indian capital to the mysterious malady called ‘Delhi belly’. Dhyan Chand, the newly appointed captain of the national team, did not, of course, use the same excuse but his bewilderment and shock were there for all to see. In his autobiography, published 16 years later, he beautifully described the after-effect of this wake-up call:

  My experiences thus far had been to win matches and not lose them. I remember that in 1932, after our return from the Olympic tour, we beat Delhi by 12 goals to nil. I never recognized Delhi as a big hockey playing center, but on this day they were right on top of us and completely outplayed us. The news of this defeat created adverse opinions about us, and while we were touring other centers before we finally sailed from Mumbai, this particular defeat kept worrying me. For the first time I was captaining the Olympic team; will India lose the title under my charge?3

  Later generations would justifiably remember Dhyan Chand as a wizard who could do no wrong. But his musings after the Delhi defeat revealed the eternal truth of all sport: even the greatest of legends are only human. By now Dhyan Chand was worried about his legacy and suffered from moments of self-doubt. In the run-up to the Berlin Games, Dhyan Chand’s anxieties were particularly pertinent, for his appointment as captain was mired in controversy. Despite being the best player, Dhyan Chand’s claims for captaincy had been circumvented in 1932 on account of what was seen as his inferior social status. A lowly soldier in the Army, he had been passed up as captain earlier despite being the best player in the team and its talisman. By 1936 the sheer weight of his exploits and his towering presence on the field forced a rethink. But Dhyan Chand was only too conscious of the new responsibility and the tremendous burden on him at a time when social divides still largely governed public life. One small slip, and the knives would be out for him. As he noted, ‘I was bypassed in 1932 possibly because of my academic handicaps and so-called social position in life. I was still an ordinary soldier, holding a minor rank.’4 Palwankar Baloo, the great Dalit cricketer at the turn of the 20th century, whose social origins initially denied him entry into the Hindu Gymkhana in Bombay, would have sympathized. Baloo overcame high-caste derision to become one of the Hindu Gymkhana’s greatest stars in the Bombay Pentangular but was never made captain. It wasn’t until 1923 that his brother Palwankar Vithal broke the captaincy barrier in cricket.5 In Dhyan Chand’s case, class barriers had been the biggest obstacle and the fact that he was finally given the captaincy placed him under enormous pressure at Berlin.

  TO THE FÜHRER: AN INDIAN IN BERLIN

  Of all the Olympics before the world wars, none is better documented on film than
the Berlin Games. This can partly be attributed to advances in film technology but a major reason lies in the propaganda value of the Games for Adolf Hitler, who had ridden on the Weimar Republic’s post-Versailles discontent and humiliation to achieve power through the Berlin putsch of 1933.6 Berlin won the bid for the 1936 Games long before Hitler and the Nazis came to power7 but for a leader who had just openly repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, the Olympics became an occasion to promote Nazi ideology.8 Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, played a big part in convincing Hitler of the publicity value of the Games and film-maker Leni Reifenstahl, a favourite of Hitler’s, was commissioned to film them. Her film Olympia originated many of the techniques now commonplace to the filming of sports.9

  The video archives of the International Olympic Museum contain reams of footage of the Games that captured them in every dimension—both on and off the field. In the IOC videos, Hitler and Nazi officials feature as prominently as the athletes themselves; Wehrmacht soldiers and disciplined rows of volunteers form the backdrop to what German officials wanted to be remembered as the greatest Games ever. Hitler removed signs stating ‘Jews not wanted’ and similar slogans from main tourist attractions. Simultaneously, Berlin was ‘cleaned up’, the ministry of interior authorizing the chief of Berlin Police to arrest all gypsies and keep them in a special camp.10 All in all, the German government was believed to have spent the then astronomical sum of about $30 million on an event that was meant to showcase the master Aryan race, as Hitler believed the Germans to be, as also to package the progressive and united face of Germany for a global audience.11