Olympics-The India Story

by Boria Majumdar

  Entertainment channels have been cricketized as well. The first non-sport channel to get into cricket was Sony’s India arm which in 2000 bought the telecast rights for all ICC-designated one-day cricket for seven years. Sony, which until then ran a single entertainment channel in India, launched a second channel, SET Max, specifically to broadcast cricket.103 Having spent $255 million on the rights, Sony officials re-designed the network’s entire branding around cricket. World Cup-winning former captain Kapil Dev was hired as brand ambassador, a series of cricket-related programmes were created around him and the network head made it clear that he expected Kapil to ‘do for Sony Entertainment what Amitabh Bachchan did for Star’. A key aim of this strategy was to build programming that would draw in non-sport-watching viewers, with a special focus on families and women.104 Sony hired women presenters for its 2003 World Cup coverage, who were specifically told to avoid cricket jargon and ‘be the voice of the cricket-widows’ by asking commentators basic question about the rules of cricket. Cricket magazines railed against what they called the ‘invasion of the dumb belles’ but by the end of the World Cup Sony’s managers themselves were surprised by the ratings.105 By the second week of the World Cup, 36.5 million women were estimated to have tuned in, nearly 46 per cent of the total viewership.106

  The Sahara Group took the same route with the telecast of the 2006 India-England cricket series. With Sahara One, the group’s flagship entertainment channel, doing badly on the ratings, Sahara bought the television rights for the series hoping cricket would induce non-Sahara viewers to sample it. The network built a synergy between its entertainment programming and cricket by getting the lead actors of all its soap operas to talk about the cricket series during their shows. As Sahara One’s CEO explained:

  The ingredients of cricket are quite similar to that of a show on a general entertainment channel. There is drama, there is entertainment, anger and cheerfulness in cricket, which is there in all our soaps, too. Therefore, there is bound to be a great synergy.107

  Sahara One’s advertisement line, Television ke begum aur cricket ke badshah ek hee channel pe (The queens of television and the kings of cricket, all on one channel), summed up this philosophy. Kerry Packer’s 1977 World Series had initiated the process of converting cricket into a television spectacle108 but in India this process has evolved more than anywhere else with television networks turning cricket into a continuing soap opera, a spectacle far beyond the game itself.

  A good way to examine cricket’s rise as a central marker of popular culture is to examine the discourses in the idiom of Bollywood. Until the mid-1980s, cricket was only one of the sports that Bollywood characters engaged with. In the 1970s Hrishikesh Mukherjee film Gol Maal, Amol Palekar, as the hero, is forced to embark on a hilarious deception with his boss because he is caught watching a hockey game between India and Pakistan while skipping work. He is equally mad about soccer and in particular about Pele. When asked about his knowledge of soccer in a job interview, he waxes eloquently about the ‘30,000 pagal (madmen)’ who went to the Calcutta airport to receive the legendary Pele when he first visited India. Similarly, films like the 1980s Saahib focused on a soccer goalkeeper’s dedication to his sport. By the mid-1980s though, cricket, like in the wider national discourse, began to take over the portrayal of sport in Bollywood. There were exceptions like the Aamir Khan starrer Joh Jeeta Woh Sikander, which revolved around an inter-school cycle race, but increasingly films like Awwal Number and Chamatkar began to have plots centred around cricket.

  At a deeper level, cricket began to seep into the everyday language of Bollywood. The 2006 Sanjay Dutt-starrer Lage Raho Munna Bhai was a striking film partly because it resurrects the Mahatma as a popular icon—not just as a distant nationalist figure, but as the personal Mahatma documented by Shahid Amin in his classic study on Chauri Chaura.109 The second striking feature of the film, and one that reflects a wider trend in Bollywood, is the prominence of cricket terminology as a metaphor for life. The disputed house at the centre of the plot is called ‘Second Innings House’: the old men living in it are determined to play their ‘second innings’ in life on the ‘front-foot’, after having played the ‘first innings on the back-foot’. When Gandhi asks the protagonist to follow the path of truth, he responds by articulating his doubts in the language of cricket: the truth would get him ‘clean-bowled’. When Munna Bhai and his sidekick, Circuit, take on an astrologer at the end of the film, they try and dispel superstition with a cricketing analogy: ‘If he was so good he should point out Indian cricketers whose horoscopes forecasted centuries and the team would never lose. It would always score 1,100 not out’.

  Cricket itself is now so enmeshed in the social life of India that for the Indian it has ceased to be a game. It is a social practice that forms the background of everyday life. Indeed, it is a metaphor for life, and Bollywood cannot help but tap into this wider sociological trend. Lage Raho Munna Bhai is not the first film to do so. In Kaante, Mahesh Manjrekar’s character spouts: ‘Hindustani do cheez bardaasht nahi kar sakta. Kashmir mein war aur cricket mein haar.’ (An Indian cannot tolerate two things: war in Kashmir and a loss in cricket). In Tathastu, a film about the intensity of parenthood, the entire father-son relationship is built around watching cricket on television and grooming the son to be a cricketer. When the son is admitted to hospital with a severe illness, the father poignantly tells him: ‘Get well soon so we can play cricket together’.

  These films are unlike the cricket-oriented films that were made in the eighties and early nineties. What is happening now is different. Lagaan reflected the populism of cricket as an agent for nationalist agency but the game has now seeped into the everyday language of Bollywood. This Indianization of the imperial sport, of course, began in the colonial period itself but vernacularization of its terminology first began with All India Radio’s commentary. In this respect, Arjun Appadurai has equated cricket’s rise with the complex process of decolonization and the making of a new Indian identity:

  The general force of the media experience is thus powerfully synesthetic. Cricket is read, heard, and seen, and the force of daily life experiences of cricket, occasional glimpses of live cricket and stars, and the more predictable events of the cricket spectacle on television all conspire not just to vernacularize cricket but to inject the master terms and master tropes of cricket into the bodily practices and body-related fantasies of many young Indian males…cricket is simultaneously larger than life and close to life, because it has been rendered into lives, manuals, and news that are no longer English-mediated…the reception of cricket becomes a critical instrument of subjectivity and agency in the process of decolonization.110

  The point is that cricket, in the Gramscian sense, is now a central pillar of the cultural superstructure of India. Bollywood is the second pillar of this superstructure and the two have now begun interfacing. Popular culture is a highly contested arena where the idea of India is constantly fought over. It is a relational idiom which reflects the ongoing conflicts, fissures and tensions of society. If one judges by the evidence of Bollywood, the verdict is clear: cricket is now central to the idea of India and Indian-ness and this cricket is very different from the gentlemanly imperial sport that the British had in mind when they first introduced it in India. India has appropriated and Indianized cricket. As Ashis Nandy said: ‘Cricket is an Indian game, accidently discovered by the British’.111

  CONCLUSION

  This chapter began with Aaj Tak’s aggressive identification with the Indian colours during the Twenty-twenty World Cup. It was the logical culmination of a process that began in the 1980s. Cricket’s rise as the pre-eminent Indian game is intimately connected with Indian television. Television was consciously turned into a mass medium in the 1980s as a political/developmental strategy. This was accompanied by advertising, which augmented the creation of a ‘new consumer class’ and a new notion of collectivity expressed as ‘the middle class’. The fact that these developments coin
cided with the 1983 World Cup win fundamentally changed the balance of power between cricket and other sports in India. Television created conditions for cricket to become a central component of new notions of national identity and consumer spectacle. The advent of satellite television pushed this linkage further. When television capitalists searched for ‘national’ publics in their quest to create a ‘national’ market, they ended up with cricket as the lowest denominator of Indian-ness.

  Satellite television is a cultural arena where the idea of India is debated and fought for every day and its focus on cricket since the 1990s has reinforced the centrality of cricket as a pan-Indian marker of ‘Indian-ness’. This is a two-way process and world cricket itself has been transformed by the massive infusion of capital from Indian television. The enormous money that television has generated for cricket has also transformed India into the spiritual and financial heart of the global cricket industry. In this process, however, hockey and other sports got left behind by the cold logic of capitalism and expanding markets. This is why Joaquim Carvalho, the hockey coach, was angry and threatened a hunger strike as perhaps the last resort for the nation’s deprived hockey players after they weren’t given due recognition following their spectacular 7–2 victory against South Korea in the Asia Cup final in 2007.

  10

  The Army, Indian-ness and Sport

  The Nation in the Olympic Ideal

  THE INDIAN ARMY AND ITS ‘MISSION OLYMPICS’

  A full four years after he had won the silver at the Athens Olympics in 2004, the face of Lt. Col. Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore remained one of the first images that struck the traveller as one drives into New Delhi from the city’s international airport. India’s lone medallist at the 2004 Games, Rathore remained a potent draw for the Army’s recruitment planners, his visage decorating a huge, virtually permanent Army hoarding at the entry to Delhi Cantonment.1 The photograph on the hoarding captured Rathore’s face in a moment of pure ecstasy as he kissed his silver medal, with the ceremonial olive wreath on his head. A caption below the photograph informed the traveller: ‘Join the Indian Army, Be a Winner for Life’. Rathore with his silver, only the fourth Olympic medal India has won since 1980, has been turned into a poster boy for the Indian Army’s recruitment programme.2

  This is understandable, given that he is a professional soldier in the Indian Army, which is currently suffering from a huge shortage of personnel.3 What merits closer attention though is the discourse about the Army, the Olympics and Indian nationalism that followed India’s failure to win more medals at Athens 2004. Speaking at a public function, President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam tapped into popular sentiment about the continuing Olympic failures when he asked the Army to come to the rescue: ‘Why are we not winning Olympic medals is working on your mind. It is working on my mind also!. . . Some countries use armed forces. If our army decides to use one brigade only for sports, we will have arrived in the international sports scene’.4 The Army responded by publicizing its commitment to a new programme called ‘Mission Olympics’. This included recruiting young and talented sportsmen from around the country, giving them an Army rank without involving them in military work and training them for the 2008 Olympics. As far back as July 2001, after a similar debacle at Sydney, the Army had created a sports academy—the Army Sports Institute—at Pune with a funding of Rs 60 crore from the defence ministry’s annual budget. The ministry’s official website makes the aims of this project clear: ‘To restore national pride in the hearts of our fellow countrymen and to project a winning image of the Army, the Chief of Army Staff has availed of the opportunity to meet the challenge of the Olympics’.5

  These moves came at a time of great hand-wringing in the mainstream media about India’s ‘humiliation’ at the Olympics. In a comment typical of the media discourse in 2004, Chandigarh’s Tribune bemoaned the lack of sporting success, equating it with ‘national’ failure: ‘A country of a billion people, but India is left to bite the dust even when facing competitions from countries like Moldova or Ethiopia at international arenas. Lack of proper training, infrastructure, planning and crass callousness of those at the helm have combined to ensure lacklustre performance by Indians in the competitions as competitive as Olympics [sic].’6 Simultaneously, the Army’s Mission Olympics was received by the press with virtually universal acclaim, praise that tapped into its credentials as a respected bulwark of the nation itself: ‘If determination, dedication and discipline are the pre-requisite of success, the Indian Army has these in abundance. Besides, the Army has the advantage of accountability. So faith will not be misplaced if it is reposed in the Indian Army to win Olympic medals for the country’.7 In other words, this discourse believed that India’s Olympic efforts had failed because of poor sports management and only the Army was capable of turning things around. A typical view expressed at an online discussion group run by a news website on the topic illustrates this point: ‘I do expect a lot from the Army. It will be all the more better if the Indian Olympic Association and its representatives are taken over by the Army. No one wants to see politicians involved in anything constructive’.8

  The above discussion raises three issues about India’s Olympic discourse over the past four years: the Olympics is clearly seen as a barometer of national pride and therefore viewed through a nationalist gaze; Olympic failures are blamed on sports management bodies which are seen as parochial and only interested in politics; the Indian Army, perceived as an apolitical edifice of the nation, is now seen by many as the last resort, capable of salvaging India’s dream of winning Olympic medals. As such, India’s engagement with Olympism is a useful entry point to understanding changing notions of Indian nationalism as well as the role of the Indian Army in a democratic Indian state.

  What has been the Indian Army’s role in India’s Olympic movement and why has it become so central to it? The answer to these queries provide answers to other crucial issues: Why are the Olympics so important to Indian nationalism? To what extent are differences in internal regional identities responsible for India’s Olympic failures and why have nationalist sentiments not overcome these? By fleshing out the history of the Indian Army’s sporting engagement, this chapter sheds light on the development of notions of Indian-ness, the constant struggle with centrifugal regional identities, the politics of the Indian empire and the Army’s transition from an imperial to a nationalist, apolitical force in independent India. At its core, Indian Olympism is a stage where competing Indian identities grapple with each other to impose their own hegemony. By focusing on the Army, this chapter provides new material that will feed into existing debates about the ‘the idea of India’ itself and indeed, questions about how many Indias exist within the Indian nation-state.

  SEPOYS ON THE PLAYING FIELD:

  ‘THE PRINCIPLE SOURCE OF SPORTING INSPIRATION’

  Most sport historians of India acknowledge the British Indian Army’s role in inculcating the practice of modern sport in the furthermost corners of the subcontinent. Writing in 1959, the pioneering sport administrator Anthony De Mello was unambiguous on this score:

  The principal source in the history of modern India is the British Army, whose members, for so long stationed in our country, had introduced most of the games we play. . .The inspiration for most of our sports came, as I have said, from the British Army.9

  This claim was by no means an exaggeration. In the 19th century, at a time when virtually all Western sporting disciplines were being standardized into their present form, troops belonging first to the East India Company, and then the British Army carried these forms wherever they went. This is true of virtually all modern sports associated with Britain, with the exception of rugby (India’s hard grounds precluding that possibility). Sport and what became known as the ‘games ethic’ was a way of life and its cultural dispersion was inevitable. The Army was its greatest conduit, simply by virtue of being the British organization with the greatest spread across the country. For instance, in the case of cricket, w
hile most historians have traditionally attributed its organized rise in India to the Parsis of Bombay in the 1840s, there is now new evidence to show that the first Indians who took it up were sepoys of the East India Company. News reports published in the Sporting Intelligence Magazine brought out by the editor of the Englishman newspaper in 1833–50 document cricket matches played by Indian sepoys in places as far apart as Cuttack, Silchar, Barrackpore, Dum Dum, Agra, Cuttack, Midnapore and Sylhet.10 These reports show that cricket was well established in the Indian heartland through the agency of the Army, well before Bombay’s Parsi elites adopted it.

  The early popularity of cricket among the sepoys was ascribed to the game’s potential to bridge the differences between the European and the native. A report drew attention to this aspect of the sport, noting: ‘Cricket is essential in improving one of the great defects, so often complained of, the distance of the Europeans in the intercourse with the native.’ It goes on to suggest that European officers, from the senior to the junior, encouraged the game either as spectators or players. ‘Were they not to do so. . .I fear the sepoys would not long continue to play.’11 But once introduced, every cultural form assumes a life of its own. It is equally true that the sepoys in many cases were matching their English counterparts on the playing field. Contemporary descriptions of cricket in East India Army’s maidans indicate that matches that pitted the native sepoys against European officers can also be seen as early historical prototypes of the fictional nationalist playing field depicted in the film Lagaan. As we have speculated elsewhere, ‘It may be a mere coincidence that the cities and towns where sepoy cricket was fairly well developed were those which were prominent in the sepoy uprising of 1857’.12