Pride of India, before & after 1947

Rohit Mahajan

The stories heard in one’s childhood about Dhyan Chand and Gama, paltry in number but enriched by exaggeration, were fantastical, mythical.

Dhyan Chand’s dribbling was so amazing, the ball so closely stuck to his hockey stick, the gora umpires would check if the stick had glue on it, father would tell us. Gama would eat tens of eggs and do a thousand push-ups daily, and no one was able to beat him, he would say. Father didn’t have too many Partition stories, for his village was to the east of a small river that became the border between India and Pakistan, and he was not uprooted from it. One recurring one involved oil being boiled in huge cauldrons, to throw down, in defence, on violent rioters, and a double-barrelled gun kept in readiness, after rumours reached the village that a hostile mob was going to attack it. The rumours, thankfully, proved untrue.

Stories about Dhyan Chand and Gama, I realised much later, reflected the pride of the Indian people who had lived under the British rule for some time, and found some joy in Indian athletes beating the white man in sport. For a subjugated people, living in horrible deprivation and injustice, and humiliated by a rapacious foreign occupier, winning in sport provided a release for pent-up anger.

It’s difficult to imagine how many Indian people actually heard of the feats of men such as Dhyan Chand and Gama in the 1920s and 1930s; it’s likely that, then as now, a large number of people were living in poverty and didn’t have the time for frivolities such as sport. But village melas, which were popular, had wrestling dangals and stories of legends such as Gama and his feats in England spread by word of mouth.

Dhyan Chand, born in 1905 in Jhansi, died in 1979 in free India. Gama, born Indian in Amritsar in 1878, died a Pakistani in Lahore in 1960. For all of their lives in active sport, they lived in an India ruled by the British. And for a long time, both were heroes for the people who were divided on the basis of religion by the British in 1947 — Gama’s greatest sporting feats were achieved in the first two decades of the 20th century, and Dhyan Chand’s in the 1920s and 1930s.

Sport and nation

Sport is war minus the shooting, George Orwell wrote.

The saying goes that the soldier and the sportsman do more for the pride of the nation than the doctor or the engineer. Sport is inherently worthless, but it’s priceless in terms of a country’s collective pride. Sporting feats show to the world that a nation has strong people in robust health, with great physical strength, and capable of great achievements in the field of play.

When Cuban boxers beat the American boxers during the Cold War, or when the East German athletes and swimmers defeated those from across the Iron Curtain, they were celebrated as representatives of a certain type of people, and their political ideology.

Pride of 1948

The Indian hockey team’s victory in the 1948 Olympic Games was probably the first achievement to be proud for the newly-independent country. India had been free for less than a year. Freedom had been accompanied by blood-letting at an unprecedented, horrifying scale, and there already had been a war with Pakistan; the whole of the country was not yet integrated, and it was also going through a horrible food scarcity.

On August 12, 1948, India beat Great Britain 4-0 in the Olympics hockey final in London. The first and third goals were scored by the great Balbir Singh Sr, the second by Pat Jansen and the fourth by Tarlochan Singh Bawa.

This was the first time India beat Britain in Olympics hockey. The British had won the first two gold medals in Olympics hockey, in 1908 and 1920, but pride made them give way to India in 1928. The Indians, before the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, played some games in England — and they beat the English national team 4-0 in their last match in that country. The British, fearing humiliation in Amsterdam, withdrew their hockey team from the Olympics. They didn’t want to be beaten by a colony at the Olympics, and the two-time champions simply ran away.

The win in 1948, and two more gold in the following two Olympics, were celebrated across the country. The hockey players were superstars. The loss in 1960, that too to Pakistan, threw the country into shock and the hockey community into a state of deep introspection. The win in 1964, with victory against Pakistan in the final, again led to a surge in joy and pride — but it was clear from then on that India’s days as masters of world hockey were numbered. India won only one more gold in the Olympics after that, in 1980. Then there was a seemingly interminable wait for merely a medal — any colour! — which ended last year at Tokyo.

Cricket is now the most popular sport in India; we’ve had world champions in sports such as badminton and shooting and weightlifting and wrestling. It’s no longer only men who are source of sporting pride for us — we have women such as Mary Kom and PV Sindhu and Mirabai Chanu, to name just three.

But now there are fewer and fewer people around who can relate to us the stories they heard about Dhyan Chand and Gama as kids in the 1930s and 1940s. The protagonists of those days are gone, too. Balbir Singh Sr died in 1948. Keshav Dutt, the last surviving player from the 1948 hockey team, died last year, snapping another direct link with those who brought pride to a new nation.