A H I S T O R Y O F S P O R T

I N I N D I A

N A T I O NAT PLAY

R O N O J O Y S E N

A F E W Y E A R S B E F O R E L A R G E P A R T S O F I N D I A R O S E U P I N

rebellion against British rule in 1857, Horatio Smith wrote in the Calcutta

Review of the Indian that he and the rest of his countrymen were most fa-

miliar with:

The most superfi cial observer of Bengali manners must know that their

games and sports are, for the most part, sedentary . . . [h]is maxim being

that “walking is better than running, standing than walking, sitting than

standing, and lying down best of all,” his amusements have to be for the

most part sedentary. 1

He then went on to list the sports that the Bengali engaged in. Besides the

usual suspects like shatranj (chess), pasha (gambling with dice), cards, marble

throwing, and kite fl ying, some distinctly nonsedentary sports were included

on the list—wrestling, hadu-gudu (better known as kabaddi , a team pursuit

game), gymnastics, and swimming. While Smith’s description of a Bengali

neatly dovetailed with the prevalent British theories of dividing Indians

into nonmartial—of which the Bengali was the prime example—and martial

races, his list of sports would probably have held true for most of India.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

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2 I N T RO D U C T I O N

Long before the British entered the scene, Indians were involved in sports.

It’s not entirely by accident that the premier awards for sportspersons in India

are named Arjuna awards and those for coaches are named after Dronacha-

rya, both central fi gures in the great Indian epic the Mahabharata. In a civi-

lization in which epics such as the Mahabharata still have a greater hold on

the imagination than cut-and-dried historical narratives, this is perhaps not

unnatural. But the nomenclature of the awards is also a clue to the hoary

origin of organized sports in India. Diffi cult as it might be to imagine, there

was life before cricket and the various games introduced to the Indian sub-

continent by the British. Not all the ancient sports have survived, and some of

them are perhaps lost forever. But many sports, such as wrestling, whose ori-

gins go back several centuries, still are played. And others, like cricket, which

was introduced along with other sports by the British in the long nineteenth

century, Indians have made their own.

This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive history of each and

every sport ever played in India. That task is best left to an encyclopedia,

of which there are some available. Instead, I look broadly at the evolution

of sports and play, especially those that enjoy mass popularity in India, and

what it says about Indians. The book is idiosyncratic to the extent that some

sports are given more attention, by both choice and accident. Lurking in the

background are two questions that will occur to any sports lover, or indeed

any observer of Indian society. First, how and why has cricket come to domi-

nate the Indian consciousness? Second, why has a nation of a billion-plus

people failed so miserably in international sporting competitions such as the

Olympics? There are probably some fairly straightforward answers to these

questions, but I have chosen to take a long and sometimes tortuous journey

to answer these questions. I hope my travel will reveal much more about

Indian society than the response by a prominent sports administrator in the

1980s: “Sport is against our Indian ethos, our entire cultural tradition.” 2

In any study of this sort, it’s best to sort out some issues of defi nition

right at the beginning. This is not a pedantic exercise, since either an overtly

expansive or a restrictive defi nition runs the risk of losing sight of the larger

connections between sports and society. What does one mean by sports? And

do we distinguish between sports and play? Or, indeed, between sports and

activities that might be more properly classifi ed as leisure or recreation?

While the study of sports has never been central to any of the traditional aca-

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I N T RO D U C T I O N 3

demic disciplines, from very early on, anthropologists showed a keen interest

in understanding the role of sports, particularly in traditional societies. One

of the earliest such efforts was by Edward Burnett Tylor—sometimes referred

to as the father of anthropology—who in an 1879 article, “The History of the

Games,” looked at the evolution of various games both complex and simple.

Tylor’s lead was followed by American anthropologists like James Mooney

and Stewart Culin, who were particularly interested in Native American

games. 3 Others cast their net in more remote corners of the world, the most

notable being Raymond Firth’s lengthy article on a Polynesian dart match.

However, it is the 1930s’ classic, Homo Ludens ( Man the P layer ), by the

Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, that is best remembered today. For Hui-

zinga, nearly every human activity had a “play element.” Play was “freedom”

or a stepping out of ordinary or real life; 4 play also was the creation of order

by bringing a “temporary, a limited perfection” into the confusion of life. 5

In the 1960s, the French anthropologist Roger Caillois critiqued Huizinga’s

work to come up with a more refi ned defi nition of play: “In effect, play is

essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and

generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and space.” 6 Caillois intro-

duced different categories of play, including agonistic games that are compet-

itive and based on speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, and ingenuity. 7

I also should mention anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s classic essay, “Deep

Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfi ght,” which peels away the many layers of a

seemingly simple event to say profound things about Balinese society.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, sports studies became a legiti-

mate fi eld in its own right, with a proliferation of books and articles on dif-

ferent aspects of sport. I don’t want to go into this literature except to fl ag two

infl uential authors of the genre. The sociologists Norbert Elias and Eric Dun-

ning analyzed the evolution of sport in the context of a gradual “civilizing

process” in which it gradually came to “serve as symbolic representations of

a non-violent, non-military form of competition.” 8 Another important fi gure

is American historian Allen Guttmann, who, in his From Ritual to Record , was

critical of Huizinga for lumping together all contests and calling them games.

Guttmann makes a sharp distinction between modern sports, beginning

around the eighteenth century, and its premodern variants, such as the an-

cient Olympic Games, the Mayan or Aztec ball games, and the jousting tour-

naments of medieval Europe. Guttmann, using a self-confessedly Weberian

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4 I N T RO D U C T I O N

framework, lists seven characteristics that make modern sports what they

are: secularism, equality of opportunity, specialization of roles, rationaliza-

tion, bureaucratic organization, quantifi cation, and a quest for records. In

language reminiscent of Max Weber in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of

Capitalism , Guttmann summed up the nature of modern sport thus: “Once

the gods have vanished from Mount Olympus or from Dante’s paradise, we

can no longer run to appease them or to save our souls, but we can set a new

record. It is a uniquely modern form of immortality.” 9 Indeed, Michael Man-

delbaum took this argument forward by pointing out that sports has much

in common with organized religion, since it provides “a welcome diversion

from the routines of daily life; a model of coherence and clarity; and heroic

examples to admire and emulate.” 10

While Guttmann is right on many counts on the recent origins of modern

sports, my book’s approach is more catholic, as I prefer to look at sports over

the longue dur é e and attempt to trace connections between the premodern

and modern. For my purpose, the defi nition of sports by the anthropologist

duo of Kendall Blanchard and A. T. Cheska, which brings in a sport’s differ-

ent elements—play, leisure, and, yes, work—works better. They defi ne sport

as “a physical exertive activity that is aggressively competitive within con-

straints imposed by defi nition and rules. A component of culture, it is ritually

patterned, gamelike and of varying amounts of play, work and leisure.” This

means I won’t be discussing cerebral games like chess, which is believed to

have its origins in the Indian subcontinent; indoor games of chance like card

or board games; and outdoor races or fi ghts involving animals, which were

very popular during the Mughal period and can still be seen in parts of India.

Indoor games like billiards, snooker, and carrom—a game that holds a special

place in Indians’ hearts—are also outside the purview of this book. But I will

unavoidably be discussing notions of the body, health, and recreation in or-

der to get a more complete picture of the place of sports in India.

A few words are also in order on why I would choose to write a book on

sports when India faces so many more pressing problems. The most obvi-

ous reason is the ubiquity of sports in India, as in most other societies. In

perhaps what was the fi rst serious work on sports, Joseph Strutt wrote: “In

order to form a just estimate of the character of any particular people it is

absolutely necessary to investigate the sports and pastimes most prevalent

amongst them.” 11 If we were to add up the numbers of hours the average

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I N T RO D U C T I O N 5

person spends (or wastes, depending on one’s perspective) playing, watch-

ing, or discussing sports, we would be very surprised. Besides, huge sums of

money and sponsorship are riding on sports in India, particularly cricket.

But the more compelling reason is that sports are inherently worthy of study

for what is reveals about human nature and societies. As Huizinga put it, “All

play means something,” going on to add, “Play cannot be denied. You can

deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind,

God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” And in the Indian context, as

the historian Sarvepalli Gopal pointed out, “Indeed frequently—too often

alas—it [cricket] is the brightest spot of the Indian scene. When we despair

of our politicians, Sachin Tendulkar keeps up our spirits.” 12

With these preliminary words, we can map out the plan and scope of this

book. If, as Sunil Khilnani pointed out, the agencies of modernity—“Eu ro-

pean colonial expansion, the state, nationalism, democracy, economic devel-

opment” 13 —have shaped contemporary India, the same is true of sports in

India. I thus tell the story of sports in India through their evolution from

elite, kingly pastimes and their encounter in successive stages with colonial-

ism, nationalism, the state, and globalization. This book dwells, among other

things, on two issues: fi rst, the intensely political nature of sports in both

colonial and postcolonial India and, second, the patterns of the patronage,

clientage, and institutionalization of sports.

Chapter 1 traces the history of Indian sports from their mythological ori-

gins to around the time of the decline of Mughal rule in the early eighteenth

century. For the origin and philosophy of sports in India, it’s best to turn to

mythology rather than documented history. Just as with every other aspect

of Indian life, the epics, particularly the Mahabharata, are indispensable to

understanding the place of sports in India. This book thus begins with the

Mahabharata. The elaborate training regimen of the Pandava and Kaurava

princes under the watchful eyes of their mentor Dronacharya is the earliest

example of the guru-shishya (teacher-pupil) bond intrinsic to the relation-

ship between a coach and trainee. We also fi nd in the Mahabharata many

instances of agonistic competitions bounded by rules. Many of these are for

prizes far greater than the medals or trophies of our times. They were liter-

ally life and death matters. But interestingly because these contests were so

important, rules were strategically broken, often with divine sanction.

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6 I N T RO D U C T I O N

Coming to history proper, the sport that has the longest documented his-

tory in India is wrestling, with references to it going back to at least the thir-

teenth century. Of course, sports like hunting have survived over centuries

and have now become part of modern competitions in the form of shooting

and archery. Sports like polo (known as chaugan to the Mughals) also go back

several centuries. Then a whole range of sports like kabaddi —which for some

years have been a part of the Asian Games—still hold sway over parts of rural

India and have recently been marketed to a larger audience as a television

sport. However, wrestling is different in that it not only has survived over

time but still is very much part of the Indian landscape as well as interna-

tional sports.

As with society, politics, the economy—and indeed everything else—the

entry of the British fi rst as traders and then as rulers from the mid-eighteenth

century onward had a profound impact on India. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on

the fascinating story of this impact on sports and ideas of leisure in India and

the complex response it evoked. The British brought with them to India their

many organized sports, among which were football (or soccer in America),

fi eld hockey, tennis, badminton, golf, and, of course, cricket. British soldiers,

along with administrators, sailors, and traders, began playing sports in India

from as early as 1721, some thirty years before Robert Clive, the future gover-

nor of Bengal, won the decisive Battle of Plassey in 1757, which marked the

beginning of the British conquest of India. During this early phase, there was

little contact between the sporting activities of the colonizers and those of

the natives. A crucial element in the diffusion of English games was the clubs,

described as “free associations of gentlemen,” 14 the earliest of which—the

Calcutta Cricket Club—was formed in 1792, only fi ve years after the Maryle-

bone Cricket Club (MCC) was established in London. Such clubs, which for

a long time were the preserve of whites, spawned several clones set up by the

Indian elite. If the clubs were the center of sports activity in India, the other

locus was the British regiments and cantonments spread across the length

and breadth of India. For British soldiers, the best way to keep themselves

occupied and healthy in the unfamiliar climes of India was sport. Accord-

ingly, I focus here primarily on cricket, hockey, and football, the three most

popular sports in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. I also spend some

time on polo, since it was the one sport that the British picked up in India and

took back to En gland. I include as well a chapter devoted to wrestling, partly

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I N T RO D U C T I O N 7

because of its unbroken existence from pre-British times but also because of

its intriguing evolution.

From the late nineteenth century and after the 1857 uprising, there was

a conscious effort to get the Indian elites, particularly the royals, to play

English games, especially cricket. At the same time, British administrators

and missionaries worked hard at cultivating a Victorian games ethic in In-

dian public school students. Notable among them were men such as Chester

Macnaghten, who taught Ranjitsinhji—who was the ruler of Nawanagar as

well as a great cricket player—both Victorian virtues and cricket skills; and

Cecil Earle Tyndale-Biscoe, a Christian missionary who introduced football

and rowing to Kashmir. Interestingly, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder

of the modern Olympics, was as much infl uenced by the ancient games in

Greece as by Rugby, the English public school, and its headmaster, Thomas

Arnold, that was the inspiration for Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown ’ s

Schooldays (1857).

Another important element in the spread and adoption of English sports

in India was princely patronage. This is the subject of chapter 4. Just as rulers

in ancient and medieval India sponsored tournaments involving men and

animals, Indian princes, such as the maharaja of Patiala (a princely state in

northern India), became patrons of cricket, football, and other sports. A few

of them, most notably Ranjitsinhji and his nephew Duleepsinhji, were excel-

lent cricketers who also played for England, but some, like the maharaja of

Vizianagram, were in it for the power and infl uence that came with sponsor-

ing and managing teams.

The popularity of English sports was by no means confi ned to the pub-

lic schools, princely playgrounds, or club greens. Not only did the common

man start taking up English games, but the playing fi eld also became the

arena for contesting British supremacy. In chapter 5, I look at how sports

and Indian nationalism coalesced in strange ways. The cult of body build-

ing in late nineteenth-century Bengal that fed into revolutionary terrorism

against the colonial rulers and the odd victory over British teams—the win

of the Calcutta club Mohun Bagan over a British regiment in the 1911 Shield

(the premier football tournament in India at the time) fi nal being a notable

example—was often seen as a triumph for the nascent Indian nation. The

connection between a healthy body and nation building was made very

early on by infl uential fi gures like the Hindu reformer Swami Vivekananda.

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8 I N T RO D U C T I O N

Beginning in the 1920s, India also started sending a team to the Olympics,

making it the fi rst British colony to do so.

If nationalist euphoria was very much in evidence during Mohun Bagan’s

victory in 1911, politics infi ltrated the playing fi eld in a different form, when

race, caste, and, most controversially, communal identities clashed on the

m aidan (an open area or space in a city or town). Chapter 6 examines the two

most signifi cant examples of this sort of politics. One was the controversy

over the Bombay Quadrangular (later the Pentangular), the most popular

cricket tournament in preindependent India played by teams representing

different communities, and the other was the spectacular rise of the Moham-

medan Sporting Club in Calcutta, both occurring during the 1930s when the

Indian National Congress and the Muslim League were bitterly opposed to

each other.

Besides India’s relatively recent success in international cricket, hockey

was the only sport in which India was the unquestioned world champion for

several decades. Even more remarkably, India fi elded a hockey team in the

1928 Olympic Games—nearly two decades before Indian independence—and

won the gold medal. The early history of hockey, documented in chapter 7,

is replete with remarkable individuals like the country’s fi rst real sports star,

Dhyan Chand, and India’s fi rst hockey captain, Jaipal Singh, a tribal from

Jharkhand (in eastern India), who was educated at Oxford and later become

a leader of the Jharkhand movement.

Wrestling can claim to have the longest lineage among Indian sports if

one goes back to the epics and medieval texts. It is also the only sport besides

hockey in which India won an Olympic medal in its early years as an inde-

pendent nation. There was a defi nite connection between wrestling and the

efforts of physical regeneration in early twentieth-century India. Wrestlers

like the legendary Gama enjoyed the patronage of different princes and was

regarded as a “world champion” during his playing days. Others like the Ben-

gali wrestler Jatindra Charan (Gobor) Guha self-consciously touted wrestling

and physical culture as a means to nation building. Gama and Gobor are the

subjects of chapter 8.

Chapters 9 to 12 take up the story of sports in independent India and trace

the complex story of how cricket became the dominant sport, despite both

the great popularity of football and hockey in the 1950s and 1960s, and the

success of sports stars in individual sports like tennis and badminton. The

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I N T RO D U C T I O N 9

story of cricket’s dominance and the place of India as the de facto center of

world cricket is tied in many ways to some remarkable successes like India’s

unexpected winning of the 1983 cricket World Cup and the ways in which

television and radio coverage worked to the sport’s advantage. It also had

something to do with the identifi cation of the Indian elites with cricket. Now

cricket has become much more than a sport in India, combining commerce,

entertainment, and politics. Indeed, along with Bollywood fi lms, cricket is

the only glue that binds the diversity of India. During this period, though, the

country lost its dominance in hockey, in which it had won a string of Olym-

pic medals right up until 1980, and did not place in the top one hundred

countries in football. In the Olympics, even a single medal is usually cause for

great celebration. At the same time, India’s traditional sports like wrestling

and more elite sports like shooting have been going through a renaissance

of sorts.

This section of the book tries to understand the place of sports in con-

temporary India and India’s relative failure as a sports nation, despite its eco-

nomic success in the past decade. In doing so, I look at several issues: the

link between sport and nationalism—what George Orwell once memorably

described as “war minus the shooting”—which rears its head particularly in

India-Pakistan contests; the economics of sport, in terms of both its reve-

nue generation and its opportunities for sportspersons; the role of the state,

which includes public-sector companies and the armed forces as patrons of

sports, plus the quality of sports administrators; the decentering of sport,

with nonurban centers producing sports stars and champions; the place of

women—absent from much of the story—who are doing increasingly well in

sports; and the role of spectatorship at a time when most viewers are watch-

ing games on television and are not physically present at the fi eld.

As recently as a decade ago, the entry on India in a handbook of sports stud-

ies could claim, though not entirely accurately, that the “sociological study of

sport in India essentially remains virgin territory.” 15 There are several books

on the history of cricket in India, one of them going back as far as 1897. The

other sports are, however, woefully underrepresented, with some notable ex-

ceptions. India’s tryst with the Olympic Games, which goes back to 1920, has

been documented in a few books. We also have, of course, several autobiogra-

phies and biographies of Indian sportspersons, mostly again of cricket play-

ers. In recent times, many more books on and by noncricketers have been

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10 I N T RO D U C T I O N

written. It is true, however, as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed out,

“social historians of India have paid more attention to riots than to sports,

to street-battles with the police than to rivalries on the soccer fi eld.” 16 Even

though cricket fi gures prominently in my book, I’ve made every effort to look

at the other pieces of India’s sports puzzle. Luckily, there are several fi ne

books on the history of sports in other countries, particularly England, which

are inspirational role models. The triumphs and tragedies of sports heroes

as well as sports organizers and enthusiasts, many of them largely forgotten,

are documented in the following pages. Some of them merit separate biogra-

phies, a challenge that, I hope, will be taken up by others. Admittedly, some

games are given short shrift because it is virtually impossible to do justice to

each and every sport in a slim volume like this. Fans of golf, horse racing, and

table tennis, to name just a few—all of which are played and followed with

great interest in India—will no doubt feel neglected.

One word of caution, though. Despite being a keen follower of many

sports, I never graduated beyond games in the neighborhood park or inter-

house matches at school. But that is not something I’m particularly ashamed

of. If it weren’t for people like me, where would sports and the sports indus-

try be? The fi nal word should perhaps be left to the Sri Lankan writer of an

intriguing novel on cricket: “Sport can unite worlds, tear down walls, and

transcend race, the past, and all probability. Unlike life, sport matters.” 17

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