Divisions that were anathema to sport

Rohit Mahajan

The idea of sport being organised on the lines of religion or caste — Christian vs Sikh, for instance, or Brahmin vs Shudra — must repulse and disgust us. It should be an anathema to all rationalists and humanists, even as it might hold some appeal for the most regressive-minded people. But this is the terrible state of division hockey — the pride of the subcontinental sport, before 1947 and after it — was reduced to after Partition.

This is what the British did to India; several historians have demonstrated that the colonial masters created Pakistan as a buffer state, between the communists to the north and the socialist-minded leadership in India. Jinnah demanded a state for the Muslims, but it was in the authority of the British to give it or not — they opted for division, which suited their interests and the interests of the feudal lords of west Punjab and Sindh. The blood-soaked separation wounded India, and left a terrible impression on sport as well.

This was a deep gash to the heart of hockey in undivided India. The 1948 Indian team had two Muslims — Akhtar Hussain and Latif-ur-Rehman — who later moved to Pakistan and won silver medals for that country in 1956. The Indian teams at the 1952, 1956 and 1960 Olympics were composed entirely of Hindus, Sikhs and Christians. The Pakistan teams were monolithically Muslim. In the backdrop of the first war over Kashmir, matches between multicultural, multi-faith Indian teams and the monolithic Pakistani teams excited tribalistic feelings.

Indian society was always terribly divided on the lines of caste and religion. This suited the British, who did nothing to discourage organisation of the sport on communal or casteist lines. Cricket in India, for instance, had its roots in social or regional divisions, evident from the names of the clubs established in Bombay in the 19th century: Kshatriya Cricket Club, Gowd Saraswat Cricket Club, Maratha Cricket Club, Gujarati Union Cricket Club, Telugu Young Cricketers, Mangalorian Catholic Cricket Club, Instituto Luso Indian Cricket Club (it had players from Portuguese-ruled Goa) or the Bombay Jewish Cricket Club.

The Parsi, Hindu and Muslim Gymkhanas were given land by Lord Harris and ‘charged with supervising and developing the numerous smaller clubs which came under their jurisdiction’, writes historian Ramchandra Guha.

It is extraordinary — and a sorry commentary on the state of Indian polity — that right until the 1940s, cricket in Bombay, the nursery of Indian cricket, was organised on communal lines: matches were held between the Europeans, Parsis, Hindus, Muslims and, from 1937, the ‘Rest’; the ‘Rest’ seems to be an inclusive entity, with Indian Roman Catholics, Protestants and Syrian Christians, Eurasians, Sinhalese Buddhists and Jews representing it at different times.

In 1940, with the independence movement gaining ground and Mahatma Gandhi launching a Satyagraha, there were calls to stop cricket in Bombay. Gandhi told officials of the Hindu Gymkhana that he didn’t like the idea of communal teams: “I can understand matches between colleges and institutions, but I have never understood the reason for having Hindu, Parsi, Muslim and other communal elevens. I should have thought that such unsportsmanlike divisions would be considered taboos in sporting language and sporting manners.”

Such divisions — based on imagined gods and imagined pasts — are indeed unnatural and unsportsmanlike. Gandhi was right.

Broken bond

The bonds among teammates transcend social constructs, but cataclysmic events such as the Partition can sever them.

Grahanandan Singh, better known as Nandy Singh, was born in Lyallpur — now Faisalabad — in 1926. His best friends in college were Keshav Dutt, Amir Kumar and Muhammad Shahzada Shahrukh. An inseparable foursome — one Sikh, two Hindus and one Muslim — who were brilliant at hockey. They won all before them — college and university tournaments, then the national championships of India, playing for Punjab. Partition separated them, and Nandy, Dutt and Kumar had to leave their motherland and move eastward.

Dutt never forgot being helped by Shahrukh. ‘The political situation had turned extremely bad. As the sun went down, religious chanting used to start, slowly getting louder. And then, there was firing. Sleeping at night became impossible,” Dutt said in a documentary, Taangh, made by Nandy’s daughter Bani.

“Shahrukh stayed with me for a couple of nights because I was frightened and couldn’t sleep. Finally he brought his uncle’s car, or whatever he did, I don’t know. And then, he took me to Lahore railway station and sent me off. Must have paid for my ticket also,” Dutt said.

All four played in the Olympics — three for India, one for Pakistan. Nandy, Dutt, Kumar won gold for India in 1948 and 1952; Shahrukh, playing for Pakistan, returned home empty-handed in 1948, having lost the bronze medal playoff to the Netherlands.

Dutt never went back to his beloved Lahore. He said the friendship with Shahrukh broke, “not because our wish was to break it, but because the political position had become extremely bad”.

In 75 years of India-Pakistan, there have been some memorable highs, and no lows lower than the religious chants during cricket matches in Sharjah in the 1980s. Let’s hope that in the 25 years to the centenary of Independence, there will be only highs and no lows.

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