The girl from Sialkot

Rohit Mahajan

If you flip through a ‘Who’s Who’ of sports published in Punjab in the 1960s, you’d find that a very large number of sportsmen and sportswomen had ‘now in Pakistan’ in parenthesis along with the name of their birthplace. A lot of them, you’d find, were born in Lahore and Sialkot. Most of them are gone, and the road ahead is short for those who remain.

Those born in the 1930s and 1940s faced huge odds right at birth — life expectancy in India of the 1930s was less than 35, an effect of disease, famine and natural disasters of the last couple of decades, exacerbated by the indifference of the colonialists.

Kulwant Ghuman belonged to a Sikh family of Ugoki village near Sialkot. Born in 1933, she got into sports in the 1940s and was among the pioneers in women’s sport in Punjab after Partition. She was very good in athletics and badminton, but volleyball and hockey were her strong suits — she captained Punjab in hockey at the 1954 and 1955 Nationals, and also played for India in various international volleyball events.

In 1956, 24 years before women’s hockey became part of the Olympics programme, she was the only Punjabi girl in the Indian hockey team that flew to Australia for an international tournament, in the run-up to the Melbourne Olympics.

That was the crowning glory of her career. It was a time of low female representation in sport in India: From 1948 to 1976, India had mostly all-men Olympics squads — there were four women in the 1952 campaign, and none or a lone woman in the contingent till 1976. There were 18 women representing India at the 1980 Olympics, boosted by the hockey squad.

Sporting family

How did a girl of the 1930s get into serious sport? Kulwant, evidently, was the daughter of an emancipated man — her father was a keen footballer in college and had only encouragement for her. “My father, Sardar Balwant Singh, was in the football team of Khalsa College in Amritsar. My eldest brother, Col Gurbachan Singh, represented Government College, Lahore, in two sports, hockey and football. Another brother, Col Avtar Singh, represented Forman Christian College, Lahore, also in hockey and football,” Kulwant, laid low by cancer in the last couple of months of her life, related in December.

She started in sport when she accompanied her brothers to the playing fields in Lahore. “I have memories of playing sport in school in Lahore, but then came Partition and I completed my matriculation from a refugee school in Delhi,” she said. They moved to Jalandhar when her family was allotted land there, in lieu of their ancestral land in Sialkot.

“It was in Kanya Mahavidyalaya that I got selected to participate in various sports, and then in DAV College,” she said. “The real push came in college. The well-known colleges laid great emphasis on sports and extra-curricular activities. My father and brothers were the motivators, but my mother was a pillar of strength for me.”

There was little institutional support in terms of coaching, and days of gender parity in sport were still 50 years away. She didn’t get to the Olympics, though she was good enough to have made it with the hockey team in the 1950s.

Kulwant loved sport right to the end of her days and watched it on live TV as long as she could, before cancer brought her life’s journey to an end this week.

Sport in Sialkot

Last month, Priyantha Kumara, a Sri Lankan national managing a sports goods factory in Sialkot, was lynched by the employees of the factory after being accused of blasphemy. The question arose: What was a Sri Lankan doing in Sialkot?

In the last decade of the 19th century, two brothers, Jhanda Singh Oberoi and Ganda Singh Oberoi, started manufacturing badminton and tennis racquets in Sialkot. The main buyers were, naturally, the British in the army cantonments across India. Natural resources were easily available around Sialkot and with rising demand, the brothers added cricket bats, polo sticks, hockey sticks, footballs and golf clubs to their list of products. That’s how the famous Sialkot sports industry came into being.

One unintended consequence of the enterprise of the Oberoi brothers — and others — was sport being taken up in ever-increasing numbers by Indians living in the region. Sialkot to benefited from this sporting culture and a large number of sportspersons came from there, including women such as Kulwant Ghuman.