Article by Amitava Kumar in The New Yorker, published
August 13, 2016
Photo of Dhyan Chand at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
credit Ullstein Bild/Getty
ot long ago, I discovered that I could own a piece of my childhood
trauma if I shelled out sixteen dollars on eBay. The August 22-28, 1976,
issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India, which came out just after the
Montreal Olympics, bore the following headline: "600 Million Indians - Not
One Bronze!"
India's men's field-hockey team, which had won the World Cup
the previous year, finished seventh in Montreal. It was the first time
since 1928 that the team had returned from the Olympics without a medal.
I was thirteen then and do not remember whether the report in
the Illustrated Weekly offered me any consolation. It probably didn't,
since the headline is the only thing that has remained in my memory.
Which is to say that, if for the rest of the world the Olympic Games
represent glorious achievement through sports, for many urban, educated,
middle-class Indians, they offer only a ritual wallowing in a feeling of
failure.
This feeling comes from a blinkered, not to mention privileged, view
of the world. Those experiencing humiliation tend to belong to what used
to be called the leisure class; the athlete soldiering on the field is
often from poor, disadvantaged strata. The former are unable to
comprehend, much less celebrate, the latter's triumph. But the bigger
truth is that in a country with endemic poverty, the real glory of the
Olympics lies in the individuals who have often overcome huge odds to
arrive on the world stage.
At the London Games, in 2012, a flyweight boxer from India named Mary
Kom won the bronze medal in her category. What was
inspiring about Kom's story was that she was the daughter of landless
laborers and had emerged, as the writer Rahul Bhattacharya put it, from
a "town so removed from the Indian growth story that aspiration is not
even visible on its streets."
Similarly, the archer Deepika Kumari, who
competed admirably in the Rio Games, was born to parents who
live in a village near Ranchi, her father working as an auto-rickshaw
driver and her mother a nurse.
According to the journalist T. S.
Sudhir, Dutee Chand - only the third Indian woman ever to qualify for the
hundred-metre sprint - wasn't sure she would have spikes to run at Rio.
She was reported to have said, "I feel like a beggar asking for such things."
I have no doubt that athletes from other countries struggle
against such obstacles, too, but it appears to me sometimes that people
in India and elsewhere choose to forget all this.
While watching the field-hockey match in Rio between the Indian and
U.S. women's teams, on Thursday, I heard the American commentator on NBC
say that even though the Indian players were probably not as fit as
their opponents, they weren't lacking in skills. I wanted to laugh.
Earlier, the same commentator, a two-time Olympian for the United
States, had said that the American players were equipped with small
devices that measured their movements and their level of fatigue. The
U.S. coach checked the data from those devices and, accordingly, made
substitutions during the game. The commentator then added that the
Indian team didn't use this technology.
For the benefit of that NBC
commentator, I'm going to spell out a fact that is so obvious that it is
almost trite: many of the young women on the Indian team are from
villages in the Indian hinterland; several of them, like Sunita Lakra,
Deep Grace Ekka, and Leelima Minz, are adivasis, members of the Indian
aboriginal population. Those women, it would be safe to extrapolate,
wouldn't have had the benefits of diet, training, or access to equipment
that their opponents take for granted.
There is no point in fighting condescension with condescension. I'm
in the wrong if I have given the impression that Indian athletes don't
win medals. In previous Olympics, the men's field-hockey team has
captured gold eight times. No other country can boast of this kind of
success in field hockey. On the other hand, and this is what causes enormous pain to
fans like me, the last time India won an Olympic medal in this sport was
in 1980, thirty-six years ago. At the 2012 London Olympics, India
finished last in field hockey.
I have been sweating through India's matches in Rio, watching the
games on live feed, but, now and then, I have also found it necessary to
go back to this
video on Youtube. It shows highlights of India's 8-1 victory over
Germany in the finals of the 1936 Olympics, played in Hitler's Berlin.
The Indians were led by Dhyan Chand, who is regarded as the best player
the game has ever seen, and he scored three goals in the final. (At the
previous Olympics, held in Los Angeles, in 1932, Chand scored eight
goals in the match against the host country. India beat the United States 24-1.)
In the video, Chand - diminutive and lithe - weaves his way
expertly through the opposition: scoring seems not only effortless but
inevitable. This sort of nostalgia offers a dose of solace, but real
history is more complicated. Dhyan Chand's son, Ashok Kumar, played
hockey for India, too, but the team he led to victory in the 1975 Hockey
World Cup was the first and last to win that event.
Nostalgia pushes us toward comforting mythologies. Let me return to
another moment of early trauma. I wasn't yet born when a famous Indian
athlete named Milkha Singh - "the Flying Sikh" - came fourth in the
400m race at the 1960 Rome Olympics. A few years ago,
a blockbuster Bollywood film called "Bhaag Milkha Bhaag" ("Run Milkha
Run") took pains to tell us that the reason Singh had lost was because,
just after the halfway mark, he turned back to look at his
opponents - and from the way the film was edited - at his
traumatic childhood, caught in the bloody riots that accompanied the
Partition. But he hadn't. We don't want to believe that Milkha Singh had
simply run out of steam.
A year before "Bhaag Milkha Bhaag" appeared in theatres, another
sports biopic, "Paan Singh Tomar," came out. Directed by Tigmanshu
Dhulia, the film presents the life of an Indian steeplechase champion of
the nineteen-fifties and sixties - the eponymous Tomar. After he retired
from running, Tomar returned to his home village in central India, where
he became embroiled in a land dispute. When the local police refused to
help him, and in fact abetted his oppression, he became the leader of a
band of brigands to exact revenge.
This film, too, had its share of
mythologizing, but I immensely enjoyed watching it. The actor who played
Tomar (Irrfan Khan) united his actions as an athlete with his rebellion
as an outlaw. Afterward, I was not able to put out of my mind the words that appeared on the screen
after the film had ended. One after another, names of India's famous but
forgotten athletes appeared, a long series of shaming epitaphs. I
stopped taking notes after the third or fourth name:
Shankar Lakshman
Three-time Olympic hockey gold medalist
Died from lack of medical attention
K. D. Jadhav
1952 Olympian wrestling bronze medalist
Died penniless
Sarwan Singh
1954 Asian Games gold medalist hurdler
Forced to sell his gold medal
he
2024 Paris Olympics men's hockey competition was held at Stade Yves-du-Manoir,
Colombes, Paris, from 27 July to August 8. This was the first time in 40
years that the Indian hockey team was travelling to the Olympics as a
reigning medallist, thanks to their Tokyo Olympics bronze.
ports
films have their own unique charm, but those centered on the Olympics
and Olympians stand apart, depicting unparalleled tales of grit, guts,
gumption, and glory.