A brief history of India’s Olympic movement

Olympics: The India Story
Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta
HarperCollins
480 pages
Rs695

There is perhaps no better time to read a book on the Olympics than when the Olympics are around. A nation that has been a minnow in the Olympic arena is not expected to have a great Olympic tradition in its 112-year history. But Boria Majumdar, noted historian and scholar, and fellow academic Nalin Mehta, have shown that there is a lot more to Indian sport than just cricket. Or rather, those hockey golds.

A well-researched effort, the book brings out some astounding details of Indian sports, its origin, the politics, passion and sacrifices. As the authors write, “The Indian Olympic story is also a story of Indian politics, of power equation, regionalism, and the failed commercialism of Olympic sports vis-à-vis cricket.”

But they establish that cricket never played much of a role in the country’s freedom struggle. Hockey did. “It was in Indian hockey, and in the Olympic Games, that the nationalist aspirations of colonial India found full expression,” they write. Indians went to participate in the Olympics on equal terms with the British, at a time when the colony was not even invited to the first British Empire Games (1930), which went on to be called the Commonwealth Games.

The book claims that Olympism came to India as part of the process of globalisation, “decades before the term itself became fashionable” and give credit to Sir Dorab Tata for starting the Olympic movement in the country. The Tata scion sent three runners to the Antwerp Games in 1920 at his expense, to record India’s first Olympic participation. The book, however, doesn’t provide the names of India’s first ever batch of Olympians.

The early days of Indian Olympism witnessed a fierce power struggle, with many groups trying to gain control of the reins of the Indian Olympic Association, the regional infighting being as old as the Olympic movement in the country itself.

There is an interesting story about a man called Sohrab H Bhoot of Bombay who formed the National Cyclists Federation of India, of which he went on to become not just president, but chairman, secretary and treasurer at the same time. He was known to pocket the gifts meant for the cyclists. Not surprisingly, he was once beaten up by aggrieved cyclists at one tournament. The chapter on the 1936 Berlin Olympics describes in detail Dhyan Chand and his hockey team’s journey to Germany and their defence of the gold in adverse conditions. When the team left Mumbai, there was no one to give them a send-off and when the team returned with the gold, it was same story. However, the Germans gave them a five-star treatment.

Mujumdar, also a cricket historian, tries to spice up the reading with cricketing anecdotes, but one need not read Olympic history to read about cricketing trivia. In all, this is a well-documented reference book. You may not complete it in one sitting, but you do want to keep going back. especially when the Olympics are on. 
t_vijay@dnaindia.net