The game is lost

Over the past two decades, sport in India has been through a peculiar transformation. The collective interest in games holds only as long as Indians are participating in major tournaments

Babu Mani, who was captain of the Indian football team some 35 years ago, died a forlorn but perhaps not impecunious death at an early age of 59. Prominent newspapers had not covered it. Not in Delhi at least. His being penurious would not have been surprising. Many Indian footballers, famous ones to boot, passed away in those circumstances. But when football in India, more so in Calcutta, was part of a certain socio-cultural frame, the unnoticed death of a player who had once achieved stardom would be inconceivable.

Over the past two decades, sport in India has been through a peculiar transformation. In some areas, Indians are doing well. Badminton is one of them. Not so well in table tennis, but here too our women and men are showing a lot of promise. But the sad thing is that the collective interest in such games holds as long as Indians participate in major tournaments. If in All England Badminton the last Indian challenger loses in the semi-final, seldom does a follower of the game get to know — from the print media at least — who won eventually. That it can be disheartening for a youngster pursuing a sport is seldom given a thought.

But not so with football, a game in which India’s last success came in 1970, when the country won the bronze at the Asian Games. In the 1950s and 1960s, when India had some standing in Asian football at least, not much news of the game barring what happened in the World Cup came from other parts of the world. Yes, all knew India figured nowhere on the world map but that did not restrain fans from cheering their heroes and or prevent stone-throwing between supporters of eminent clubs. Manchester United evoked awe and so did George Best. But very few knew who won the English Premier League in a particular year. The interest in South American football shaded into a romantic interest in the continent itself, with its history of colonialism, poverty, the Amazon river, the Andes mountains, and so on. But Copa America was something most did not know of if one were to go by the sports pages of big newspapers and magazines such as the venerable Sportsweek. The rumbustious sparring of football fanatics did not give a hint of evidence that their interest went beyond the local. All this seems the stuff of an age today’s admirers of Messi and Ronaldo cannot conceive of.

Still football was Indian — so Indian that one could be forgiven for thinking that the game originated in India. Take Calcutta football and leave out the nationalism around Mohan Bagan winning the IFA Shield in 1911. This is one sphere in which the parochial city turned cosmopolitan. Star players from the south (Babu Mani was from Karnataka), or Baluchistan and the NWFP in the 1930s or 1940s, equalled the Bengalis in number or even outnumbered them. People went into raptures when their favourite non-Bengali players ran rings around their opponents — so what if the latter were Bengali! On the football field it did not matter if one was a Muslim or a Hindu. Ahmed Khan, the player who East Bengal’s website says is “India’s greatest ever”, was neither a Bengali nor a Hindu.

Seasonal changes and religious occasions blended into football. Excitement started in early spring, just after the Saraswati Puja, when players changed their club affiliations. The sultry heat of summer seemed even an attraction when it came to standing in queues to get a ticket to see even the initial matches of the Calcutta football league. There would be endless discussion as to who could perform after a monsoon downpour. Autumnal victory in an IFA Shield final would add to the mirth of the Durga Puja, which would follow in 15 days or so. Hyderabad, Mysore, or Calicut perhaps did not romance the game to the extent Calcutta did, but there too it had a place in social life. Had it not been for its cultural content, there would have been no reason for Pele to play in Calcutta in 1977, by when India had slipped badly even by Asian standards.

Worldwide it was cricket that had to keep pace with football in popularity. In India it was the other way round. The institutional props of football — such as the dominant tournaments — have given way to competitions in newer formats that are some kind of brain-teasers. That way the core of Indian football has been dismantled. Hence the interest in the game has glided over the national and broadened itself into the international, but with knobs on. It’s worth thinking about what makes Tulsidas Balaram, who was part of India’s Asian Games gold-winning team in 1962 and a legend of Calcutta football though he was from Hyderabad, say he would play football in his next life but not in India.