Mirror cracked from side to side

Muscularity or physical skill is not valued by the state or by society. How then can Indian sports make a mark?

Vikram Bedi Delhi

A bronze age is underway in Indian sport, heavily contaminated though it remains by years of destitution, of grandeur lost (hockey) and of opportunities foregone (athletics, football, cricket). Still, these are decidedly better times. Relatively speaking, we seem to be graduating beyond episodic excellence, attributable only to exceptional individuals (Milkha Singh, Ramanathan Krishnan, among others) to consistent improvements across many disciplines.

Indian cricket is finally showing its mettle abroad, is more athletic, better balanced, more intelligent. Cricket’s startlingly universal appeal is paying off, albeit not enough to satisfy fans’ infinite greed. “Pay off” is apt: the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is now unimaginably wealthy and is putting its resources to better use.

Even Indian hockey, too slow to adapt to the new astro-turf-based, coaching-intensive game, is recovering lost ground (currently ranked sixth, twice as good as its 1998 ranking). Some commercial money and cable television coverage are finally coming its way. The Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) and its notorious president are no longer ignored by the public—there is scrutiny, debate and criticism, including from within. The commercial lift-off of cricket is pressuring the IHF grandee. There is a new generation of fitter, tougher players. The gradual (but experienced as steep) decline that began even before the accidental gold in the boycott-riddled 1980 Moscow games is finally being reversed.

At the Athens Olympics, the Indian showing was markedly improved. Major Rathore got all the acclaim, but others -- shooters, boxers, wrestlers, women weightlifters, archers and even the hockey team -- put in better showings. And there is Anju George, carrying forward the tradition since PT Usha of female Malayali athletes exposing the injustice and waste of our gender-biased sports culture.

Golf is thriving. There are Jeev Singh, Arjun Atwal and others, but also excellent upcoming young golfers aplenty, despite a tiny talent pool, revealing what can be achieved with even small improvements in funds, infrastructure and administration. The football scene remains dismal, men’s tennis is declining but Indian badminton is better organised, and has greater depth.

At this upbeat point, a harsh reminder of the larger truth: even impoverished island-nations like Jamaica and Cuba have international achievements that expose our sporting puniness. Dare I mention China’s exorbitant and ever-increasing sporting glories? That I termed the recent improvements, very minor relative to other countries, a sporting bronze age was a comment on India’s dismal past record, including in cricket.

Despite the recent upturn, India’s sporting health remains poor, which is precisely why Indians indulge in self-flagellation after every failed Olympics campaign. Not for nothing is apparently infantile sport freighted with moral, metaphorical meanings the world over: having internalised colonial stereotypes, we cannot but feel disturbed about what our nothingness at modern, hyper-competitive sport says about us.

But, to be contrarian again: medals at the Olympics are merely of little intrinsic value. Instead, what matters is whether we are a sporting nation—whether as many of us as possible (not just the young, well-off, or males) have the means, the opportunity and the desire for the joy of intelligently playing serious sport. The answer: sport doesn’t really, as yet, count culturally in India the way it does elsewhere. Medals not won, rankings not improved are just symptoms of this larger national failing. “What do they of sports know who only sports know?” might be a valid query: what does our failure to become a sporting, medal-winning nation , even after discounting for poverty, say about us?

For one, the government’s failure to truly support sport signals the feeble position physical culture has in our nationalism. For all our century-old rhetoric about the desirability of fitness and strength, we have really been more invested in our ostensible cultural excellences. Also, the Indian nationalist aspiration to be modern has emphasised economics, technology and bookish education over physical culture.

Similar nationalist-states like China and Cuba have felt compelled to produce world-class sportsmen to aggrandise themselves and their people. And have done so successfully, showing that commercial and/or associational approaches to the problem for poorer countries of strengthening sports aren’t the only workable ones. There has been none of that nationalist will from Indian elites—their legitimacy comes from elections on bases other than sports promotion. Unlike in the West, sport as character-shaping, gender-equalising, or citizenship-teaching has only ever been quarter-heartedly promoted.

Sure, we have numerous “official” sports associations but these suffer from under-funding, amateurism and corruption. They are faction-ridden bodies that function less in professional (relatively disinterested) ways than as arenas for grand-standing and power-mongering by (little, amateur) big men (Dalmiya, Kalmadi, Dasmunshi among others). Nor have they been held accountable by indifferent sports ministers.

The market, too, has done little to support sport, not even since liberalisation. It is not only that cricket has acquired a near-market monopoly. There is a vicious cycle between low standards, on the one hand, and poor market support and public participation, on the other. Nowadays, top-flight international sport available on television further reduces the desire for watching or participating in the poor fare offered by local sports associations. Hence, empty stands even for Ranji games, let alone competitions in, say, volleyball or table-tennis.

Underlying these state, market and associational failures lies the truth that we Indians don’t value serious, organised sport the way people in the West or in China do. Very few parents encourage their kids to take games as seriously as studies. Instead, sport, too often, functions as emotional safety valve, more as hedonistic “child-play” than as “serious game”. Middle-class boys play a lot, but it’s cricket one day and basketball or football the next—the young man who is encouraged to devote his energies properly to just one or two games is the exception.

Too often, such youth are from petty-business families that aren’t uptight about the economic future, or else they are so poor at studies that parents feel that sport may mean a quota college seat or a job in a public sector unit. Sport is not for girls, least of all middle-class ones, who are subjected to body-ideals about slimness, beauty and softness, not muscularity or physical skill. With enough of neither facilities nor money nor attention and acclaim, serious sportsmen (other than cricketers and golfers) are often too demoralised and hard-pressed to think of sport as a vocation, love and fidelity. Now, things are improving, but too slowly, too little. Meanwhile, what really counts—our becoming a nation of amateur sportspeople—continues to elude. We Indians, it seems, prefer spectatorship to practice, and value the idea of medals over sport itself.

Sport is a revelatory mirror to hold up to society. Even after discounting for poverty, we don’t look too good in it. As yet.