Peasants On The Athletics Track

Exclusive Extracts from Olympics: The India Story by Boria Majumdarand Nalin Mehta
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‘100 Yards Round A Bend’ To Antwerp: 
PeasantsOn The Athletics Track 

To Sir Dorab Tata goes the credit of starting systematic Olympic activity onIndian soil in 1920…In Sir Dorabji’s words:

"Having been educated in my youth in England I had shared in nearly every kind of English Athletics and acquired a great love for them. On my return to India I conceived the idea of introducing a love for such things there. I helped set up with the support of English friends, as General Secretary, a High School Athletic Association amongst numerous schools of Bombay, in the first place for cricket, and then for Athletic Sports Meetings which embraced nearly all the events which form part of the Inter-University contests every year in London." 

Adopting a game also meant adopting the entire paraphernalia of modernitythat went with it. It didn’t just mean playing a foreign game, it also meantadopting European clothes, European rules and European notions of order and‘fair play’. Sport became the playing field where tradition and modernitymet, clashed, and fused. A good example here is that of the Deccan Gymkhana.After the successful start of the Harris Shield, the idea was modified in Poona(now Pune) with the creation of the Gymkhana.

The committee which ran the Gymkhana was not conversant with the details ofmanaging such athletic meets on European lines and wanted to develop theirsports programme more in line with established Indian traditions. Sir Dorabji,who was nominated the president of the Gymkhana, played a central role in thefusion of foreign and indigenous cultures that ensued.

At the first athletic meet the Gymkahana organized, Dorabji found that thecompetitors were ‘all boys of the peasant class working in the fields andliving off poor fare…’  Naturally they had no idea of European rules ormodern training of any kind. On attending a meeting of the Gymkhana, Sir Dorabjifound that they were proposing to run their 100- yard heats round a bend withoutstrings. This was because their sports ground was very small and the track waspart of a rough unrolled grass field. To the peasants, running was running, butnow it had to be undertaken under standardized and controlled conditions.

In Sir Dorabji’s letters on the subject, preserved at the InternationalOlympic Museum, the one thing that strikes the reader most palpably is his senseof wonder at this clash of peasant and Western cultures in the races at theDeccan Gymkhana. 

Other popular events included the long distance race of about 25 miles,rightly designated the Marathon. The peasants who participated were used torunning barefoot on hard macadamized or dirt roads. Despite their lack oftraining and primitive conditions, the first three or four men ran the distancein fair time. As Sir Dorabji observed, their time ‘would compare well with thetimes done in Europe or elsewhere’. In 1919, some of their times were close tothe times clocked in the Olympics.

Suitably impressed, the Tata scion decided to send three of the runners, evenat his own expense, to the Antwerp Games of 1920. This was the birth ofIndia’s Olympic encounter and nationalist sentiment was at its core. AsDorabji Tata described his motives in a personal letter to the IOC president,Count Baillet Latour, in 1929:

"I therefore offered to arrange for the sending of three of the best runners to Antwerp to run the Olympic Marathon at the next meeting, when I hoped that with proper training and food under English trainers and coaches they might do credit to India. This proposal fired the ambition of the nationalist element in that city to try and send a complete Olympic team." 

But the peasant athletes had little idea of what was required to participatein the Olympics nor of the standard of performance essential to qualify for anyof the events. For instance, a key member of the Gymkhana, when asked what timehe thought was standard for a 100-yard race replied that it could be anything‘from half a minute to a minute’. He was ‘astounded’ when told that itwas not a matter of minutes but rather of tenths of seconds.