By Ranjit Dalvi

Hockey should be developed wherever it is popular and has taken firm roots! Surprisingly India has failed to do this. This is the major reason for its downslide. With three consecutive Olympic gold medals in the colonial era, and then the victory in the London Games as an independent nation served as a catalyst for the game to spread to every nook and corner of the country. Probably at that time it came to be identified with national pride and without any official proclamation it earned the privilege of being called the National Sport!

This was the opportune time to expand the structure with 33 state units affiliated to the then governing body, the Indian Hockey Federation (IHF). The resources including finance may have been scarce then; yet the Federation and state units should have made efforts to form district level and taluka level units to build a proper grass root structure in place. Having failed to do that, it really hurt and still hurts despite formation of a new body, Hockey India.

To stress the fact, let us take the example of my native district Kolhapur. Although the origins of the game there are not clear, the first documented proof is an old photograph of Line Bazar Club posing with a trophy in 1938 or 1939 after winning a hockey tournament. It would be safe to surmise that the sport must have originated a few years before that.

When Kolhapur was a separate Princely State Rajaram Rifles’ hockey team was a force to reckon with

Many may not be aware that Kolhapur has a flourishing sports culture. It was a princely state ruled by descendants of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the great Maratha king who had challenged the might of the Moghuls in the 17^th century. In the early twentieth century Rajarshi Shahu Maharaj, a great social reformer patronised kushti which is traditional Indian wrestling in a mud-pit.

Kolhapur had its own Olympics or a multidiscipline event. Talking of hockey, the Rajaram Rifles Training Centre, the State’s own police force, won the hockey title in the 1945-46 edition of the event, prior to the merger of princely states in the Indian Union.

The Kolhapur State was founded in the year 1700 by Maharani Tara Rani, the widow of Chhatrapati Rajaram, second son of Chhatrapati Shivaji. She turned out to be the nemesis of Aurangzeb, who had marched to the Deccan with the fond hope of capturing it easily.

The valour and tenacity of the Marathas saw Aurangzeb failing in his mission and his subsequent death in 1707 at Aurangabad on his way back to Delhi. He wasted 27 precious years of his life on this futile exercise!

The saga of Maratha valour continues with many still joining the Indian army. The first ever organised battalion of Indian natives, the Maratha Light Infantry (MLI) was formed in 1768 by the British. The same regiment popularised hockey in the 1950s and 1960s.

Olympians Shankar Laxman, Bandu Patil and Major Shantaram Jadhav always struck a chord in the hearts of hockey aficionados. They were in the forefront while the MLI won major tournaments in the country. The MLI headquarters at Belgaum is just two hour’s drive from Kolhapur. Incidentally Bandu Patil’s father served in Kolhapur in the police department.

Our first individual Olympic medal winner, wrestler Khashaba Jadhav (bronze medalist, 1952 Olympics) was a student of the Rajaram College in Kolhapur. In recent times shooters Rahi Sarnobat (Asian and Commonwealth Gold medals in 25 metres Pistol shooting) and Tejaswini Sawant (World Championships and Commonwealth Gold medals in Rifle shooting) have proved their pedigree. Football too is quite popular here and the city boasts of at least 100 clubs.  

 

Lines Bazaar Hockey Club circa 1940s

Hockey still has 18 clubs of which 14 alone are in Line Bazar, an area which gets its name from the infantry lines housing a thousand odd soldiers, the British deployed for their security after they established a residency following the takeover of the state.

There are schools and colleges too which promote hockey not just in the city but also in nearby towns like Ichalkaranji which is a flourishing textile manufacturing hub in Western Maharashtra and taluka places like Islampur and Bhudargad-Gargoti. In fact Ichalkaranji was the first place in the region to develop a natural grass pitch around two decades ago. Most of the hockey is placed on chat or gravel pitches here.

Despite having such a broad base, those at the helm of affairs at the Maharashtra Hockey Association failed to realise the potential of this region. Can you imagine a district hockey association being formed 33 years after independence? Did the IHF ever address this and question the affiliated states?

We kept assuring ourselves of being world-beaters and dreaming that our adversaries were ages behind us in terms of talent and skills till the 1970s. This was despite suffering setbacks in the Rome (1960) and Mexico Olympics (1968) from where the real slide started. Maybe Pakistan winning the two editions of the Games gave us a false sense of security that sub-continental style still reigned supreme!

The introduction of the World Cup and subsequent Olympic Games saw us relinquish our supremacy barring the 1975 edition of the Cup and the Olympic Games at Moscow in 1980.The latter is considered a devalued win!

The story would have been quite different with a proper structure in place to promote the game in such districts or sub-regions like Kolhapur. And mind you, India has 718 districts now! Imagine the amount of raw talent that’s waiting to be tapped at the earliest opportunity!

Photos Courtesy:  Amar Bhosale,  Researcher and freelance journalist.  

Author Ranjit Dalvi is a Sports Writer/ Radio and TV Commentator/ National Umpire: Hockey/Football Referee/ Ex-Convenor Mumbai Hockey Umpires Board/ Ex-Managing Committee member, The Mumbai Hockey Association Ltd.