Cover feature

Caste and the sporting status quo

As long as caste continues as the overwhelming factor in India, all-round sporting glory will be elusive, and Indian teams will continue performing disastrously globally.

By : S Anand

Sport, historically, evolved as a substitute for war. Chariots used in war would be used for racing as sport. In ancient Greece, the Olympics games were closely associated with the development of the state and warfare between states. In the sporting arena, gladiators – either prisoners of war or criminalised slaves – fought to the death in front of spectators. Early sport was controlled war in a public place: permissible violence, staged within a certain demarcated boundary, unfolded under the gaze of the state, king or some form of authority.

The linkages between war and combative sport in the Subcontinent are strong. In India, when ultra-nationalist and revisionist historians celebrate ‘ancient’ sport such as kushti, malla-yuddha or pehlwani – forms of combat wrestling in which the mythological Bhima and Duryodhana participate – they are primarily referring to martial arts. Even in the southern part of the Subcontinent, kalarippayattu (prevalent in parts of present-day Kerala and Karnataka) and varma adi (in present-day Tamil Nadu) are martial-art forms that double up as medical practices, since they emphasise understanding of the ‘vital spots’, and also pass for sport. Kabaddi, a popular sport in the Punjab that also finds mention in ancient Tamil culture as sadugudu, is another combative team game that entails a great deal of group physical contact.

When sport thus is a display of controlled physical aggression, the question of who has a right to perform becomes crucial. In traditional caste society, participation in all martial sports would necessarily have been limited to the martial Kshatriyas; in some cases, arms-bearing Brahmins also participated. The oppressed castes, especially the Dalits, are not expected to participate in sport. In the hierarchical social order, every caste group has a certain predefined role to perform, and the very participation of Dalits in the sporting arena could threaten that order, with the prospect of defeat at the hands of the ‘subaltern’.

The mythological story of Ekalvya, the Adivasi archer who is denied by the Brahmin guru Dronacharya a chance to even compete with the less-talented Kshatriya-disciple Arjuna, encapsulates the issues of boundaries and transgressions that animate caste society. Karna, half-brother of the Pandavas in the epic Mahabharat, is deemed low-born, but poses a threat with his very talent at archery. Ekalvya, Karna, Arjuna and Dronacharya may be mythological characters, but they continue to be the reference points when caste codes are written by the modern sport establishments. The Indian state awards for the country’s best players are named after Arjuna, and after Dron- acharya for the best coaches – a Kshatriya-Brahmin combination notorious for its unsporting attitude, duplicity and deception.

Even today, birth determines eligibility in various forums, and the sporting arena is more contested than other public spheres. The victory of an individual or a team belonging to an oppressed caste can lead to role reversals. A Dalit cannot be an ‘acceptable’ winner in sport, since it imbues the person/community with heroism. Though globally modern sport today endorses the slum-to-podium successes of the working-class poor, and modern sport is seen as a site of subaltern assertion, caste society does not permit such assertions. James H Mills, editor of Subaltern Sports: Politics and Sport in South Asia, argues that “sports invites subalternity” – although such an invitation seems foreclosed in many ways in the caste-ridden Indian context. And even if there are sporting arenas where Dalits and Adivasis can truly excel, such a sport never manages to attract mass appeal, and such heroes are rarely subjects of mass adulation. The forgotten Indian archer, Limba Ram, a one-time world champion, exemplifies such indifference. Only a Tendulkar, Dhoni or Sania Mirza can be icons and brands.

Not a social leveller
Take the case of an ‘ancient’ Indian sport such as pehelwani. According to Joseph S Alter, a scholar who has studied Indian wrestling, untouchables and Muslims are discouraged from entering the akhara (exercise pit). After all, he notes, “Akharas are often located on land that is owned by temple-management committees or donated by a public benefactor or patron of wrestling.” Dalit participation, and potential victory, can upset the caste order of things. Moreover, the pehlwani diet is strictly vegetarian, and emphasises brahmacharya, or celibacy. According to Alter, “A diet of milk, ghee, and almonds is said to both build up and stabilize one’s supply of semen. Ghee in particular is regarded as homologous to semen since it is whitish and creamy, and because it is the distilled essence of milk.” The ideology around pehlwani seems anomalous, but it strongly endorses caste hierarchy. Crucially, the expensive diet is not something the largely poor Dalits would be able to afford. The Dalits thus tend to be excluded structurally from the strict regimen that goes into the disciplining of a wrestler’s body.

In India, where more than 72 percent of the population continues to live in rural areas, where demarcations of boundaries based on caste continue to be rather rigid, sport, both in its premodern and modern avatars, is not a ready option for the oppressed communities. Where Dalits cannot even visit teashops or wells, access to public playgrounds or a gym, if there is one, becomes a serious issue. It is for this reason that one witnesses, in India, news of Dalits being attacked and even killed for winning sporting contests, in particular in games dominated by the upper castes.

In December 2003, in the village of Santagarh in Saharanpur District of Uttar Pradesh, two Dalit boys, Vikas and Munish, were brutally killed after their cricket team had inflicted a string of defeats on the Rajput-dominated Hasanpur team. The all-Dalit Saharanpur team had won INR 200 per victory in their last three cricketing encounters with Hasanpur, and the Rajput sense of pride and honour had taken a beating. Similarly, in January 2007, in Sedapalayam, in Tamil Nadu, a Dalit youth named Siva was murdered following an altercation between the Dalit and the dominant Vanniar youth over a cricket match. These are but a few incidents that have come to light due to the fact that, at the centre of the conflicts, has been cricket – a game that drowns out all other sports in India.

Sport is projected as a great social leveller, but in India it becomes yet another site of reinforcing social norms. The domination and popularity of cricket owes not merely to the fact that it was introduced by a colonial power around their gymkhanas, or to the fact that in contemporary India, urban and rural, it appears to require nothing more than an improvised bat, a rubber ball, three hand-drawn lines on a wall or a pile of stones serving as wicket. As such, cricket has come to be projected as a truly democratic sport, one that can be played by more than just the rich.

It is this notional, routine access to cricket that gives the poor and the unprivileged the impression that they are participating in something of a ‘national’ game, that otherwise only the upper-caste Tendulkars and Dravids play. One-day cricket, with its demands of fitness, has led to a more regionally and, caste-wise, more diverse national team than the ‘traditional’ five-day Test cricket. Yet the larger system that governs cricket in India, and the manner in which access to most professional sports is structured, limit the possibilities of ‘subaltern’ forays into the higher echelons of any sport. It is a fact that only those who have the paraphernalia of flannels, shoes and the right gear, as well as access to well-formed pitches and ‘nets’, can even think of playing competitive cricket at the lowest division level.

Today, global capital and the television boom in India may appear to have bestowed a pre-eminent status on cricket. Yet the game’s ready acceptance among the elite, and its natural propensity to be Brahmin- and upper-class-dominated (at least in Test cricket) goes largely unexplained. Ashis Nandy, who has in the past equated cricket with Hinduism, and argued that it is an ‘Indian game’ accidentally discovered by the British, writes in his The Tao of Cricket: “Particularly recognisable to the Indian elites were cricket’s touch of timelessness, its emphasis on purity, and its attempt to contain aggressive competition through ritualisation.” For Nandy, who can be considered anti-modernist and anti-secular, cricket is a non-modern game that seeks to sustain a ‘hierarchy of values’ that defies modernity. Cricket, most importantly, being a non-contact sport, appeals to the Brahmin sense of ‘purity’.

Non-school activity
The question is often asked as to whether some form of affirmative action in sport, one that ensures subaltern participation, could lead to more Indians climbing the medals podiums in global sport. There is no simple answer to this question. As things stand, the possibility of participating in modern competitive sports depends almost entirely on access to education. But in rural areas in India, 75 percent of schools make do with one teacher for several classes. Among Dalit children, the dropout rate in classes 1 to 5 is nearly 37 percent; in classes 5 to 8, it is nearly 60 percent. By secondary-education levels, that number jumps further to 73 percent. Few schools have playgrounds, and there is precious little space for sports other than plots used for assembly. Certainly sports equipment is absent, and children are left to play ‘games’ rather than ‘sports’.

Compounding the problem is child labour, which forms the lot of the exploited youth and children. Children under 14 constitute around 3.6 percent of the total labour force in India. Of these, nearly 85 percent are engaged in traditional farming. There is hardly the time or income required to engage in sport, even as a child. Sport is invariably seen as an extracurricular, even non-school, activity for which there are no academic incentives. According to the norms, a school must necessarily have a playground, but such norms are easily flouted. Only upper-class schools provide some opportunities for real engagement with sport.

In India, those who take to athletics, hockey, football or other physically intensive but deglamourised sports tend to come from less privileged backgrounds. The aims and objectives of a lower-middle-class sportsperson in India can be rather modest. Having been forced to neglect academic education, he or she aims to become a state-ranked player by age 22; at best to participate in a few national finals; and, on the strength of such achievements and a degree, land a clerical job with the government, availing the ‘sports quota’.

For sportspersons with better education, keen on moving up one rung and getting a toehold in the middle class, public-sector units (PSUs), led by the railways, had in earlier times offered employment and financial security. Even they ceased to represent their employers in sports meets by age 30. However, since the 1990s, following the policy of ‘liberalisation’, the government disinvested from PSUs, and there followed a freeze on most government recruitment; as such, the incentive to explore a career in sport is far less attractive today. The private sector’s policies of recruitment do not, of course, make allowance for any form of affirmative action – forget a sports quota.

Given such combinations of factors, most Indians, egged on by the mainstream media, are keener on following the failures of the Indian cricket team than in introspecting on why Indians do not fetch medals at global sporting events. A hierarchical, divided society that insistently sustains and nurtures inequality cannot aspire to sporting glory. As long as caste continues to remain an over-determining factor in India, all-round sporting glory will elude Indians. Till then, postmodern scholars can continue to speculate on how this is, in fact, symptomatic of the Indian tradition of resisting the modern, how non-performance with regard to global standards is in fact a native critique of the universalising and standardising impulse of contemporary global sports. Till then, we can partake of the subcontinental obsession with cricket, a sport that apparently defies modernity.