COMMENTARY

Haryanvi Jats as Indian Sports Icons

Bhupendra Yadav

watched him grapple but here things were different. He said, I fought not just Sushil Kumar but his die-hard 7,000 spectators who witnessed the bout (Singh 2010).

Shamateur Sports

Athletes from Haryana won more than half of the gold medals at the Commonwealth Games 2010. Against the backdrop of the transformation of sports into global commerce, corporatisation and shamateurism, this article uncovers some of the reasons for the success of the Haryanvi athletes in combat and contact sports. Rewards have so far only celebrated the famous; they have not created a sports culture. And a sports policy has been announced by the state government only after the CWG success. Will the new sporting icons help Haryana make the transition from an obsession with honour to a concern for human dignity?

t 101, the Indian medals tally at the Commonwealth Games (CWG) 2010 was the highest ever. Women athletes brought home 55% of these medals. This is a remarkable feat given that in our country, the nutritional needs of women usually get the least priority. The other notable feature of these games was that Haryana alone, with 2% of Indias population, contributed more than 50% of the gold medals (21 out of the 38 India won).

Success Has Many Fathers

In popular perception, Haryana was transformed overnight. Previously the dangerous backyard of Delhi with the draconian khap panchayats, it is now a hub of glorious sportspersons and delightful achievers. Everyone wanted to take credit for this magnicent performance. The Sports Authority of India rightly claimed credit, and the Indian Olympic Association might also have had a hand in this feat. Even Bhupender Singh Hooda, the Chief M inister (CM) of Haryana, claimed that his sports policy crafted the success (Malik 2010). Nothing can be further from the truth. The so-called sports policy is the consequence of rather than the reason for Haryanas rise as a sports hub. The policy is barely on the anvil, as we will show l ater. Using some insights from Bourdieu, the purpose of this article is to understand the reasons behind the splendid performance by Haryanas athletes. The fact that the games were hosted in Delhi gave the Haryanvi athletes a home crowd advantage. Mahavir, the father-cum-coach of two women wrestlers, brought with him 200 spectators to cheer his daughters who won a medal each. The opposition also noted the home crowd advantage. Cameroon-born Australian wrestler, Mehrdad Tarash, was trounced by Sushil Kumar in 30 seconds in his opening bout. Tarash observed that back home not even a few hundred

In the medieval times, chivalrous aristocrats indulged in fencing, riding and polo. To this the bourgeoisie added tennis, skiing and golf. The latter are usually practised alone, or with chosen partners, in exclusive clubs. As opposed to these elite sports, the Haryanvis excelled in the combat and contact games, like shooting, athletics, wrestling and boxing. These sports require a lot of strength and dedication, and can be risky. Despite living with the odds of a dismal gender development index, Haryanvi women athletes have done well in these masculine sports. Four out of the ve women to have won gold medals did so in wrestling, shooting and the discus. Sport is a part of culture and cultural elds are important but not autonomous. They are uid and dynamic because they are being constantly changed, not just by geniuses or the society hosting them, but by internal practices also. The legendary American, Avery Brundage, ruled over the Olympic movement for two decades till 1972. Besides not wanting women as c ontestants, he hated professionalism and restricted the Olympics ostensibly to a mateurs. However, the best athletes r eceived remuneration. Everyone knew what was going on, but they kept up the pretence as if the athletes were amateurs. A ccepting money from governments, sports departments, corporate sponsors and private organisers was ne, but being caught accepting money or telling the truth about it was scandalous. This was not amateur sport but shamateurism.

Market Culture in Sports

From the 1960s this inalienable eld of sports was also subjected to market c ulture. Bourdieu would say that an autonomous eld was being transformed into a heteronomous one. The external pressure from the eld of business initially manifest itself through increased sponsorship and telecasting rights, but more recently it has reached a point where the sporting teams are listed like companies on the stock exchange. We, in India, are

A version of this article was earlier published in the Times of India, 31 October 2010. Bhupendra Yadav ([email protected]) is a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

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witnessing a greed-driven corporatisation in cricket. To turn sports into viable commerce, pushy ofcials took over the sports organisations. For instance, the Spanish Juan Samaranch lorded over the Olympic movement after Brundage, the Italian Primo Nebiolo over international athletics and the Brazilian Joao Havelange over international soccer. The primary aim of these ofcials was to corporatise their sport to the fullest. The more businesses invested in sports, the more these chosen sports prospered in terms of media publicity, s tadium attendances, sponsorships and players wages. The sport for sports sake spirit and the loyalty of players to teams and of teams to localities was overtaken by economic considerations (Webb et al 2002). The Indian Premier League in cricket, once led by the infamous Lalit Modi, is a good example of this transformation of sports into global commerce. Prior to the 1960s, a sportspersons identity meant (at least publicly) a strong commitment to the game and its values (like attachment to fair play, loyalty, selflessness, the good of the game) and supposedly masculine qualities such as strength, determination, discipline, courage and tolerance of pain. With the onset of corporatisation, sporting identities were inuenced by commoditisation which valued individuality, selshness, arrogance, a lack of discipline, disrespect for authority, hyper-sexuality and most importantly, a capacity to create headlines or initiate scandals. Sportspersons now get the p ublicity of pop stars and crowds gather to see not just their sporting skills. The penchant of sports icons for excessive behavi our, their sexual attractiveness or notoriety and their larger than life reputations arouses curiosity. Judged by this yardstick, sport is a dull non-corporate business in Haryana. Monetary and other awards have just begun to ow in, but this has not spoilt Haryanas athletes. They have not thrown many tantrums yet, and hence are a boring, disciplined bunch. The state government is f ollowing a well-accepted policy of directly helping athletes through government jobs under a 3% sports quota. In the past three years, 239 sportspersons have also got jobs in the police under this scheme. Out of these,

11 were appointed deputy s uperintendents of police (DSPs), seven i nspectors, 21 subinspectors and the r emaining 199 in lower ranks (Bhardwaj 2010). Out of the 41 sportswomen given jobs in the Haryana police, three are DSPs, 11 are sub-inspectors and 27 are in lower ranks (Times of India 2010). These athletes are professionals masquerading as amateurs and we have here our own example of shamateurism.

house and an additional Rs 5 lakh for preparation for the London Olympics (The Tribune 2010b). These rewards only celebrate the f amous and support the successful. Hence, we need to look elsewhere for the roots of the love for sports in Haryana.

Aggressive Peasants
There is a family resemblance between military/hunting activities and wrestling, shooting, races, riding or archery. For the soldiering population of Haryana, therefore, love for such sports comes easily. Indian boxers bagged seven medals in the CWG. Two of the three gold medals went to Paramjit Samota and Manoj Kumar, both Haryanvis. They hail from army backgrounds and in fact, Kumars father was also a boxer. They claim that personal a nger about the lack of money and poor infrastructure made them aggressive, which worked in their favour (Indian E x press 2010). Second, before the advent of machinery, agriculture was a backbreaking occupation. Agricultural income had a direct relation with the quantity of sweat produced during ones toil. In the early 1960s, Bourdieu had the following interesting observation about the pains Algerian peasants took to reproduce life:
The peasant does not, strictly speaking, labour: he takes pains. What is valued is not action directed towards an economic goal, but activity in itself, regardless of its economic function. The self-respecting must always be doing something. If nothing else, at least he can carve a spoon (in an Arab saying) (Bourdieu 1979: 24).

Rewarding the Successful

Haryanvis may be tough like the hardy people on the frontiers but incidentally, they are mostly vegetarian like the Gujaratis. Desi ghee helps the athletes build their strength and vitality. Hence the CM of Haryana, while felicitating the athletes, gifted them desi ghee according to their performance the gold medallists got 101 kilos whereas the participants were gifted 21 kilos of it (Sirhindi and M alik 2010). To think that these rewards are a substitute for a sports policy would be ridiculous. The monetary incentive architecture has been in place for long. The rst international sports star of Haryana was not a Haryanvi. Karnam Malleswari, a resident of Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh, became a resident of Yamuna Nagar in Haryana after marrying fellow weight lifter Rajesh Tyagi in 1997. In 2000, Malleswari became the only woman to win an Olympic medal when she got the bronze for weightlifting at the Sydney O lympics. She gratefully acknowledged the congratulatory phone call to her by the then CM Om Prakash Chautala, a sum of Rs 25 lakh and a plot of 510 sqm presented to her (Dutta 2000). In 2004, as preparations for the Athens Olympics, the Indian Olympic Association got Rs 1.5 crore from the International O lympic Committee. It distributed Rs 70 lakh to the hockey team, Rs 22 lakh to A bhinav Bindra, Rs 8.5 lakh each to K arnam Malleswari and Anjali Bhagwat, and Rs 6 lakh to Anju Bobby George (The Tribune 2004). Immediately after the CWG 2010, the Rajasthan government announced awards for the discus gold medallist Krishna Poonia, who belongs to H aryana but now lives there. Apart from Rs 15 lakh as her reward, her coach-husband was given Rs 7.5 lakh and she has been offered a DSPs job in the Rajasthan police, a MIG B

With the passage of time, the life of these Algerian peasants must have become purposive-rational like that of the modern Haryanvi peasant. Almost 84% of the landholdings in Haryana are less than four hectares and thus uneconomical (Government of Haryana 2009). Unable to hire agricultural labour,

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COMMENTARY

such small farms are cultivated by family labour, and this routine toiling for long hours builds the stamina of ordinary people and produces in them a natural inclination for sports. The Director of Sports in Haryana, O P Singh, claimed that the sports department had an annual budget of Rs 60 crore. This year the state government plans to spend Rs 4 crore on cash prizes to the CWG medallists (Rs 15 lakh for gold, Rs 10 lakh for silver and Rs 5 lakh for bronze) and participants (Rs 2 lakh per head). Apart from salaries to the employees of the sports d epartment, they run a sports scholarship scheme for 3,000 youngsters between 8 and 15 years of age. The talented are selected after a Sports Promotion Aptitude Test and will receive a monthly scholarship of Rs 1,500 and Rs 2,000 (Indian E xpress 2010). The modest gures given by Singh are in sharp contrast to the tall claims of the CM, who declared that the sports allocation has gone up from Rs 1,400 crore in 2005 to Rs 3,200 crore in 2010. Hooda also claimed that 46,000 children in two age groups, viz, 8-14 and 14-19, came for selection under the Play for India Sports Talent Hunt Programme and 5,000 of them have been selected for scholarships, whereas Singh put the number at 3,000 (Malik 2010; The Tribune 2010c). This discrepancy in numbers raises doubts about the credibility of the claims made by the CM.

the same laissez-faire policy when khap panchayats ran amok in the name of honour. Myopic leaders are seldom in command. Their politics gets commandeered instead to momentarily cheer the successful sportspersons or to helplessly mourn the gory consequences of the illegitimate diktats of khap panchayats. The government lacks the will to be the catalyst of change, and it has no resolve to harbinger cultural modernity.

these sports icons will speak up for universal values of freedom and social justice starting with equal status of women in the family, right to choose a partner, and the dignity of Others.
References
Bhardwaj, Mukesh (2010): Why Haryana Ranks Fifth in the Commonwealth, Indian Express, 15 October. Bourdieu, Pierre (1963 in French [1979 English translation], Algeria 1960): The Disenchantment of the World, Trans, Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (1996 in French [1998 English translation]): On Television and Journalism, Trans Pris cilla Parkhurst Ferguson (London: Pluto Press). Dutta, Ashwani (2000): Rousing Welcome for Malleswari, The Tribune, 9 October. Government of Haryana (2009): Statistical Abstract 2007-08, Publication No 910, Department of E conomic and Statistical Analysis. Indian Express (2010): Our Performance at the Games Made People Watch Boxing, 24 October. Malik, B S (2010): Medal Haul: CM Gives Credit to Sports Policy, The Tribune, 11 October. Singh, Prabhjot (2010): Wrestling to Stay in Cwealth Games, The Tribune, 10 October. Sirhindi, Manish and B S Malik (2010): Battle of Rallies: Hooda Plays for Olympic Gold, Chautala for Khaps, The Tribune, 2 November. ToI (2010): The Golden Girls of Jatland, 17 October. The Tribune (2004): Anju to Carry Flag at Athens, PTI, 7 August. (2010a): Hooda, Chautala Joint Winners, 2 November. (2010b): Poonia Rewarded Rs 15 Lakhs, 17 October. (2010c): Sports Outlay to be Hiked, 15 October. Webb, Jon, Tony Schirato and Geoff Danaher, ed. (2002): Understanding Bourdieu (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage Publications).

Icons for Change

A few m0nths ago, the khap panchayats of some Jat gotras had shamed Haryana by condoning brutalities in the name of some odd sense of honour, tradition and paternalism. Now the new sports icons, most of whom are Jats, have given the province a positive image of a sports dynamo. Their victories have been of international standards and they have had global exposure. Soon some of these sports icons will be endorsing consumer products in commercial advertisements. Could we recruit them for initiating a dialogue for cultural change? These sportspersons have neither gone to colleges nor have they learnt critical social theory in classrooms. Whatever they have learnt is on wrestling mats and in boxing rings. They are not intellectuals; but as Gramsci claimed, everyone performs the intellectual function. Bourdieu reminded us that the purpose of education was not just to produce a good worker who could read, write and count. Education was meant to produce good citizens who know the law and can defend their rights. We must work to universalise the conditions of access to the universal (Bourdieu 1998: 66). Haryana is in dire need of education in universal values. It has to make a transition from an obsession with honour to a concern for human dignity. The values of freedom and social justice are the basis for human dignity. To deny them in the name of social honour, caste prestige, gotra e steem and family reputation is both illegitimate and immoral. The better way to produce social opinions in the public sphere, said Habermas, was to build them through rational communication between stakeholders. Haryana today is proud of its sporting icons and would communicate with them more easily than with us. It remains to be seen if

Sports Policy: A CWG Outcome

There exists a sports school at Rai (Sonepat) since 1973 but none of the CWG medallists are its alumni. Rural stadiums are already underway at 171 places in Haryana. Another 100 rural stadiums have been promised. Sports nurseries have been announced for wrestling in Sonepat, athletics in Rohtak, kabbadi in Jind, hockey in Shahbad (for women) and in Sirsa (for men), volleyball in Kurukshetra, for tennis and badminton in Panchkula. Regional sports centres with hostels are slated to come up in Ambala, Hisar, Rohtak and Gurgaon (The Tribune 2010a). This sports policy has been announced after the spectacular performance of Haryanvi athletes in the CWG. We can see that the government has been a spectator, and not an enabler, in the rise of medallists among Haryanvi sportspersons. We saw

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