Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Indian nationalism was offered as a counterpoint to communal expressions on the playing fields such as those of the Pentangular and the Mohammedan Sporting Club. This brings up the question of whether Gandhi, who in this period was giving new form and direction to the nationalist movement, had any connection to sports.
We do know from his autobiography that at a very young age, he was fascinated by both the physical strength of India’s British rulers and the eating of meat, which was forbidden in his strictly Vaishnava family. The connection between the two was neatly encapsulated in a doggerel that was popular during Gandhi’s childhood: “Behold the mighty Englishman / He rules the Indian small / Because being a meat-eater / He is five cubits tall.”
Encouraged by a friend, Gandhi even took to secretly eating meat for a year so that he could be “strong and daring” and defeat the English, until he realized the error of his ways.
Gandhi’s obsession with his body, health, and diet is, of course, well known. Indeed, Joseph Alter has argued that public health was integral to Gandhi’s ahimsa. Gandhi even went to the extent of saying that it is “impossible for an unhealthy people to win swaraj [self-rule].”
This did not, however, mean that Gandhi had much interest in sports. As we saw, he was reluctantly dragged into the controversy over the Pentangular. When he was a schoolboy, Gandhi writes in his autobiography, he “never took part in any exercise, cricket or football, before they were made compulsory.”
When Gandhi first went to London to study law, he apparently carried a letter of introduction from the great cricketer Ranji, who arrived to study in England the same year that Gandhi did. This wasn’t surprising, given that both were from Kathiawar and had studied in Rajkot, though in different schools.
A classmate from his schooldays once spoke of Gandhi as a “dashing cricketer” who was “good at both batting and bowling,” and his only surviving sister told an interviewer that as a young boy, the Mahatma had a “great interest” in “tennis, cricket and such other games,” so much so that he would not “remember his meals.” But Gandhi himself in 1931 clearly stated his disinterest in cricket: “I have never attended cricket matches and only once took a bat and a cricket ball in my hands and that was under compulsion from the head master of the High School where I was studying , and this was over 45 years ago.”
Gandhi’s indifference to cricket contrasts with Nehru’s great interest in it. Although Nehru wasn’t asked to intervene in the Pentangular, as Gandhi was, he was fond of cricket from his boyhood. While at Harrow, Nehru bought a cricket bat and wrote to his father that he was making “slow but steady improvement” and went on to score an unbeaten forty runs in a match. Nehru also sent to his father a detailed description of an Eton-Harrow match, and before his entrance examination for Trinity College, Cambridge, Nehru confessed that it was hard for him to drag himself “from a good cricket match to work.”
Gandhi, at least in his South Africa years (1893-1915), had an interest in football.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, he founded three football clubs, all of them named the Passive Resisters Soccer Club, in Durban, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. Football was popular among the less well-off Indians in South Africa who played in local leagues such as the Transvaal Indian Football Association and the Klip River District Administration. In 1903, the South African Association of Hindu Football was formed with Gandhi’s blessings.
Gandhi often showed up at football games and talked to the players during halftime about nonviolent resistance, distributed pamphlets on resisting racial segregation, and even delivered speeches to the crowd. The Passive Resisters did not play in any of the established leagues but engaged in friendlies at the Phoenix settlement or at Tolstoy farm. Gandhi kept up his links with football in South Africa after his return to India.
In 1921/1922, the tour of a team called Christopher’s Contingent, sponsored by a former collaborator of Gandhi, Albert Christopher, was organised by Gandhi’s friend and follower Charles Freer Andrews. The team played fourteen matches in India and spent time with Gandhi in Ahmedabad. Ironically, in 1934 there was strong opposition to the proposed tour of the Indian football team to South Africa because of the colour bar and discriminatory policies. But the tour, the first foreign trip by an Indian football team, eventually did take place that year, and the Indians won fifteen of the sixteen matches played and lost one.
Even though we have no further evidence of Gandhi’s interest in football, he seems to have appreciated the sporting spirit of the British and their ability to accept defeat with equanimity. When World War II was raging, he wrote in the Harijan:
Gandhi’s conception of sport, however marginal to his politics, was indeed far removed from the animosities engendered by the popularity of the Pentangular or the victories of Mohammedan Sporting.
Excerpted with permission from Nation At Play: A History of Sport in India, Ronojoy Sen, Penguin Books.
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We do know from his autobiography that at a very young age, he was fascinated by both the physical strength of India’s British rulers and the eating of meat, which was forbidden in his strictly Vaishnava family. The connection between the two was neatly encapsulated in a doggerel that was popular during Gandhi’s childhood: “Behold the mighty Englishman / He rules the Indian small / Because being a meat-eater / He is five cubits tall.”
Encouraged by a friend, Gandhi even took to secretly eating meat for a year so that he could be “strong and daring” and defeat the English, until he realized the error of his ways.
Gandhi’s obsession with his body, health, and diet is, of course, well known. Indeed, Joseph Alter has argued that public health was integral to Gandhi’s ahimsa. Gandhi even went to the extent of saying that it is “impossible for an unhealthy people to win swaraj [self-rule].”
This did not, however, mean that Gandhi had much interest in sports. As we saw, he was reluctantly dragged into the controversy over the Pentangular. When he was a schoolboy, Gandhi writes in his autobiography, he “never took part in any exercise, cricket or football, before they were made compulsory.”
When Gandhi first went to London to study law, he apparently carried a letter of introduction from the great cricketer Ranji, who arrived to study in England the same year that Gandhi did. This wasn’t surprising, given that both were from Kathiawar and had studied in Rajkot, though in different schools.
A classmate from his schooldays once spoke of Gandhi as a “dashing cricketer” who was “good at both batting and bowling,” and his only surviving sister told an interviewer that as a young boy, the Mahatma had a “great interest” in “tennis, cricket and such other games,” so much so that he would not “remember his meals.” But Gandhi himself in 1931 clearly stated his disinterest in cricket: “I have never attended cricket matches and only once took a bat and a cricket ball in my hands and that was under compulsion from the head master of the High School where I was studying , and this was over 45 years ago.”
Gandhi’s indifference to cricket contrasts with Nehru’s great interest in it. Although Nehru wasn’t asked to intervene in the Pentangular, as Gandhi was, he was fond of cricket from his boyhood. While at Harrow, Nehru bought a cricket bat and wrote to his father that he was making “slow but steady improvement” and went on to score an unbeaten forty runs in a match. Nehru also sent to his father a detailed description of an Eton-Harrow match, and before his entrance examination for Trinity College, Cambridge, Nehru confessed that it was hard for him to drag himself “from a good cricket match to work.”
Gandhi, at least in his South Africa years (1893-1915), had an interest in football.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, he founded three football clubs, all of them named the Passive Resisters Soccer Club, in Durban, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. Football was popular among the less well-off Indians in South Africa who played in local leagues such as the Transvaal Indian Football Association and the Klip River District Administration. In 1903, the South African Association of Hindu Football was formed with Gandhi’s blessings.
Gandhi often showed up at football games and talked to the players during halftime about nonviolent resistance, distributed pamphlets on resisting racial segregation, and even delivered speeches to the crowd. The Passive Resisters did not play in any of the established leagues but engaged in friendlies at the Phoenix settlement or at Tolstoy farm. Gandhi kept up his links with football in South Africa after his return to India.
In 1921/1922, the tour of a team called Christopher’s Contingent, sponsored by a former collaborator of Gandhi, Albert Christopher, was organised by Gandhi’s friend and follower Charles Freer Andrews. The team played fourteen matches in India and spent time with Gandhi in Ahmedabad. Ironically, in 1934 there was strong opposition to the proposed tour of the Indian football team to South Africa because of the colour bar and discriminatory policies. But the tour, the first foreign trip by an Indian football team, eventually did take place that year, and the Indians won fifteen of the sixteen matches played and lost one.
Even though we have no further evidence of Gandhi’s interest in football, he seems to have appreciated the sporting spirit of the British and their ability to accept defeat with equanimity. When World War II was raging, he wrote in the Harijan:
Failures do not dismay or demoralise them [the British]. Wars are for them a national game like football. The defeated team heartily congratulates the successful one almost as if it were a joint victory, and then drowns the sorrow of defeat in an exchange of glasses of whisky. If we have learnt nothing worthwhile from the contact with the British, let us at least [emulate] their calmness in the face of misfortunes.
Gandhi’s conception of sport, however marginal to his politics, was indeed far removed from the animosities engendered by the popularity of the Pentangular or the victories of Mohammedan Sporting.
Excerpted with permission from Nation At Play: A History of Sport in India, Ronojoy Sen, Penguin Books.
