Jaipal Singh Munda
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A profile
Ronojoy Sen
From the archives of The Times of India: 2008
The most remarkable of the Olympians is Jaipal Singh, captain of the hockey team that won India its first Olympic gold medal — several years before Independence — in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. Born in a remote village in what is now Jharkhand, Jaipal was taken to England by the English principal of his school in Ranchi. After two terms at a college in Canterbury, Jaipal joined St John’s College, Oxford, where he made a name for himself as an ace defender in the university’s hockey team. When he was chosen to play for India, Jaipal was a probationer in the Indian Civil Service. The decision to captain India, however, meant taking leave from the India Office in London. “I did not get leave! I decided to defy the ruling and take the consequences,” he writes in his autobiography.
The Indian team, which included Dhyan Chand, would go on to win the Olympic gold medal convincingly. But by a twist of fate Jaipal did not play in the final. Dhyan Chand later said, “It is still a mystery to me why Jaipal Singh, after ably captaining us in England, and in two of the three matches in the Olympic Games, suddenly left us. I have heard many stories, but so far I have not had the truth.” Jaipal himself did not throw any light on his sudden withdrawal. He merely says in his autobiography that on his return to London from the Olympics, Lord Irwin, Viceroy of India, congratulated him personally.
Jaipal’s story does not end there. After the Games, he was told he would have to stay one more year in England because he had taken unauthorised leave. He immediately quit the ICS. After various jobs that took him from Calcutta to Ghana to Bikaner, Jaipal returned to Ranchi. There he took a decision that changed the trajectory of his life. In 1939, along with a few others he formed the Adivasi Mahasabha which sowed the seeds for a separate Jharkhand. A Constituent Assembly member and a fourtime MP, Jaipal remained till his death in 1970 an eloquent defender of Adivasi rights.
Some details
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, January 18, 2023: The Times of India
From: Gopalkrishna Gandhi, January 18, 2023: The Times of India
The field was readied, the game began. Like some apprentice in an office, the ball started getting flicked about. In the riyasat (princely state) of Deogarh, this game — hockey — was a novelty. The well-read and well-reared knew and played serious games like chess and cards. Anything that called for running and jumping was deemed fit only for children. The game proceeded with gusto. When the attackers took flight with the ball, they were as a great wave that was hurtling forward.
"And when, from the opposite side, the defenders took on it was like that wave had been halted midway by an iron wall. This combat went on till evening. The players were drenched in sweat. The heat of their blood vessels could be seen on their faces, in their eyes. They went out of breath, huffing and puffing. And yet the game could find no victory, no defeat.”
That is Munshi Premchand in his brilliant short story "Pariksha". My translation of the Hindi original loses the heat and dust, sweat and frenzy of the original. But I could not help recalling and sharing it with those smitten, as I am, by the sport, this season of hockey. Nor could I wonder which Deogarh the master storyteller was referring to. Could it be the Deogarh that lies in Odisha, near Sambalpur, Rourkela and Bhubaneswar, where hockey is today astir and stirring millions?
I doubt it. Munshiji is more likely citing the story in the Deogarh that lies in the district of Lalitpur, Uttar Pradesh, the province in which the author of Godan lived most of his life. Or in a godly fortress (Deogarh) of his imagination. Be that as it may, I could also not stop the stream of consciousness moving from all signals from Birsa Munda Stadium to that star of hockey stars (after the legendary Dhyan Chand), Jaipal Singh Munda.
India’s first blue player
My mind is dedicating every drag flick, each grasp of a gap, every strike and each goal-bound shot in Bhubaneswar and Rourkela to that son of a cattle-herding Munda family, born exactly 120 years ago in what is now Jharkhand. Jaipal’s deft stickwork with the ‘J’, and his sparkle, got him swiftly into St Paul’s School in Ranchi, and then, thanks to the imaginative reflexes of missionaries running that school, into St John’s College, Oxford. A very good and quick grasp of economics came as no surprise either to him or his teachers, but what did startle was his performance in the Oxford University hockey team as a deep defender with his clean tackling, sensible gameplay and well directed hard hits, becoming the first Indian to win a blue in hockey.
Jaipal went on to do what many Indians before him, like Aurobindo Ghose and Subhas Bose, to name stalwarts, did: sit for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination. Jaipal made it to the heaven-born service in a clean shot, but a higher goal awaited him. At that very time, goes an account, he was asked to captain the Indian team for the Amsterdam Olympics. India Office would not give Jaipal leave, and the gold-clincher team’s leader-to-be chose hockey over the ICS.
Munda chose hockey over a career in the Indian Civil Services as he was not given leave to lead the team in the 1928 Olympics (Source: Wikipedia)
On returning to India, Jaipal saw that his people — the Munda and the tribals in general — were under a double immiseration: colonialism and India’s own mistreatment of its tribal populations. Receiving but little encouragement from the mainstream nationalist movement, Jaipal became active in the Adivasi Mahasabha, of which he was elected president in 1939.
Elected later to the Constituent Assembly, Jaipal Singh made a speech on the Objectives Resolution that should be read by every student of Indian politics and history. He said, "As an Adibasi, I am not expected to understand the legal intricacies of the Resolution. But my common sense tells me that every one of us should march in that road to freedom and fight together. Sir, if there is any group of Indian people that has been shabbily treated, it is my people. They have been disgracefully treated, neglected for the last 6,000 years. The history of the Indus Valley civilisation, a child of which I am, shows quite clearly that it is the newcomers — most of you here are intruders as far as I am concerned — it is the newcomers who have driven away my people from the Indus Valley to the jungle fastness…
"The whole history of my people is one of continuous exploitation and dispossession by the non-aboriginals of India punctuated by rebellions and disorder, and yet I take Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru at his word. I take you all at your word that now we are going to start a new chapter, a new chapter of independent India where there is equality of opportunity, where no one would be neglected." Goodness knows taking people at their word is something we do less now than we did 75 years ago. Jaipal Singh’s example in hockey and politics comes alive now as it has not for a long time. His spirit rejoices in Birsa Munda Stadium. It is yet to rejoice in the prosceniums of our public life.
