Keshav Dutt
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A brief biography
Nilesh Bhattacharya, July 8, 2021: The Times of India
KOLKATA: He used to boss the field with so much class with a hockey stick that his place in any team, be it the national or the club one, was always a certainty. Such was his charisma — he used to come on a Harley-Davidson bike to play matches for Mohun Bagan in the Calcutta Hockey League — that supporters from even rival teams came to the field to see him play.
Old-timers in the Maidan often said that the domination of Pancha Pandava’s East Bengal in football had its match in Keshav Datt of Mohun Bagan on a hockey field.
Datt, the final link to post-independent India’s first Olympic hockey gold, passed away in the city in the wee hours of Wednesday. The two-time Olympic champion was 95 and had been battling with age-related ailments for long.
“He loved this city so much that he refused to go with his wife and children when they decided to settle abroad,” recalled Gurbux Singh, another hockey legend, while speaking to TOI.
“He was one of the greats that I always looked up to as an inspiration. Keshav Datt, Leslie Claudius and Jaswant Singh Rajput...we always forged an excellent camaraderie. Those were the days,” the 1964 Olympic hockey gold-winner Gurbux said, feeling nostalgic.
Like many of his generation, Datt used to be a man of many hats.
Apart from playing hockey at the highest level, he was a former state badminton champion as well as quite a decent hand in tennis. But it was his performance in the 1948 London Olympics and the next Games in Helsinki in 1952 that helped him find his place under the sun in Indian hockey during the golden era of the sport.
The state government had felicitated the legend with the ‘Banglar Gourav’ award in 2013.
