India
Every day, five-year-old Sanjay could be found at Kolkata’s Howrah station, along with countless other street kids that called it home. There are 100,000 like him across India. But in Sanjay’s case, he got lucky, a charity found him, he learnt to play rugby, and now, years later, he not only has a family of his own, but he also coaches one of the best junior teams in the country.
Kolkata wakes up each day to the clanking and rattling of hand-pulled garbage carts scattering about their duties. The world is fast catching onto recycling and repurposing, but for Kolkata this is the second or third set of eyes going through the household waste. Kolkata’s mountains of garbage are as tough a problem as any city’s; 4,500 tonnes of solid waste generated each day. But compare that with London, which produces twice as much with just over half as many people, and you start to see the story. To get to its dumps, Kolkata’s rubbish really has to be of no use. Don’t tell this city about coloured bins, there is a whole life, with thousands of families, devoted to rubbish as their livelihood. This is a city with ‘jugaad’, a way of problem solving with next to no resources, just a keen mind. Everything finds a second or third use. “Where there’s muck there’s brass.”
The sprawl of Kolkata is home to more than 14 million souls who live every kind of life that can be imagined, and some that can’t. It was in 2001 that the long-standing communist government decided to rename Calcutta as Kolkata. Today, even in newspapers and posters it is spelled both ways. And such name changes are still common for streets around the city, perhaps none better than the switch of Harrington Street to Ho Chi Minh Sarani at the height of the Vietnam War, still home to the American Consulate today.
Immaculately tailored business folks commute to their pristine offices in the latest Mercedes, avoiding the lungi-clad [similar to a sarong] labourer emerging above ground from unblocking a street drain. The commute will be interrupted at busy junctions by transgender Hijras who will demand a small contribution and send office-bound workers on their way with a smile and a blessing or a bang on the window and abuse.
Britain has made its mark in many ways, having effectively ruled India since 1757 when Robert Clive won the Battle of Plassey. At the climax of the Imperial Durbar [a mass assembly, attended of thousands of nobles and landed gentry] of 1911, King George V declared that the capital of India would move from Calcutta [as it was then] to Delhi. This precipitated a steady decline in the fortunes of the city. Today Kolkata produces some of the best brains in the country but sees many of its brightest young minds move to other Indian cities or abroad to develop their careers. Since her election in 2011, overcoming 34 years of communist rule, West Bengal’s firebrand Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has changed the face of the city, but still struggles to attract good jobs and investment.
It was Christmas Day in 1872 when rugby reached Calcutta as an England team took on a combined Irish, Scots and Welsh team. With teak goal posts marking either end of play, the game was so popular, it was repeated a week later. Rugby had found its way to the subcontinent.
Back home, Queen Victoria reigned over an empire that painted maps pink and Gladstone was her Prime Minister. This was the height of the British Raj, India was now creating millionaires in London, with the biggest fortunes made trading tea and opium, the empire was soaring.
While the British Raj would last sixty more years, the same couldn’t be said for rugby. By 1877, rugby was struggling to gain a foothold. After that initial game, those teak posts were used by the Calcutta Football Club [later to become the Calcutta Cricket & Football Club], and member numbers had swollen to 137, many there for the social aspect as much as the rugby, but it didn’t last. The free bar had been withdrawn and playing numbers declined so much that captain of the club, GAJ Rothney declared rugby in Calcutta deceased.
In 1878 the remaining club coffers were converted into silver rupees and melted down to make a trophy which famously features three cobras for handles and from 1879 has been played for in the annual “Calcutta Cup” match between England and Scotland.
By 1890 rugby was again being played in Calcutta and a new silver trophy was handcrafted that is still played for today, another Calcutta Cup. Today the cup is closely guarded by members of Calcutta Cricket & Football Club (CCFC) who trace their roots to that early rugby club and even further to 1792 when the first game of cricket involving the club was reported.
Each year at monsoon season, which also signals the start of the rugby season, the grass is left to grow a little longer at CCFC, bats and pads are put away and rugby posts erected. The top target for club teams in India is the annual All India and South East Asia tournament, a tournament dating back to 1924, and now played by both men’s and women’s teams, a dozen in the first, six in the latter. With only 24 clubs in the whole country, there’s no scope for a national division, but Kolkata does has its own inner-city league.
The hosting of the tournament rotates between the legacy clubs of Bombay Gymkhana and CCFC, but the Army has often been the team to beat, winning eight of ten titles from 2006 to 2016, before Delhi Hurricanes began their own winning run with back-to-back titles in 2017 and 2018. It’s been several years since any other Asian team competed in the tournament, making it the Indian rugby equivalent of America’s ‘World Series’ baseball.
Indian rugby’s greatest story starts with the children living alone on the streets. Some are as young as six or seven, and they cluster together in a ramshackle community at the busiest city railway stations. Estimates put the numbers of such street children at more than 100,000 in India, mainly to be found in Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata. Now and again, they can get lucky and find a safe place to stay, with people that will support and educate them. It never replaces a family, but there are places where they try to get as close as possible to it. And some involve rugby too. Organisations such as Future Hope, Don Bosco Ashalayam and the Jungle Crows, have all been using rugby to help.
The reasons a youngster finds themselves alone in Kolkata are many and varied: abandoned by parents unable to cope; pushed out by a new mother or father not prepared to take on the responsibility of a former partner’s child; sent out to work, but opting for a different life instead. Listening to the stories, and perhaps even helping a young person trace their way back home is inspiring. Sometimes they find a long-lost mother, sometimes not. But these are emotional journeys for all those involved and for some, rugby can become an important part of their story.
In June 2019, the West Bengal under 19 team headed to Chandigarh, in the northern state of Punjab. Chandigarh was the dream city of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a planned city to be the new capital of the India State of Punjab which had been partitioned in 1947. Much of it was designed by French architect Le Corbusier and retains his vision of an airy, planned metropolis, now rated as one of the wealthiest cities in the country.
Teams from across India descended on the Punjab University Campus to play over three days of competitive rugby action. The West Bengal boys were captained by Rajdeep. His story is all too common; put in a hostel, aged six, by his father who had been unable to look after him when his mother died. From that small hostel in the countryside he’d been sent to Don Bosco Ashalayam, one of the largest charities catering for abandoned children in Kolkata. He’d started rugby on a Sunday morning coached by a French volunteer and rugby player, Christophe. He caught the rugby bug early and since then it’s been a constant in his life.
The girls were captained by Rushmita. She hails from the north of Bengal, a small village called Saraswatipur, her mother plucked tea and her father drove the tea factory ambulance. Light had come to their home in 2012 and a government project meant that in 2018 they got their first toilet, they still draw water each day from a well. Rushmita’s mum’s work brings home some $2 a day if she meets daily targets for picking tea. The girls of Saraswatipur have been playing rugby for five years now as part of the Khelo Rugby project of the Jungle Crows, a rugby club started by British diplomats that has been inspiring street kids since the beginning. The Saraswatipur players love their rugby and, as older girls move into different jobs and get the chance to stay in education through scholarships, they can see the power the odd shaped ball can have. It’s a motivator.
Coaching the boys was Sanjay, Sanjay also coaches the Future Hope Harlequins, consistently one of the best junior teams in India. That was also where he had started his own rugby journey. Tim, the founder of Future Hope, had found Sanjay at Kolkata’s busy Howrah station at barely four or five years of age. It took Sanjay time to settle and he constantly ran away at first, but would always be found again days later in the same spot at Howrah station. Eventually he settled into life, by 15 he managed, after several journeys, to find his mum. Sanjay is now married with a couple of children of his own.
Coaching the girls was Roshan. He still doesn’t know exactly where he is from, but the first time he went to visit Saraswatipur it felt familiar and like home. The jungle, the river, the earth, it all felt connected. He could remember a flood, the house being destroyed, but that has all merged into vague memories. After losing his home, Roshan lived alone at Kolkata’s Sealdah station for three months at the age of six before he was taken in by Ashalayam. He was happy with Ashalayam, took on responsibility, looked after smaller boys, played lots of rugby, it was all a fantastic new start. He now runs Khelo Rugby in Saraswatipur, has recently got married and is a successful coach.
Rugby is played by record numbers in India today. The official figure is that there are more than 80,000 players, but that’s wide of the mark, it’s still hard to find a member of the general public who knows what the game is. Clubs like the Delhi Hurricanes and the Jungle Crows have hundreds of players at a stretch. Most players today hail from communities where sport can be seen as a chance to break out from a tough life, whether it’s the street children of Kolkata and Mumbai; or the tribal children of Odisha, Bengal and Jharkhand.
The game is still administered by an elite few, members of private clubs in Mumbai and Kolkata, promoting the sport yes, but not yet ready to democratise the running of the game in the same way as the playing of the game has developed.
A couple of celebrity players are helping to promote the rugby bug in India, most notably the actor and director Rahul Bose who has played for India and can still be seen delivering a good pass at the Bombay Gymkhana. Sidharth Malhotra is one of Bollywood’s hottest properties and regularly visits and helps out with his rugby club, the Delhi Hurricanes. Rugby has also been featured by Bollywood, the clips are not flattering with players shown being kicked in the head or at the bottom of mass pile-ons. But all this is due to change.
Jungle Cry, is Indian rugby’s Tin Cup, a Hindi-English film that will tell the true story of a team of under 14 children who travelled to London in 2007 and won the Tour Aid Nations Cup. The team was drawn from a school in the city of Bhubaneswar in the state of Odisha devoted to tribal “Adibasi” children called KISS (Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences). The story of the tribals of India, who make up more than eight per cent of the population is one rarely told, the original indigenous people, often still excluded from mainstream society and opportunities. In Odisha, figures suggest more than 70 per cent of the Adibasi population live below the poverty line while living upon some of the most mineral rich land, with iron ore and bauxite amongst the most valuable.
The KISS children were taught the game, never having seen a rugby ball until months before their trip. Little did the organisers of the tournament think that the South African Rugby World Cup-winner Chester Williams, booked for the final, would be handing over the trophy to the KISS Jungle Crows rather than the side from his homeland. The KISS boys beat teams from Zambia, Romania, Kenya and Swaziland on their way to the final.
The power of the KISS win was immediately understood by the KISS Founder Dr Achyuta Samanta. He could see how this victory could mobilise politicians and officials towards his cause and motivate the children of the school. In 2007 KISS was a school of some 1,500 children, today more than 25,000 children live and study at KISS.
Kolkata is today very much the beating heart of India’s rugby. The city has a season that stretches from June into September. Teams include CCFC, Kolkata Police, Sergeants Institute, Armenian College, Young Rugby Club, Adibasi Rugby, Jungle Crows and the Maidan Hazards. Normally eight or so teams get themselves organised enough to play each year with the Calcutta Cup being the main prize. For many years the city relied on the CCFC pitch as the only ground, but now there is another option. Tucked away in a quiet part of the Kolkata Maidan near the busy and noisy Chowringhee Road is Crow Field. Reclaimed from the site where concrete was cast during the 1980s for the building of the city’s metro, until five years ago it was a wasteland littered with lumps of debris. It was a mammoth project for the small club, executed with minimal resources to make the space fit for rugby, the power of ‘jugaad’.
It’s already had high-flying visitors, with the RAF Spitfires arriving for the Kolkata Sevens in 2018. It was the Spitfires’ fifth visit to India as part of their support for the Jungle Crows Khelo Rugby project and, over five tours, the Spitfires have yet to lose a match, but each time the Indian teams push them harder and harder, the gap is narrowing.
The same applies to the wider world of rugby for India. Rugby is currently having a growth spurt in the country. The national men’s and women’s teams are getting to play internationally at sevens and fifteens, with the men ranking 77th in the world and play in Division Three of Asian Rugby. In their most recent campaign, they finished second with a good win over Indonesia but a heavy loss to China. International games don’t come often, but players are incredibly motivated by such opportunities, making personal sacrifices, giving up jobs and putting off studies to attend camps.
Indian rugby comes with challenges. Players are developed by a patchwork of clubs in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, and in rural pockets like Bihar and Odisha. How to ensure they are sustainable and can keep producing the players that create the hype is a challenge.
The women’s game in India has seen significant media interest since they won their first test match ever, 21-19, over Singapore in June. The story made news across India and even internationally, and it is hoped that this results in more players coming into the game and, even more important to future growth, more funding. World Rugby also selected an India player to be a part of their #TryAndStopUs campaign, Sweta, from Bihar, features in the promotional video. The India rugby vibe is good.
It is hard to know what those early 1872 rugby pioneers thought the future held when they first passed a rugby ball in India. The world was a very different place, with different values and ideas in society. As they were playing, thousands of indentured labourers were being packed off from the Calcutta Port to serve the colonies in Mauritius, Guyana and the Caribbean islands. The power of the game is now firmly in the hands of the young boys and girls playing from diverse backgrounds who have a passion to flourish along with the game they love. A great future awaits rugby in India, but we’ve been here before. The 2010 Commonwealth Games saw World Rugby invest heavily in the game, which abruptly stopped after the trophy had been won by New Zealand in Delhi. That stadium still stands with its imported rugby posts idle. This is the challenge, to capitalise on the record popularity rugby has today – to give young, ambitious players, the opportunities they deserve. Because as we learnt from the Jungle Crows, if they do get that chance, they’re definitely going to take it.
Story by Paul Walsh
This extract was taken from issue 7 of Rugby Journal
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