1948: The untold story of free India's first Olympic gold

Post the 2013 release of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, we’ve been put on a steady diet of baby formula sports movies and ‘biopics’. Using a BoxOfficeBigName (BOBN) and an easy ‘based on truth’ coat-hanger, every successive film slathers more cinematic schmaltz over the truth than the previous one. But when truth finds a way to be heard and seen, it shakes the soul and clears the air. Independent India’s first Olympic medal from London 1948, will not, mercifully, only be tied in with Gold, the Akshay Kumar (BOBN) ‘fictional take on what happened’.

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When Gold was being released in 2018, the daughter of one of those 1948 Olympians was painstakingly putting together on film a slice of that story that had never been considered, let alone recounted or told. Seven years in the making, Bani Singh’s documentary is called ‘Taangh’ (t as in Telengana), an untranslatable kind of Punjabi word, dangling somewhere between longing, craving, and pining. Taangh is on the festival rounds, through Trivandrum and Chennai and next onto the Film South Asia in Kathmandu this March. Writer director Bani Singh is daughter of double Olympic medallist Grahnandan ‘Nandy’ Singh. She says it was as if the film went on its own path, independent of what she, an industrial and furniture designer by profession, had first set out to do.

After Nandy Singh suffered a stroke in 2009 which affected the right side of his body, left him unable to speak and to live what had until then been a whirlwind life, Bani set a camera on a tripod and hit record. She began talking to him about the Olympics, “to get him into a happier place” and found “that when he was there (trying to tell stories through gestures, writing with his left hand, clippings, photographs) he would forget where he was” - the athlete in a cage, trapped by his own body. It was the time, she says in the film, “where I met the champion.”

Bani had intended to record an oral history of sorts, maybe a small article somewhere. Yet, she says today, “the force of this film was coming from somewhere else.”

Partition, pain, hockey

Taangh is only 90 minutes but lingers long in the mind, peeling off, settling in. It is deeply personal, about fathers and daughters but also occupies a larger canvas – sport, friendship, teammates, memory, loss and home.

While going through a formal photograph of the Indian team for London48, at the top right-hand corner, standing shoulder to shoulder Bani saw her father, Keshav Datt and Amir Kumar. The three refugees from Pakistan on that 1948 gold medal winning team had belonged to another older brotherhood. As students, they had played together for Government College (GC), Lahore and were part of the last united Punjab team which won the March 1947 hockey Nationals. By August, ‘Kesho’, Nandy and Amir were made to go east, across a border soaked in blood and sadness.

They dealt with the trauma of displacement, turning to their beloved hockey for rootedness. They knew about London48 and wanted to go. Within the next few months, all three found sporting ‘domicile’ in other states to show up at the next Nationals and be seen by the selectors. Nandy for Bengal, Kesho for Maharashtra and Amir for United Provinces. They ended up together in a team photograph again, but fundamentally changed.

Amir was to die aged 57 in 1980 and to find out more about 48, Bani met others like Balbir Singh Senior, Jaswant Singh, Ashwini Kumar but also, most significantly, her father’s irrepressible, anti-establishment buddy Uncle Kesho/ Keshav Datt. In the film, Datt is in his late-80s, fragile. He uses a walking stick but is articulate, enraged even, a tremendous raconteur who was to lead Bani into the beating heart of Taangh. She has 60 hours of footage around Indian hockey history but that is for another project. This film was meant to go elsewhere.

Finding Shahrukh

To find more GC Lahore buddies, Datt was shown the names of the Pakistani team from London48, asked if he recognised any. He picks one, Shahzada Mohammed Shah, Pakistan’s hockey vice-captain was the college’s star athlete, hockey player, boxer, cyclist, charismatic, fearless. “He was known as Shahrukh. He was my classmate.” They were, he said, “close friends.”

When Dutt returned from the 47 Nationals, he found his family gone from Lahore. As mobs roamed the streets after sunset, Shahrukh spent nights at Datt’s deserted family home, giving his teammate solace and support. Until the day Shahkukh drove to the railway station, Datt and luggage hidden in his car and put him on the train to India.

The more Shahrukh came alive in Datt and her father’s memories, the more Bani wanted to find him. In February 2014, she landed in Lahore on a six-day visa, looking for one name in a city of ten million names. Shahzada Shahrukh, hockey player, Government College, Lahore. On day one, the Pakistani hockey federation office promised her a contact. The next day their door was locked. Another promising number rang, unanswered. Late on the night of day two, Bani found herself at a gathering of poets, her anxiety increasing. On learning she was from India, the matriarch asked Bani if she was Sikh. As a child during partition, an elderly Sikh had saved her life and the lady hugged Bani in gratitude.

When Bani told her about trying to find Shahrukh, the wheels of destiny began to turn. No matter how late it was, the lady rang her brother. Drop everything and help find Shahrukh. His daughter had married into a hockey family, they had to come through. They did. Shahkukh was living with his daughter, who returned Bani’s call and invited her home with a wary, polite caveat. Her father was in his late 80s, not in the best of health and, she reckoned, with fading memory. Maybe the questions could be written down and the father could be asked by the daughter.

Reality TV calls it the ‘Reveal’ moment, the piece of ah-ha spontaneous astonishment when blindfolds are removed and someone unexpected turns up or the house is shown as smartly improved or a new car is waiting at the door. It’s made for TV theatre. In Taangh, real life unspools in simple, unfabricated telling, a slowly overwhelming tide of emotion.

When the old champion in the wheelchair is handed over photographs of his old teammates, Shahrukh looks at them and asks if he must return them. No, they’re yours, he’s told. He kisses them and begins to cry. He tells Bani, your father will cry too. (And he does.) Shahrukh’s daughter is left surprised by his flood of recollections of those who left him, by the sparkle in his eyes and his stories.

“We were friends, there was so much love…. Kaise tittar-bittar ho gaya, pata bhi nahi laga.” (Everything was scattered, we didn’t even realise it.). Shahrukh was the last surviving member of the 48 Pakistani hockey team, “like he was waiting,” Bani says. Waiting for his friends to show up again, tell him he had not been forgotten and he was loved. “He went back to college… and he just poured that love for his friends on me.”

The Pakistani team that lost the Olympic semi-finals to England was went through the cruelty that continues to eviscerate subcontinental sports teams. Shahrukh turned away from hockey and went on to represent Pakistan in cycling in 1952 Helsinki. Photographs of Sharukh and his elder brother Khurram feature in GC, Lahore’s Hall of Fame as Olympian alumni. Bani was felicitated in GC, now a university, with former Pakistani hockey internationals invited. The management organised a hockey match among their current students to mark the moment. The teenage players were told, GC had not three but five Olympians. We just didn’t make the connection, they will be honoured.

n hearing how the three refugees from Lahore had found three different state teams to make the push for London48, Khadim Ali Khan, the GCU director of Sports, said, “Junoon si, hamaare munde si” (they had passion, they were our boys), “unki hamne wiring kar di thi. Jab ishq hhota hai, (we had wired them to be that way, when you love something) you don’t remember where you are.” But what you also never forget is where you are not. Distanced not only from a sense of a physical place, but a sense of a belonging.

Nandy Singh and Shahrukh passed away within a year in 2014 and 2015. Keshav Datt was the last of the 48ers to go last July. Taangh is the unified memory of their collective. The core of what even decades later that could not be partitioned

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