Balbir Singh Snr (1923-2020): Sikh Olympian’s legacy remains marred as Hindu nationalism wiped him from India’s sporting history

The life of Balbir Singh Snr, arguably one of India’s greatest athletes of all-time, is a complicated one when it should be anything but. Singh passed away on Monday, May 25, in his adopted hometown of Chandigarh, India, due to complications from pneumonia. The 96-year-old Sikh, who won three Olympic gold medalsin field hockey (London 1948, Helsinki 1952 and Melbourne 1956), is the only team manager to lead India to a men’s World Cup since it started in 1971. However, the Punjabi has largely been erased from India’s sporting history because of his heritage and Sikhs’ controversial history within India and its Hindu nationalist bent, which has taken on increased significance since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014. Singh’s dominance on the pitch, especially during India’s first Olympic gold campaign, which followed India’s partition, holds special significance. He scored two goals in India’s 4-0 victory over Great Britain in the gold medal match played at Wembley Stadium mere months after partition. Before 1947, British India had won three straight gold medals. Singh’s father was a freedom fighter against the British Raj, while Singh himself was forced into becoming a police officer for the Raj, due to his prowess on the hockey pitch. He witnessed the bloody deaths of partition first-hand as an officer, and in turn was largely responsible for India winning its first ever Olympic gold medal as a sovereign nation. In Helsinki at the 1952 Summer Olympics, Singh, who was India’s flag bearer, scored nine of India’s 13 goals, including five in the final against the Netherlands, an Olympic and world record. At the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, Singh scored five goals in the opening match of round robin play before breaking his finger. He sat out the rest of the group matches, but played in the semi-finals and final. The legacy of Singh in India, and subsequently abroad, pales in comparison to the accolades showered on Hindu field hockey player Dhyan Chand, who won three Olympic gold medals for British India, the last being in 1936. Chand is widely celebrated and there are multiple stadiums named after him. Chand’s birthday is also the country’s national sporting day, even though he never actually competed for India. However, many Singh supporters within the Punjabi community argue Chand’s medals, and similar goalscoring prowess, don’t hold as much weight as Singh’s given British India had virtually no competition. Only after Indian independence did legitimate competition in the sport emerge as the British Indian team was essentially split into three (Great Britain, India and Pakistan). The subjugation of Singh because of his heritage is well-documented. At the London Olympics, he scored six goals in a preliminary round robin game, but was sat out for the next two matches. His reappearance in London is largely credited to a group of Indian medical students from the University of Oxford, who complained about his absence from the starting roster to their country’s high commissioner. Singh also invariably paid the price for refusing to hide his religion throughout the years. He flew into Delhi during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots after Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards, carried out in retaliation for a military operation to remove a Sikh separatist from the Golden Temple in Amritsar. As Sikhs were being dragged out into the streets and killed, Singh refused to remove his turban, or hide in the car that was driving him from the airport to his home. Over the years his legacy has been eroded as religious tensions have risen and fortified in the country. During the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, Singh was not included in the ceremonies and only given tickets to attend events after his family complained to organisers. Another example of India’s Hindu-dominated culture actively ignoring one of its legendary athletes happened during the 2012 London Olympics. The organising committee for the Games chose 16 athletes to represent the history of the modern Olympics in an official Olympic museum exhibition called “The Olympic Journey: The Story of the Games”. The list is a roll-call of Olympic heroes – American track and field star Jesse Owens, Russian wrestler Aleksandr Karelin and Australian runner Cathy Freeman feature alongside Singh. Not only was Chand not named to the list, Singh was the only field hockey player of the 16, but the announcement received little fanfare in India after it was announced. Singh, a proud Indian patriot who considered himself a secularist, only started to secede that his legacy was heavily subjugated after relocating to Canada – where he became a citizen in 2000 – for a portion of his later life. “I’m better known and recognised abroad by international fans than I am by Indians,” said Singh in an interview in Canada by Maclean’s magazine in 2016. *Blennerhassett is the author of the 2016 non-fiction book “A Forgotten Legend: Balbir Singh Sr., Triple Olympic Gold & Modi’s New India”. Help us understand what you are interested in so that we can improve SCMP and provide a better experience for you. We would like to invite you to take this five-minute survey on how you engage with SCMP and the news.