Written & Directed: Mari Selvaraj
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| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15097358/ |
We have always been told that sports unite people. When Hitler was selling the idea of Aryan supremacy to the world, the Universe tried to shoot him down. It cryptically was telling him that his eugenics was bunkum. A Black American named Jesse James won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics to embarrass the Führer.
When apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela believed that rugby and sports were the surest way to reconcile the fractured nation. He hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. The ‘Springbok’ emblem, once viewed as an oppressive symbol of the white minority, suddenly became a source of national pride and joy.
We are also aware that sports transcend all borders. It is a level playing field that puts aside politics, colour and creed, so they say. Quite early in life, I realised this was not true. If this were true, the world would not have boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The neutrality of sports went out of the window when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan a year earlier.
Increasingly, whenever there is an India-Pakistan cricket match, there is a meltdown. The losing team would claim that the refereeing was biased. It ends up in fistfights or, sometimes, in something more sinister.
In the Malaysian football scene, the governing body found it easier and more cost-effective to import fading professional footballers, give them fake identities and create fake family trees to secure citizenship than to invest in local talent. The disease of favouritism and discrimination in Malaysian sport is not something unheard of. It started with the authorities wanting to cash in on the public craze for football (and badminton, too).
In the 70s, when Malaysia was a football force to be reckoned with, we churned out player after player of high calibre. The players were amateurs, of different ethnicities, whose sole pride was to lay for the nation. When the state began meddling under the guise of advancing sports science, the rot set in. The ugly disease of favouritism and racial preference crept in. By the 1990s, the earlier 1970s teams, with varying ethnicities, came to be represented by a predominantly one race; talent no longer being the determinant for selection, but rather fulfilling politicians' agendas.
During the British Raj, colonial subjects, awed by their master’s gentlemanly game of cricket, began playing it too. Unfortunately, they could only do so amongst themselves. The colonial masters thought that playing with the natives was not acceptable. It ended up with cricket teams formed along racial and religious lines. There were the European clubs for the whites, the Parsis, the Hindus, the Muslims and the rest. The interesting thing about the last group is that it is open to non-white Christians and those from the lower caste. The groups compete in the Pentangular Tournament.
In the early 20th century, India had a legendary cricketer named Palwankar Baloo. He is considered the greatest cricketer in Indian history. Playing for the Hindu side, he helped them to defeat the European side. He toured England in 1911 and showed great performances there. Between 1910 and 1920, there was a great campaign to make him India's captain, but the efforts were thwarted by the Dalit caste system.
The movie 'Bison' is a sports drama about a boy from a kabaddi family who is obsessed with becoming a kabaddi player. His father, a former player, knows the hurdles and brickbats he faces to reach the next level. He is hellbent on keeping his son away from the game. Along the way, there are gangsters, clashes and overt discrimination of the boy because of the low caste he is from.
Kabaddi is an ancient Vedic self-defence and survival sport that started in India some 4,000 years ago. It is said that Krishna and Gautama Buddha also played this game in their childhood. Persians were also reported to have played it 2,000 years ago. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, kabaddi was showcased on the sidelines as an exhibition sport. It has not yet become a regular feature of the Olympics, but it is an event in the Asian Games.
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