The Cacutta Telegraph, India
June 20 2011
A DEATH IN LONDON
– The distinct flavour of Calcutta’s fading colonial phase
by Ashok Mitra
The small news item, with a London dateline, was missed by most
newspapers in the country, including those based in Calcutta. Joe
Galibardy, the rage of Calcutta hockey in the pre-World War II decades
and right half-back in Dhyan Chand’s victorious team in the 1936
Olympics, died on May 17 last. He had migrated to England in 1956 and
settled in a London suburb; he was 96.
Memory is a stock of joint supplies. The very mention of Joe Galibardy
chokes the corridors of the mind with a harum-scarum procession of
other exotic-sounding names: Tapsell, Carr, Furtado, Carvalho,
Carapiet, suchlike; these names spelled the hockey season in Calcutta
in the 1930s. Field hockey in that era was almost unknown in the rest
of the world. It was the pastime of British colonials of the lesser
breed who had come out on business or on a job to South Asia. The
caste system was pronounced among these expatriates: the top layers of
the ruling class in Calcutta, if not privileged to be the seat of the
imperial administration, still the hub of major mercantile activities.
The city’s all-white crème de la crème had cricket and tennis as their
preferred modes of relaxation. They used to congregate in two or three
hoity-toity clubs in which membership was severely restricted. Those
belonging to the subordinate species among the expatriates, even if of
pure British stock, had to look for a different address. That went for
other offal like Anglo-Indians, Jews – whether of Caucasian or other
lineage – and descendents of the heterogeneity arriving in the
previous two centuries from near and distant foreign shores in search
of a living in the burgeoning second city of the empire. All such
species trooped into either the Dalhousie Club or a sporting body
sponsored by this or that profession or service group. Hockey in
Calcutta was for a long while dominated by four clubs, with a riot of
ethnic diversity in their roll of members – Calcutta Customs, Calcutta
Port Commissioners, Bengal Nagpur Railway, the Rangers. A round robin
league competition under the aegis of the Bengal Hockey Association
took up most of the season. It had the format of teams distributed
over a hierarchy of three or four divisions and providing for both
promotion and relegation, depending on the performance of the clubs.
While the Jhansi Heroes, shepherded by Dhyan Chand and his brother,
Roop Singh, shone in lonely splendour in that regimental establishment
in the far interior of the country, Indian hockey was really the story
of the Calcutta and Bombay outfits. Bombay had that dazzlingly
marvellous team, the Lusitanians, with its bevy of Fernandeses and
D’Mellos. Both the Lusitanians and the Jhansi Heroes would visit
Calcutta to take part in the Beighton Cup tournament that followed the
hockey league fixtures. Excitement would run high.
Admittedly, this excitement had a specificity. It was confined to
stray sections of the sports-crazy clientele of the city. Hockey as a
sports event involved substantially greater outlay than the ubiquitous
football called for; the lay Bengali kept generally aloof from it.
Interest in hockey grew only in the wake of the stunning exploits of
Dhyan Chand and his team-mates in successive Olympics; patriotic
emotions would swell at the flimsiest opportunity in those otherwise
glum and dull colonial days. Even so, the passion of those who crowded
the few galleries in the Calcutta Maidan swirled mostly around
football. The out-of-the-blue annexation of the Indian Football
Association Shield by the goody-goody Bengali team, Mohun Bagan, by
defeating a British regimental team in 1911 – exactly a century ago –
spurred further their sectarian passion for football.
The natives, anyway, maintained some distance from hockey. At the
other end, to the upper- crust expatriate establishment groups too,
the game was non-U; they continued with cricket and, of course,
tennis. Hockey was for their menials. The city police commissioner,
for instance, would relax on indolent late autumn afternoons serving
gentle lobs in a mixed doubles on the lawns of the sprawling
Ballygunge Sports Club; the wife of the joint commissioner would be
his partner. The police sergeants, although very often pure-breed
English or Scot or Welsh, would find it awfully difficult to gain
entry into this exclusive club; they sauntered to either the Dalhousie
Club or that shelter of last resort, the Calcutta Police Club, sulked
and played hockey. In contrast, the heterogeneous mix of the Eurasian
underclass who succeeded in wrangling jobs in the railways or customs
or the office of the Calcutta Port Commissioners or in the forest
ranges of Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Orissa – Anglo-Indians,
Anglo-Portuguese, Anglo-Italian, Anglo-Dutch, native Christians,
Goans, Jews, Armenians of other hues, Parsis – suffered from no
inhibition. They took in good grace their inferior ranking and
exclusion from the elite clubs and joyfully concentrated on hockey.
Nimble on their feet, with a flair for dribbling the ball with their
sticks, and possessing an eerie skill in converting short corners into
goals, they lorded over the game. The leading teams took their turn to
win the annual league championship, and it was carnival time when the
Beighton Cup tourney commenced in late April. The hockey season was
breathlessly short, but crowded. Along with the Jhansi Heroes and the
Lusitanians, there would also be a number of other out-station teams
participating in the Beighton.
A pot pourri of wide-ranging surnames crammed the sports page in the
hockey season, apart from Galibardy and Tapsell, other ones, like
Costello, Carapiet, Lazarus, Surita, Pinto, Bannister, Bareto,
D’Costa, and, of course, Lumsden. The three Lumsden brothers in the
Rangers Club played hockey, cricket, football, tennis. One team
playing in the hockey league was the Armenian Club, chock-full of
members of the Jewish community. Armenian merchants for a long time
had a near-monopoly of the city’s real estate business; they loved
hockey. Their scions did courses at St. Xavier’s College till as late
as the fag end of the 1940s, when some of them drifted into Utpal
Dutt’s Little Theatre Group. To go back to the not too remote past,
Siegfried Sassoon, the World War I poet, was of Calcutta Jewish stock.
So were the Cohens, one of whom, decades later, joined the Communist
Party of India and stayed with it for quite a while. That heritage is
totally lost.
The fate of the Armenians has been no different from that of the other
ethnic group which contributed so sumptuously to Calcutta’s hockey.
Galibardy, who had quietly migrated to England more than
half-a-century ago, has emerged as a news item only on the occasion of
his death. Nobody knows what happened to the Tapsell and Carvalho
families and to the rest of the lot. The extraordinary churning of
ethnic diversity that marked the city’s fading colonial phase had a
flavour of its own. Does not this slice of social history cry out to
be researched?
To be fair, the cricket teams too would now and then spring a
surprise. The Calcutta Cricket Club was snobbish to the core. Its
skipper for more than a decade, A.L. Hosie, had impeccable managing
agency background. His successor, T.C. Longfield – now a minor
footnote in cricket annals because Ted Dexter, Test captain of England
in a later period, married his daughter – was equally high caste. But
Calcutta CC’s long-time opening batsman was one Behrendt, a
nondescript half-Dutch, a lefty, stockily build, who would routinely
despatch the first ball he faced to the boundary for a four. Another
prominent member of the team had a surname which was Flemish all over,
Van der Gutch, even as a Pugsley, supposedly of mixed
Burmese-Irish-Portuguese descent, became a Calcutta football hero in
the same period.
Did Joe Galibardy – or, for the matter, Charlie Tapsell – deserve a
biography? Who knows? Or is it a case of who cares? Cultural
anthropologists can have a lovely intra-mural debate on the issue.
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