The Netaji Subhash Regional Coaching Centre, which is now getting a new indoor stadium. The Netaji Subhash Regional Coaching Centre, which is now getting a new indoor stadium.

On August 15, the 55 young gymnasts at Khumulwng Tribal Gymnasium in West Tripura district won’t line up for their turn to do the vault or the beam. Instead, they will crowd around a laptop that mentor-coach Montu Debnath has promised to bring to the centre, and watch a recording of the Produnova somersault that “Dipa di” would have attempted in Rio the previous day.

But today, days before that “Independence Day special session” and Dipa Karmakar’s much awaited Sunday appearance at the gymnastics finals in Rio, the gymnasts at the centre, between the ages of 5 and 11, stay sharply focused. A little after 4 pm, a shriek pierces through the centre. A six-year-old has fallen off the balance beam, but she quickly springs to her feet and goes back to her starting position.

The gymnasium, a large, airy hall surrounded by Khumulwng forest, 50 km from Agartala, is one of several in Tripura that have vaulted into prominence alongside Karmakar’s feat.

Set up in 2013, the gym was an unused judo hall till Montu Debnath, a protégé of Dalip Singh, the man considered the “father of gymnastics” in Tripura, helped turn it around. With balance beams of three difficulty levels, a rope ring and a vaulting board that was specially brought in from Delhi, the gymnasium, says Debnath, is now the “pride of Tripura”.

The story of how Dipa trained on a vault assembled from parts of an old scooter is now the stuff of Olympic legends, but that’s a familiar narrative among Tripura’s gymnasts: of families and their children who have had to defy, besides gravity, poor infrastructure, funds and — in the case of gymnasts like 15-year-old Ashmita Pal — poverty.

With a string of medals in national competitions, Ashmita Pal, 15, is spoken of as the state’s most promising gymnast after Dipa. With a string of medals in national competitions, Ashmita Pal, 15, is spoken of as the state’s most promising gymnast after Dipa.

Ashmita is spoken of as the state’s most promising gymnast after Dipa. With a string of strong performances in national competitions, she broke into the Indian team ahead of the World School Championship in Turkey in July. She didn’t win any medals, but her performance, said her mentors, was technically one of her best. She now trains at Vivekananda Byamagar, Agartala’s oldest gymnasium, set up in August 1947, and only a few metres away from Dipa’s home.

The gymnasium, run by a privately owned club, is the first filter for gymnastic talent in the state. The equipment here is obsolete, the mats tattered. Young gymnasts enthusiastically point to Dipa’s improvised vaulting board that lies in one corner, along with other discarded equipment. It is here, that Ashmita, a Class X student, trains every day after school under the watchful eyes of Soma Nandi, Dipa’s first coach, and her husband and Dipa’s current coach, Bisheshwar Nandi.

Ashmita’s father Arun Pal is a daily-wage labourer and mother Shilpi works as a household help. The couple say they save every rupee they can to ensure that their daughter’s demanding physical training can be bolstered with the best of diets. “It’s not always enough, but we do the best we can. Eggs, Horlicks… these are luxuries for households like ours, but not for us. We know our daughter needs all this so that she has a better future than we do. Neither my husband nor I can help her with her studies and we know even less about sports. But we have faith in her coaches. Dipa too helps Ashmita whenever she can. We only tell her that no matter what, she can’t ignore gymnastics,” says Shilpi.

“Can’t ignore gymnastics” — that’s a line often heard in these parts. And it has been this way much before Dipa’s feat. Almost every school in the state has a gymnastics centre and parents see the sport as the only way out of the poverty and insecurity that have defined many of their lives.

Bharat Kishore Deb Burman, Dalip Singh’s protege and Tripura’s first gymnastics ‘star’. Bharat Kishore Deb Burman, Dalip Singh’s protege and Tripura’s first gymnastics ‘star’.

“There are a couple of reasons for that,” explains Bharat Kishore Deb Burman, Tripura’s first gymnastics star and a national champion in the 1960s. “Gymnastics is not a sport that is easy. The first few years are painful, quite literally — there is a lot of falling down — but their families have to put in very little in terms of investment. The equipment belongs to the gymnasium and centres like the Vivekananda Byamagar teach poor children for free. At some centres, they also get food in the evenings. Another reason why gymnastics is so popular in Tripura is that families hope their children will go on to earn money, perhaps even get a government job,” says Burman.

***

Agartala’s tryst with gymnastics did not begin with Dipa. It doesn’t even begin in Tripura. This story starts in Patiala, in the year 1963 at the Sports Authority of India’s (SAI) National Institute of Sports, where an Army sports instructor, Dalip Singh, met a Russian gymnastics coach, N I Takaishvili. The Russian was in Patiala to conduct a course on coaching and Singh had enrolled for it. A year later, when SAI sent Singh, who hails from a family of farmers of Bewal village in Haryana’s Mahendragarh district, to Agartala to scout for gymnastics talent, his training under Takaishvili came in handy.

Burman says that it was from the Russian coach that Singh learnt that coaching was more than just teaching technique. “At the time, the Soviets were the best gymnasts in the world. What Dalip Singh learnt was that talent needs to be nurtured and, more importantly, recognised. That was the Soviet way of doing things and Dalip Singh brought this to Tripura,” says Burman.

Today, gymnasts in Agartala are convinced that Singh’s arrival was nothing short of providence. It’s not difficult to see why. Before Singh, another SAI coach had been dispatched to Tripura, but on arriving, he is said to have been dismayed with the state’s remoteness. In his report to SAI, this coach is said to have simply said that gymnastics couldn’t be developed in Agartala. Tripura’s first elected CM, Sachindra Lal Singh of the Congress, wrote to the NIS Patiala, requesting for a second instructor. A few months later, Dalip Singh arrived in Agartala.

For the next two decades, Singh worked relentlessly to introduce the sport and set up infrastructure. Knocking on almost every door, the 31-year-old would convince parents to send their children to Vivekananda Byamagar. He would talk to them about the sport and its “health benefits”. His most successful pitch was that gymnastics would help their children get government jobs.

Salam Sushila Devi with a photograph of her husband, Dalip Singh, who brought gymnastics to Tripura. Devi says before Singh fell in love with her, he fell for Tripura. Salam Sushila Devi with a photograph of her husband, Dalip Singh, who brought gymnastics to Tripura. Devi says before Singh fell in love with her, he fell for Tripura.

Somewhere along the way, the young Haryanvi would fall in love with a Manipuri girl, defy his family and marry her. Salam Sushila Devi, now 75, says before Singh fell in love with her, he had fallen for Tripura and had decided that he would return to his village only after his retirement. “There was only gymnastics in his life — his students and their coaches… nothing else,” says Devi, a trained pathologist, sitting at her home in Ujjan Abhoynagar, a few metres from Vivekananda Byamagar.

In the decades that followed, 24 gymnasts from Tripura won 60 national championship medals. Until the late Eighties, Tripura dominated almost all the nationals, particularly at the junior and sub-junior levels. Of the seven gymnasts who have won the Arjuna award, three are from Tripura, two of them Singh’s pupils. The third Arjuna award winner, Dipa Karmakar, credits her success to coach Bisheshwar Nandi, who, in turn, was Dalip Singh’s protégé. Almost every gymnastics success story in Tripura can be traced back to Dalip Singh.

“The thing about him (Dalip Singh) was that he was completely selfless. Can you imagine coming to Agartala and deciding to stay here, train us and work with us? For what? It was purely for the love of the sport. He laid the foundation for us. He had sound knowledge not only of the sport but of its administration,” says Singh’s pupil Montu Debnath, who in 1975 became India’s second gymnast to win the Arjuna award. The first was Singh’s contemporary, Olympian Shyam Lal Khullar.

Gymnasiums such as the Vivekananda Byamagar teach poor children for free. At some centres, they also get food in the evenings, which is a big draw. Gymnasiums such as the Vivekananda Byamagar teach poor children for free. At some centres, they also get food in the evenings, which is a big draw.

In Agartala, Singh had to hit the ground running, starting his coaching stint at Vivekananda Byamagar. What he saw when he walked in was a cramped room with rudimentary weight-lifting equipment. Singh hired a carpenter to make the vaults and beams, creating what would eventually become a nursery for gymnastics. The room, where Dipa trained with second-hand equipment, isn’t any different today. But this gymnasium is also where Singh found Burman.

In 1965, Burman travelled to Bombay for the national championships and won two medals — a gold in the floor exercises and a bronze in vaulting — becoming the first athlete from Tripura to win a national competition in any sport.

These are tough times for the champion — his medals were stolen after a break-in at his home in 1989 and he is recovering from a stroke — but none of that has dulled his love for gymnastics. “I stayed up watching Dipa and, honestly, she’s something extraordinary. None of us was ever as good as her. In fact, I’ve never seen another talent like her,” he says.

Like Dipa now, who gets mobbed every time she returns to Agartala, Burman returned from Bombay to find himself a celebrity. Eventually, his name made it to the textbooks, but it was Singh who realised the moment’s incredible potential. He convinced the government and took Burman along to schools in Agartala in an effort to motivate more children to take up the sport. It was a deceptively simple formula.

He later convinced the state government to give him training space at the Netaji Subhash Regional Coaching Centre (NSRCC) in Agartala, where hundreds turned up as Burman, Debnath and his other wards picked up medals at major events. With NSRCC as the hub of gymnastics in the state capital, he opened up secondary centres in different schools. Some of his students were trained to coach in these centres, while physical training teachers in schools were given a three-week basic course in gymnastics and promising students from these secondary centres were sent to NSRCC.

“Singh used every event possible to spread awareness about gymnastics. Be it Republic Day or a school annual day, his gymnasts would perform and people loved it,” says Burman.

By 1968, Singh managed another “miracle”. “He convinced SAI and the Tripura government to allow a Soviet team of gymnasts to compete alongside us. That team had two Olympic members,” says Debnath.

The Russian team was followed by a German team in 1970 and a Chinese team in 1984. Old timers in Agartala still remember those demonstrations with a mixture of wonder and fondness. “Those gymnasts seemed liked magicians. I remember thinking how those gymnasts looked like they were flying. What was even better was that our own gymnasts like Montu Debnath could match their moves,” says Bilash Debnath, 72, a hotel manager in the city.

Debnath laughs off the praise. “Maybe they eased off on me. But for me, and Tripura, it was a moment of immense pride,” he says.

As gymnastics became Tripura’s most popular sport, hundreds of parents turned up at Singh’s gymnasium. Here, he enforced another rule which continues to be an unwritten principle in the state: Singh told his coaches that no child should be turned away. Gymnastics is not a sport that can be pursued casually, he reasoned, and therefore, drop-outs should happen naturally. One of those who trained under Singh and later dropped out to drift into weight-lifting was Dipa’s father Dulal Karmakar, now a SAI instructor.

Until the 1980s, Tripura produced national champions by the dozen. Burman and Debnath blazed a trail for a whole new generation of gymnasts — Bisheshwar Nandi, Dipa’s coach, won five medals at national championships; Kalpana Debnath, another Arjuna award winner and now vice-chancellor of Patiala University, won all the gold medals at the Surat National Championship in 1978.

At the Khumulwng Tribal Gymnasium in West Tripura district. At the Khumulwng Tribal Gymnasium in West Tripura district.

Singh died in 1987 and took away with him — as his wife describes it — “the ability to combine sports with diplomacy”. Tripura continued to rack up medals in the junior, sub-junior and school-level events, but apart from Banashree Debnath, who won a gold medal at the Karnataka National Games in 1997, no one won a major event.

The reasons for Tripura’s sudden dip in performance in the Nineties — until Dipa came on the scene — are many. Soma Nandi, Dipa’s first coach and wife of Bisheshwar Nandi, Dipa’s current coach, says that most of Singh’s pupils left Tripura after landing jobs in government services. Debnath, who returned to Tripura after several years in Kolkata, says that in 1977, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police recruited “around 35 of our best gymnasts and left a gaping hole in the conveyor belt of athletes and coaches that Dalip Singh had created”. Another reason, says Burman, was that “in the Nineties, unemployment was at its peak and people were not sure if athletics would give them jobs. They wanted private jobs and sports became secondary”.

Tripura suddenly found itself dislodged from the podim. That was until Dipa came on stage.

***

With balance beams of three difficulty levels, a rope ring and a vaulting board specially brought from Delhi, the Khumulwng gymnasium is the “pride of Tripura”. With balance beams of three difficulty levels, a rope ring and a vaulting board specially brought from Delhi, the Khumulwng gymnasium is the “pride of Tripura”.

Back at the Khumulwng gymnasium, Shradha Deb Burman, 11, and Kriti Meska, 10, don’t take their eyes off the balance beam. But once they make a clean landing on the blue mat, one after the other, they break into smiles.

Their coach and mentor Montu Debnath says they are among the brightest prospects at the centre. In 2015, Shradha won the silver medal in the state championships and Kriti the bronze.

Shradha started training at the centre two years ago. Her parents are marginal farmers in Khumulwng and the free food she gets in the evening is a big draw. “I started coming here because there were other children from my village. But I realised this was something I was good at. I also like it here because we get Frooti on some days,” she says.

Outside the gymnasium, Kriti’s mother Rini Meska waits for the day’s session to end. Kriti stays in a residential school managed by the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council and Rini has travelled 140 km from her village, Dashda Kanchanpur, for their weekly meeting. “We understand gymnastics, but we never thought our children would have the opportunity to practise with legends such as Montu Debnath. But Kriti has only one star in her mind — Dipa. She says she wants to be like Dipa di.”

Montu Debnath, who in 1975 became India’s second gymnast to win the Arjuna award, now coaches children. Montu Debnath, who in 1975 became India’s second gymnast to win the Arjuna award, now coaches children.

Tripura’s roll of honour

Bharat Kishore Deb Burman: Won gold at the national gymnastics championships in Bombay in 1965, Tripura’s first gold in the sport at the national level

Montu Debnath: Arjuna award winner. Won 36 gold medals at different national championships. Won gold in ‘vaulting horse’ at Indo-Soviet cultural exchange meet held in Kazakhstan (then part of the USSR) in 1969. Was captain of the national gymnastics team

Kalpana Debnath: Arjuna Award winner and national champion. Won all the gold medals at the national gymnastics championship at Surat in 1978. Was adjudged ‘All-Round Best Woman Gymnast of India’ nine times

Bisheshwar Nandi: Five-time national champion, coach of Dipa Karmakar. Was part of the team that went to 1982 Asian Games

Balaram Shil: Currently CRPF DIG, represented India at 1982 Asian Games

Bijan Saha: National champion and part of Indian team at 1982 Asian Games

Debashish Dam Choudhury: National champion who represented India at 1982 Asian Games. He captained the national team in the 1986 Asian Games

Diptanu Banik: Gold medal and two silver medals at the Tulit Petre International Gymnastics Competition in 2001 in Hungary

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