This actually goes back to December 2000, when I sent in an entry for the annual Outlook Picador Non-fiction Competition. My essay was titled At home with the bodies. I was pretty satisfied with it. I thought it made some good points, whatever they were, and was written well, too. When I heard that it was on a shortlist of five for the prize, I was over the moon. Not much later, I found out that I hadn’t won. Naturally, I was greatly disappointed.

But then I read the essay that did win, and no longer was I disappointed. The better man, with his better essay, had won, and there was no shame in losing to the eloquent passion, the heartfelt heartbreak of his writing. This was Tsundue’s My kind of exile (read here), a wrenching examination of what it means to be in exile, without roots—to be, in fact, uprooted from your land. For Tsundue is one of the many thousands of Tibetans living in exile in India, driven from their homeland, together forming a forgotten pawn in the realpolitik of international relations, in which very few countries want to step on the toes of China.

And in these lines from his essay, about watching the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics on TV, Tsundue’s loss hit like a punch to the guts: “I couldn’t see clearly anymore and my face felt wet. I was crying... I tried hard to explain to those around me. But they couldn’t understand, couldn’t even begin to understand... how could they? They belong to a nation. They have never had to conceive of its loss, they have never had to cry for their country. They belonged and had a space of their own not only on the world map but also in the Olympic Games. Their countrymen could march proudly, confident of their nationality, in their national dress and with their national flag flying high."

Indeed, the rest of us follow the Olympics, hoping our nation’s athletes will do well, perhaps bring home a medal or three. Or in the case of the world’s athletic powerhouse countries, dozens of medals. But where’s this hope directed if you are from Tibet? Or Palestine? Or if you are a Kurd, or a Chechen?

Step back through the history of the modern Olympic Games and you could ask the same question over and over again. Until the end of the 1980s, it applied to Lithuania and Estonia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and several more. Also to black South Africa and Namibia, known then as South-West Africa. Before 1961, to the Congo and Tanzania, picking just two of so many colonies that became independent in those years.

And here in our subcontinent too, we once knew Tsundue’s anguish well. Before 1947, we must have asked that question too. Which is why I sometimes wonder what it must have felt like, as an Indian, to watch athletes represent India at the Olympics before 1947.

Like Calcutta-born Norman Pritchard, who won two silvers in athletics in 1900 as the sole athlete representing “British India". He had English parents and moved permanently to England in 1905, so perhaps it’s easy to write him off as a merely nominal Indian. But in 1920, India sent a six-man team of—if you like—more authentic Indians to the Antwerp Games. Not long after came Dhyan Chand and his all-conquering hockey team, who won gold for India in 1928, 1932 and 1936.

Yet, though they called it India, though these hockey magicians played for India, though we still remember that golden period as Indian hockey’s glory years—it was still British India.

What must it have felt like to represent and cheer on a country that was not yet born, that was in fact struggling in those years to be born?

I never really thought about that until I read Tsundue’s essay. Since I did, I think about it at least once every four years.

From the 1948 Games onwards, of course, Indians at the Olympics have represented India—now a bonafide, independent, authentic country. I look forward to the day when Tibetans, and Kurds, and Palestinians, and so many other felt nationalities, are all at the Olympics as similarly bonafide, independent, authentic countries.

In fact, I would like to be with Tsundue when that happens. I suspect he might still be crying.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar.

His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun

Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com

Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.

Share Via