Sports

Working At Play

The SAI cultivates the Sabar children's natural skills to produce sporting talent

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Working At Play
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ROLLING on a training mat in the cavernous indoor training centre of Sports Authority of India’s sprawling complex in Calcutta’s Salt Lake area, Lakshmi Sabar looks diminutive and lost. For this seven-year-old girl from Purulia, it’s a far cry from the cramped and low mud-and-thatch home she comes from in the parched astelands of West Bengal, where she survived on once-a-day boiled rice meals, and rats, birds and snakes when the family hunted. She never went to school. Last year, the police killed her father, who made palm-leaf  and grass brooms for a living, because he belonged to a tribe which the British government branded as one with "criminal propensities" a century ago. The stigma refuses to go. But when S A I’s coaches travelled to Purulia, in the heart-land of the 15,000-strong Kheria Sabar denotified criminal tribe community, to scout for sporting talent, they loved Lakshmi’s easy cartwheels and somersaults. Last fort night, she joined the first group of 33 Kheria Sabar children hand-picked by S A I coaches for training in archery, volleyball and gymnastics. With this, the Kheria Sabar children, including 12 girls, joined the 200-odd promising and established sportspersons who live and train at the premier 44-acre complex. Says Somen Chowdhury, S A I’s director- incharge in Calcutta: "This is a revolutionary move towards bringing a traditionally persecuted community into the mainstream."

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Revolutionary it is. Bengal’s self-proclaimed progressive Marxist government has a shameful track record in its treatment women of   tribal communities. The 60,000-strong denotified criminal tribe community, comprising Kheria Sabars, Lodhas and Dhekaru s in three districts, have an abysmal literacy rate (below two per cent), remain landless, and continue to be deprived of proper drinking water and housing facilities. The effete government does little to change traditionally regressive attitudes of the non-tribal local population: 42 Lodhas were lynched by hate mobs between 1977 and 1979 alone. To make matters worse, the police continue to hound them. Over the years, some 20 Sabars have been lynched by locals or beaten to death by the police. For the past 16 years, however, Ramon Magsaysay award-winning novelist and social worker Mahasweta Devi has worked tirelessly for ensuring civil rights for the community through her Paschim Banga Kheria Sabar Kalyan Samity (West Bengal Kheria Sabar Development Society). Her efforts have paid crucial dividends: the society runs some 13 non - formal schools in the district for Sabar children, digs ponds and wells with Union government funds and trains Sabar men and women in treating animals and poultry farming .

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And it’s her efforts again that have led to the Sabar children training at SAI. For the past three years, archery coach Pradip Kundu has been regularly attending the hugely popular Sabar Mela, a fair Mahasweta Devi kickstarted in 1991 in Purulia where the tribespeople display and sell handicrafts, dance and sing. Impressed with their sporting skills, Kundu and Mahasweta Devi coaxed SAI officials to return to Purulia this February and see some 100 Sabar children at play. And selections were made after the children qualified in a battery of fitness and medical tests. "They run well, do their somersaults effortlessly, and archery is a traditional sport with them," says Mahasweta Devi. "There’s no reason why they shouldn’t represent the country with proper training. "

Hence the dramatic turnaround for the Sabar children at the SAI complex. They practice five hours a day, maintain well-regulated diets of bread, milk, eggs, vegetable, meat and curd, sleep in well-appointed dorms. "I don’t find them very homesick," says Kundu. Although some adjustments are painful: opening and bolting their dorm doors, the children have cut their limbs and sometimes fallen sick after overeating. But old habits die hard. Sarath Sabar, 13, training in archery, caught a rat one day in the practice fields, roasted and ate it with friends. Lakshmi’s 11-year-old brother, Bhudeb Sabar— the only brother-sister duo in training— caught a snake in the fields and took it to his coach, who advised him to throw the reptile away. If woodpeckers fly into the trees round the complex, the children fall silent and listen to their pecking away, a sound, according to the coaches, "that city people can never hear." Come evening, and boys like Bharat Sabar, 13, training in gymnastics, gets his flute from the sack in which he brought his pen and tattered set of shirt and trouser, and plays tunes that he picked up back home. "They are unlikely to be overwhelmed by city life. They have very strong nativity," says Mahasweta Devi.

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Something that’s reflected in the fact that archers comprise the largest group of Sabar children at S A I— 16 of them, including three girls. Using traditional bamboo bow-and-arrows, Sabar children are instinctive hunters. Though targeting moving animals with short, hard and inflexible bows is quite diff e rent from targeting a 10-cm- diameter bull’s eye— the innermost of 5-10 concentric circles— with state-of-the-art wood and fibreglass bows and aluminium and carbon arrows. "They have the instinct and aggression, but they have had no access to modern equipment. So they need a lot of training. They are also mal-nourished, so they need to build them-selves up physically too," says archery coach Kundu. For her part, Mahasweta Devi invokes the epics to celebrate the Sabar childre n ’s foray into archery training. " It’s symbolic," she says alluding to the tale of ace low-caste archer Ekalavya’s severing his finger as an offering to his guru in return for shooting a target accurately in the Mahabharata. "Ekalavya’s myth has been finally broken . "

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And how. On the moss greens of the archery field, where shooting distances range from 30 to 70 metres, Swapan Sabar, 15, is already showing signs of promise during practice. At home, where his mother lives alone and ekes out a livelihood making brooms that sell at a paltry Rs 10, he used bows and arrows to kill birds for food. "I’m getting used to the new equipment," he says, "but I still like the food more." He adores his new fibreglass bow though. His friend, Ajit Sabar, 15, has also shot birds, rabbits and rats at home. His mother is a farm worker back home, earning a pittance. He’s equally fond of his fibreglass bow, and is already talking about being a good professional archer one day. And Bhudeb, who joined the archery classes a fortnight ago, is trying to forget his father’s killing and become a "good sportsman". "I don’t know why they killed him," says he. "He just used to make baskets and b rooms and mops. I want to be an archer." An ambition his playmates share. Ranjit Sabar, 1l, son of a farm worker, wants to become an athlete when he grows up. "I love this life," he says. "The food is good, as is the practice." Chotu Sabar, 12, is learning to play volleyball after spending the last five years as a stone-crusher in his village, earning Rs 4 a day. Bhagaban Sabar, all of seven years, cartwheels all morning at practice and impresses his coach with his agility. "They’re my new obsession," says gymnastics coach Joyprakash Chakraborty, of the three Sabar children under his wing. " They’re hungry and they’re hard working . But they aren’t greedy. They’re ideal pupils."Agrees athletics coach Emanuel Haq:" They’re extraordinarily obedient and disciplined."Adds his colleague Montu Debnath: "Given their backgrounds in deprivation and hunger, they’re very spunky. We’ll just have to give them good food and train them properly to get results." By the year- end the Sabar children will be inducted under S A I’s Special Area Games Scheme, which trains tribal and backward people with sporting potential. For their 6-crore - strong brethren of denotified and nomadic tribes in India, this will be the best news in a long, long time.

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