As the countdown to 08.08.08 begins, and a neighbour braces itself for both brickbats and accolades on hosting its maiden Olympic Games and we send our quota of dreamy eyed athletes and officials who would be placed just above Eritrea and below Slovenia in the medals tally and we do the usual jamboree of announcing harebrained schemes to win gold medal after gold medal 4, 8 and 12 years hence, I have one question for you - who is Independent India’s first individual medal winner at the Olympics?

Milkha Singh and PT Usha missed it by a whisker two decades ago, Leander Paes, Malleshwari and Rajyavardhan Rathore gave India some respectability in the past decade, but the first Indian representing the tricolour who ever won a medal was Khashabha Jadhav, way back in 1952, at the Helensinki Olympics. As I was, looking up some details on the man, I came across this article by Rediff in 2000, on him. Read on, on the story of the man, who in most other countries would be immortalised, but died unrecognised by our system. Some excerpts:

Recalls Ranjit Jhadhav, his only son, “When Baba wanted some financial help for his journey to the Helsinki Olympics, he received a cold snub from (then Bombay chief minister) Morarji Desai, asking him to contact them after the Games.”

The same leader garlanded the victorious Khashaba when he returned from Helsinki at a function organised in Bombay.

True heroes, they say, are admired without an apology. Not so in the case of this wrestling great who had to beg for money to travel to Helsinki. The Maharaja of Kolhapur funded Jhadhav’s trip to London for the 1948 Games. But for the 1952 Games he and his family went around the village begging for contributions to enable him to flirt with destiny.

Khardikar, principal of the Rajaram College, where Jhadhav studied, mortgaged his home for Rs 7,000 to send his former student to the Olympics. Despite repeated requests to Morarji for only Rs 4000, there was no help forthcoming from any quarter.

“He would have easily won the gold at Helsinki,” said Sampat Rao Jhadhav, his cousin who was with Khashababhau when he left for Helsinki to compete in the bantamweight category.

“It was difficult for him to adjust to the mat surface. After two rolling fouls he missed out on the gold medal which was his for the taking. (The gold was won by Japan’s Ishii Shobachi while Russia’s Rashid Mamedekov clinched the silver.) Moreover, there was no interval between the two bouts and to fight with two world class wrestlers without appropriate rest was more than a Herculean effort,” added Rao.

The Akhil Bharatiya Khashaba Jhadhav Wrestling Tournament was instituted to posthumously appreciate his contribution to Indian wrestling. His son and wife, however, continued to run from pillar to post lobbying for the Chhatrapati Shivaji award, Maharashtra’s highest sporting honour, but were turned down on the pretext that he was dead.

In 1994 after repeated requests to the Maharashtra sports minister, Khashaba Jhadhav was posthumously awarded the Chhatrapati Shivaji award.

But the Arjuna Award still eludes the wrestler.

“My father should get the Arjuna Award because he deserves it. I have done everything possible to get my father the recognition he deserved when he was alive. I will try and get the Arjuna Award awarded to my father,” says his son, Ranjit, who has written to Sports Minister Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa in June. There has been no response yet.

“I’m bitter. I’m bitter when I look at the prevailing conditions. The glamour the cricketers have got. It hurts. What have they given in return to the people who showered so much love and attention on them? They will have to take into consideration my father’s accomplishments. Milkha Singh wasn’t highly qualified, but became the sports director of Punjab. My father was a BA, LLB and yet they thought that he was not qualified to be a coach,” says a bitter Ranjit.

As a post script to this piece, Jadhav was awarded the Arjuna Award posthumously in 2001, 48 years after his award winning performance and 16 years after his death! In comparison, Karnam Malleswari who won a bronze medal in the Sydeny Olympics of 2000 was awarded the same Arjuna Award in 1994, 6 years prior to the medal winning performance. 

First Posted at Prem Panicker's on July 18, 2008.