Double Olympic gold winner’s life, career shaped by Partition
Two-time Olympic hockey champion Keshav Datt died of agerelated illness in Kolkata in the early hours of Wednesday. He was 95 and is survived by daughter Anjali and sons, Kiron and Arun. Datt was the last surviving member of the teams that won gold in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics playing every minute of India’s matches in London and Helsinki, as either right half or centre half. He was the vicecaptain in 1952.
Datt believed he could have gone to the 1956 Olympics too, but for the demands of his job in the tea industry in the city then known as Calcutta. “Once I joined tea, there was no time… But I couldn’t afford to chuck that job in the hope of getting something equally good,” Datt recalled in an interview. Gurbux Singh, who won the Olympic gold in 1964 and a bronze in 1968 and played against Datt in domestic events, still thinks Datt was right. “He was in prime form (in 1956), certainly good enough to make the India team,” Singh said Wednesday.
Datt’s life and hockey career were shaped by Partition. One of seven siblings, Datt was born in Lahore on Dec 29, 1925. His father was called Pandit Ishwar Datt; “Pandit because we were brahmins,” Datt explained. His mother Sushila Devi “was from Kashmir.” The family belonged to Lahore, but Partition forced them to leave. “We lost our home, we lost everything… never thought we would have to say goodbye to Lahore, to the house. I still miss that place,” Datt remembered in 2013. He never got the chance to visit Pakistan.
Datt learnt hockey in Lahore, following in the footsteps of elder brother Yogesh. After Partition, he stayed briefly in Bombay and went on a goodwill tour of East Africa and Kenya under Dhyan Chand in 1947 before being selected for the 1948 London Olympics. Datt spent the rest of his life in Kolkata. He initially worked for the Port Trust, one of the departments that formed the bulwark of British govt in India, before shifting to a private British tea company. Yet, except for the short while at Port Trust where he played alongside Olympians Joe Galibardy and Leslie Claudius in the “Olympic half-line”, Datt spent his career in Mohun Bagan, a club formed primarily as a challenge to British hegemony in sport and outside.
Datt’s first love was badminton. However, “badminton was considered a ladies’ game, which was, you know, unfair,” said Datt. He shifted to hockey, “but badminton helped me with my footwork because it’s a very fast-moving game.”
“I am a person, by birth, if I take on something I want to be extremely good at it, far above average. It’s in my blood you might say. I don’t like also-ran sort of business,” Datt had said, without a trace of hubris, in the interview. This is the same man who gave away his 1948 Olympic gold medal to the prime minister’s relief fund in the wake of Chinese aggression in 1962. “A great player and a thorough gentleman,” is how Gurbux remembers Datt.