This past week Dilip Tirkey became one of India’s unlikeliest MPs, being elected to the Rajya Sabha from his native Orissa as a Biju Janata Dal (BJD) candidate. A few months past his 34th birthday, Mr Tirkey is among the youngest members of the House of Elders. He is a tribal (adivasi) and a Christian, adding to the pan-Orissa social alliance the BJD seeks to represent in Parliament. Said to be a charming man, Mr Tirkey’s nomination is certainly a welcome innovation by his party.

The reason Mr Tirkey is a tribal hero and an Orissa icon goes beyond ethnic or regional identity. He is a hockey superstar who played over 400 times for India and used the sport to lift himself from a humble village to media headlines. In 2004, he became the second tribal to captain India’s hockey team at the Olympic Games. He didn’t win a medal in Athens that year, but can make amends by carving a niche for himself in Parliament. His rise to the national legislature is a result of nothing but merit and hard work. It is the sort of fairy tale Indian democracy needs to hear more often to renew its faith in itself.
For all his achievements, Mr Tirkey is not a pioneer. He was, as the previous paragraph said, not the first adivasi to captain India at an Olympic hockey event. That honour went to Jaipal Singh Munda, a remarkable man and one of those founding fathers today’s India has forgotten but would do well to remember.
Jaipal Singh was a tribal prince in the region now known as Jharkhand. Early in life he converted to Christianity — though in his final years he was described as a “lapsed Christian” — learnt the English language, went to a missionary school and finally left for the University of Oxford. At Oxford, he made it to the hockey team and won a University Blue. In 1928, when the Indian squad was being selected to play its first Olympic Games in Amsterdam, it was the 25-year-old Jaipal who was named captain.
There is a certain poignancy to that story and to the egalitarian and even revolutionary spirit of hockey in those times, as opposed to cricket. In 1932, four years after the Amsterdam Games, India’s cricketers toured England for their first Test match. The squad was led by the Maharaja of Porbandar, who thankfully dropped out of the Test at Lord’s and handed the captaincy to C.K. Nayudu, a commoner but a much better batsman. Four years later, another princeling, the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, led the team on its second tour of England but cussedly insisted on playing the Test matches, even though he was scarcely a cricketer.
In contrast, hockey was far more representative of the rainbow coalition called India. Sikhs and Anglo-Indians, north Indian Muslims and that dazzling armyman from Bundelkhand who was the greatest of them all: those early hockey teams reflected the national movement — or what the national movement wanted to believe of itself — far more accurately than their cricket peers. It was only fitting then that the 1928 hockey team was led not by a vain prince who could barely hold a stick, but by a handsome adivasi prince who was quite simply one of the best defenders in the world.
India won the gold at Amsterdam but Jaipal never made it to the podium. He had had a fight with the British manager and left towards the end of the tournament, just before the semi-final. Ironically, he was the second Oxford man to drop out. His contemporary, Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi, had been chosen for the Games but had opted out even before the team left. In the final in 1928, India was led by Eric Penniger, an Anglo-Indian.
Yet that was not the end of the Jaipal story. He came back to India as a role model for young adivasis, eventually representing his people in the Constituent Assembly. After Independence, he founded the Jharkhand Party and began a quest for a tribal homeland that eventually became a reality at the dawn of the 21st century. By then Jaipal was long gone. The past week, as it happened, marked the anniversary of his death in New Delhi in 1970.
Nevertheless the man had written himself into history. He was among India’s early active parliamentarians. In May 1951, the Lok Sabha saw a fervid debate on the First Amendment, which sought to place “reasonable restrictions” on freedom of expression “in the interests of the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality… or incitement to an offence.” Jawaharlal Nehru and Syama Prasad Mookerjee crossed swords in a memorable debate. Eventually the bill was passed 228-20. Jaipal was one of the 20 who voted against the bill.
Four years later came the Fourth Amendment, which placed restrictions on property rights and gave the state greater powers to take over private property for a social or public purpose. The Fourth Amendment Bill was referred to a Joint Committee of Parliament led by Jawaharlal Nehru himself. As Granville Austin writes in his masterly Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience, “Jaipal Singh, a representative of the adivasis of Bihar and a member of the Constituent Assembly, wrote in his dissent that for the poor man’s sake compensation must be justiciable, for the right to approach the courts ‘is the most effective guarantee against executive tyranny’.”
It was a lost cause. Jaipal, a constitutionalist who believed in social justice and saw modern property and legal rights for adivasis as intrinsic to that mission, was thwarted. His was such a different sensibility from one that regards tribals as museum showpieces to be patronised with empty promises like “I will be your sipahi in Delhi.” His was such a remarkable legacy. It now passes to Mr Dilip Tirkey.

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com