First Football Game in Kashmir, 1891

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This was a time when football was first introduced by emissaries of Raj to far off places like Afghanistan and Tibet too. What is interesting in the description of the event provided by Biscoe is the powerful consciousness on part of the missionary that he was irreversibly changing the social mores of the natives. And according to him, for the better and forever. He was building Rome. Rome or no Rome, he did add a new chapter to how Pandits assimilated some new things from Missionaries too. But the path, as often is the case of evolution of a society or a community, wasn’t as smooth as one would like to believe now.

While C. E. Tyndale Biscoe would have one believe that after initial reluctance Kashmiris wholeheartedly gave up their Pherans and Pugrees and started playing football, in a photograph published in National Geographic Magazine (top) just around that time, we can see kids playing football with their Pugrees and some even in the beloved pheran. The truth is that the acceptance of strict missionary ways wasn’t accepted by purist Pandits without giving a tough fight. Pandits employed all kind of tactics as a way to block the path of missionaries. It was almost modern warfare that included media blitz, calling for support from mainstream Hindu Nationalist leaders and employing age old Kashmiri technique of giving nasty nicknames to people who were siding with the Missionaries. The National Geographic Magazine tells us that these Pandits were nicknamed Rice Christians, or ‘Batte Christain‘, one who converted to Christianity for rice. Much late, when communism arrived in Kashmir, the term was modified and became ‘Batte Communist‘ or ‘Rice Communist’, for one who claimed to be a communist for discount in Rice rations (this was probably around 1950s of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad). Also, around this time moniker Kari was coined for people who were suspected to have changed religion to Christianity.

The above photograph from ‘Character Building in Kashmir’ (1920)’ has Biscoe boys dragging a “dead dog”. The story:

Around that time often leading the social attacks on Biscoe school were Brahmins and the supporters of other “more normal” schools including ones that had the backing of Mrs. Annie Besant, of theosophical fame, who opened Hindu School, on the other bank just opposite the CMS school near the third bridge of Srinagar. Often local Newspapers were filled with News snippets targeting the school and its way of functioning. In one such news story, the paper claimed that Mr. Biscoe made Brahmin boys drag dead dogs through the city. Strange as the news may seem, Mr. Biscoe’s response was equally typical. He writes in his book ‘Character Building in Kashmir’ (1920):

Many of the native papers had done us the honour of telling their readers what they thought of us, and gave accounts of what had not, as well as of what had, happened chiefly the former. For many of the Indian papers greedily swallow the lies made red hot in Srinagar. One of the yarns that appeared is worth quoting :
” Mr. Biscoe, principal of the Church mission school in Srinagar, makes his Brahman boys drag dead dogs through the city.”
This ” spicy ” bit of news took our fancy, and we thought it a pity that one of these yarns at least should not be founded upon something tangible, so we decided to help the editor of the paper in this matter.
We possessed an obedient dog, a spaniel, who was in the habit of “dying” for his friends when required to do so. The rest of the cast was quite easy a party of boys, a rope, and a photographer. The obedient spaniel died, and remained dead while we tied a rope to his hind leg, and placed the boys in position on the rope for the photographer to snap.
So henceforward if ever we find a citizen disbelieving Srinagar yarns, especially those spun against the schools, we can produce this photograph to show that one at least of their stories is true. Papers may err, but cameras never (?).

In one of the still more strange case, Pandits even sought help from Vivekananda on the matter when he arrived in Kashmir in around 1897. Although not naming him directly, Biscoe in ‘Kashmir in sunlight &shade’ writes about Pandits asking a certain Sadhu to intervene in their favor. This man he describes as, “A certain yellow-robed and much-travelled Sadhu” who “visited Kashmir with his cheelas.” and “had travelled in Europe and America, and was highly educated.” Based on the description and chronology of the events this man has to be Vivekananda. What followed was that initially this Sadhu favoured the Pandits but later after talking to Biscoe and seeing his school and work, he did a u-turn and advised pandits to send their children to Biscoe.

And yet the Pandit hatred for Biscoe, this man who was challenging their way of life, didn’t subside. They didn’t understand all this strange business of swimming, rowing, mountaineering, cricket, cleaning street and rivers. They expected the school to just to teach their children maths and essential skills that will help them get a government jobs. But they saw that Biscoe was in-effect changing their children into little Europeans. And he was doing it with a certain brashness. If children drowned while rowing in Wular, Biscoe believed that other children would readily filled their place. He believed in football and its power to change a society. But the ripples that his little experiment was causing in the Kashmiri society can be gauged from writings of Biscoe’s son  E. D. Tyndale-Biscoe. In his book  ‘Fifty years against the stream. The story of a school in Kashmir’ (1930)* he writes that the children in order to avoid football would often puncture the ball and their parents would shoot off angry letter’s to CMS headquaters in London. One of the letter read like this:

“We, the inhabitants – Hindus and Muhamadans of Kashmir – want this, that if Mr. Biscoe is allowed to remain in Kashmir as a Principal of the school, not a single boy will attend it, and the Society will have to close it for good. Therefore, please sir, transfer Mr. Biscoe for his is exceedingly a bad man, illiterate, deceitful, ill-mannered, uncultured, cunning, and a man too fond of cricket.”

And yet Biscoe stayed on, building his little roman empire in Kashmir, little by little, with diligent social work and an unshakable faith in his unconventional methods.

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* Mentioned in ‘Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post, edited by James H Mills, Satadru Sen.