Revision as of 18:31, 7 October 2020

A brief biography

May 14, 2020: The Times of India

Tulsidas Balaram: a factfile
From: May 14, 2020: The Times of India

With the recent passing away of Chuni Goswami and PK Banerjee, Tulsidas Balaram remains the last of Indian football’s fabled Golden Trio. TOI tracks down a legend…

Once upon a time in Indian football, three was plenty but never a crowd. Today, it is a one-man club, with the lone member raging silently against the dying of the light.

Chuni Goswami followed PK Banerjee to the maidan in the skies within 40 days of each other last month, evoking spontaneous grief and a wave of nostalgia not often seen in Indian sport. What it also did was thrust the focus on the third player in Indian football’s evergreen golden trio.

Chuni was the bona fide superstar, aristocratic and elegant and most becoming of a Mohun Bagan icon. As a footballer — lithe and light — he ghosted past rivals almost as if he wasn’t there. PK was the tour de force on the right wing who willed things his way through the sheer force of personality. He was also capable of astonishing reinvention. Canny enough to remain loyal to unglamorous Eastern Railways, he used that same sense of self-preservation to forge a storied career as a coach. In all this, there is Tulsidas Balaram, with his blind, undying faith in teamwork, instruction, loyalty and in Rahim saab, India’s greatest-ever football coach.

Today, having long embraced everyday ordinariness, Balaram is encountering sudden concern from all around.

“Young man, one or two phone calls will not do justice to talk about that time.” The half-admonishment sets the tone of the revisit. “You want to do a story on me,” he asks, mildly perplexed. Perhaps the death of an old friend, teammate, club rival and also contender — for the same position in the India team — can provide fresh context. He allows himself a sardonic chuckle. “‘Arrey, Balaram,’ they say in my colony, ‘The virus is there, why go out? We want to see you for five, 10 years more. Stay inside. We will help you, we love you.’”

Balaram was the most understated and aloof of the three, with the rest lapping up all the adulation. You could say he was the outsider, the foot soldier, even as the over-arching influence of the other two in Calcutta’s socio-cultural ethos kept growing. This is not to say he wasn’t his own man. He would carve his own space and earn a lifetime’s respect as an East Bengal idol. Fierce, larger than life on the field, Balaram’s battles with the other hero of the time, the equally-fiery Jarnail Singh of Mohun Bagan, is stuff of legend.

The 1961 season with East Bengal was a watershed one, and the faithful still see him as their saviour, running errands for him to this day. “In my Uttarpara neighbourhood, they don’t even weigh the vegetables when I put them in the basket. They simply put them in my bag. ‘Balaram sir, please take and go,’ they say, not even counting the money I give them,” he says.

After not being selected in India’s opening game against hosts Australia in 1956, Balaram has often said, he was subsequently never dropped by Rahim till his early international retirement due to pleurisy in 1963. He would notch up the record of having played the most number of Olympic Games matches by an Indian footballer, including five on the trot.

He would play the semifinals and the bronze-medal tie at Melbourne Games, and three straight games in Rome four years later. He would have fine goals against Hungary and Peru in Rome, in addition to a handful at the Asian Games, with the ones in 1962 Jakarta helping India reach it’s footballing peak – the gold medal.

There is no great urge to pull out a boat and bring the big fish home, yet all Balaram has to show for all his achievements is an Arjuna Award in 1962 and then being cruelly bypassed for the Padmashri in 1990. “I was told, ‘Balaram’s file was dropped last minute.’ After all these years, still I don’t know why. They all deserved, so why not me?” he asks. “I don’t want it now. People’s love and affection is more than a Padmashri for me.”

Balaram was perhaps India’s first modern footballer, a 1960s prototype of the current-day European mould. A veritable team man, he could play in any position, falling back to win the ball and relay it to the two men upfront. Ironically, even today he remains the go-to man for those seeking a memory of his departed teammates.

“PK always wanted the ball in advance, he liked to have some room to take on the defender,” he remembers. “Chuni wanted it on his feet, particularly the right. If you gave it to his left, he would be in slight difficulty, lose time trying to adjust. Ball on the right, he was magical. We had superb understanding. You wake us up in the middle of the night and we would be ready to play after barely shaking ourselves awake. Football is a very simple game, yaar.

“Rahim-saab used to say, ‘Kya hai, miyaan football? Gola lo, gola do. Bas (what is it, football? Take the sphere, pass the sphere. That’s all it is).” Balaram’s versatility was perhaps the reason Rahim made him forsake his favoured left-in slot for Chuni. Pulling him wide left gave the coach more options. “Back home, there used to be 40,000 people for the Nationals alone. In the Rovers Cup in Bombay, stars like Shammi Kapoor would come straight from shooting, make-up still on, because Chuni and Balaram would be playing,” he recalls.

No one in Kolkata – his home since 1957 – denies his stature. Yet today, little of it exists. Like the Padmashri, not being accorded even a pass for the Fifa under-17 World Cup three years ago was an unforgivable slight in Balaram’s eyes. It was symptomatic of the 83-year-old’s own existence – always admired, but never fully appreciated. “I don’t know if I am great or not. I have a simple definition, I used to kick the ball better than other players. Maybe that’s what I was successful on the field. About greatness, don’t ask me…”