Blood on a Hockey Field

In 1983, India lifted its first Cricket World Cup. The same year saw the murder of Prithipal Singh, a star of India's 1964 Olympic gold-winning hockey team. In Gunned Down, Delhi author Sundeep Misra revisits the crime while unpacking the life of a player once celebrated and yet deeply polarising in Indian sports history.

- ADITHI REENA AJITH

Sundeep Misra, author, Gunned Down: Murder of an Olympic Champion, (Authors UpFront) first heard of the name Prithipal Singh when he was a schoolboy making a list of top-ten hockey players with his father in the late 1970s. Misra knew of Dhyan Chand, Balbir Singh, Leslie Claudius, but Prithipal's name, who his father insisted belonged in the top five, was new to him.

Prithipal was a major name in Indian hockey during the 1960s Olympics. "He was this big personality. He had a cult following around him, like the way he used to score off those penalty corner hits and generally his play on field," Misra recalls. In 1983, when Misra read that Prithipal had been shot dead on the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) campus, the memory of his discussions with his father returned. "It was always at the back of my mind. But then barely out of school, I never had an inkling that one day I would write a book or even become a journalist," notes Misra.

The book traces the life of the hockey star from his childhood in Nankana Sahib in post-Partition Pakistan, and the family's move to Amritsar amid the upheaval of Partition, to his triumphs on the Olympic field — Rome 1960 (silver), Tokyo 1964 (gold), and Mexico City 1968 (bronze). It follows his later years as a teacher at Punjab Agricultural University, leading up to his assassination on the campus.