The martial races of India's Olympic team

South Asia has the least sports-crazed peoples on earth, but some minorities are looking forward to the Olympics.

With the Olympics coming up, it’s interesting to focus on the world’s least athletic region, the Indian subcontinent.

Indian prime minister Modi felt shamed by India winning only 2 medals at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, so he subsidized sports and got the medal total up to 7 in Tokyo in 2021.

But even in 2024, most of the Indian heartland doesn’t seem very adept at and/or interested in Olympic sports. (By the way, South Asia’s most popular sport, cricket, is not part of the Paris Olympics, but is planned to return at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.)

British imperialists used to talk about India’s “martial races” like the Tibetan Gurkhas and northwestern Sikhs. To some extent, that still seems to show up in athletic participation.

@Shiftant tweets:

And here’s a map of India’s states:

Here’s a list of 2024 Indian Olympic team members by state.

And here’s a map of the raw numbers of athletes by state for the 2021 team, unadjusted for population size of the states:

In general, on a per capita basis, the mostly rural Deep North south of the Ganges has very low rates of making the Olympic team. The somewhat more prosperous Dravidian south does a little better.

The west coastal state with 67 athletes per 100 million is the old Portuguese colony of Goa.

These are very small sample sizes, but Goa, a state that’s relatively prosperous, more Catholic and Mediterranean in culture, and more traditionally focused on the outside world than most of Southern Asia, has a long Olympic tradition.

The far eastern state with 65 is Manipur, based on two athletes. In 2021, Manipur sent 5 team members. The New York Times reported in 2021:

In recent years, the country’s most powerful crop of Olympians has come from a narrow neck of land in northeastern India, where ethnic minorities live in the shadow of the Himalayas. These states, Manipur and Assam, are home to insurgent movements fighting for autonomy from the Indian state. Because of their ethnicity, people there often face discrimination.

… There are also racist whispers, some not so quiet, that people from the Himalayan foothills are more martial than others in India and that’s why they make good boxers.

After labeling that view “racist,” the NYT then quoted a bronze-medal winning lady boxer from Manipur to exactly that effect:

“Manipuri people, we have a fighting spirit, especially women,” said Kom, who grew up rationing meals to save money for a pair of sneakers.

The northeastern Himalayan state with 143 is the former independent kingdom of Sikkim. (But the sample size is very small with one archer.) Sikkim’s capital of Ganktok is at one mile elevation, which a former US ambassador to Nepal told me was the dividing line between South Asians and East Asians on the south slope of Himalayas: East Asian Tibetans don’t like the tropical diseases at lower elevations and South Asians don’t like the lack of oxygen at higher elevations.

The north central state with 36 is Uttarkhand.

Punjab is at 62, with 19 athletes, with nine having the frequently Sikh surname of “Singh.”

Haryana scores 84. It used to be part of British Punjab. In raw terms, it sends the most athletes with 24. It tends to do well in more militaristic sports like shooting, archery, boxing, and wrestling. But there’s only one “Singh.” S. Lant says, “But in Haryana, I believe it's mostly Hindu Jats and Rors.”

I can’t tell for sure what state the gray 167 stands for. I believe it’s Chandigarh, which is the joint capital of Punjam and Haryana designed by Le Corbusier. It is sending two athletes.

In general, interest in sports seem to correlate with interests in traditional masculine pastimes such as war, fighting, and hunting.