Baseball on the high hills

Manipur is known more for its drug and HIV/AIDS problem, not for something that has been its abiding passion for decades—baseball. Now, US and Manipuri enthusiasts have come together to give the game a fillip in the rest of India

By Yatish Yadav

What much of India knows of Manipur is that it is a “disturbed state” whose HIV+, AIDS and drug addiction rates are burgeoning, with HIV+ cases comprising more than 7 per cent of India’s total HIV+ cases and 30 per cent (200,000) of the country’s intravenous drug users. What much of India doesn’t know is that Manipur, with a population of two million (0.2 per cent of India’s population) has had something amazing going for it for a long time: baseball, America’s national game and enduring passion, has been played in Manipur for many decades now. Surprisingly enough, the state has 26 clubs—and it is the women’s teams that have a vital presence.

Manipur-born Somi Roy, media and film curator based in New York, was shocked when his cousin requested him for a few bats for the baseball team in Manipur. Moved by this transoceanic passion for a game considered restricted to the US and Japan, Roy contacted major baseball clubs and baseball buffs in the US for help.

On a humid June evening in 2005, about 100 New Yorkers with a passion for the Great American Sport gathered to launch First Pitch: The US Manipur Baseball Project. Baseball stars, sportswriters, artists, playwrights, filmmakers, doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, fashion designers, an ambassador and a former maharaja gathered over hotdogs and Manipuri-style canapés made of lotus-root fritters, and stumbled sportingly through America's baseball anthem, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”—in Manipuri. Award-winning filmmaker Mira Bank from Hollywood, and Vic Losick, her cameraman, began shooting their documentary on Manipuri baseball.

Their questions seemed incandescent: Baseball in the eastern Himalayas? 26 teams? Where on Earth is Manipur? Somi tried to contact everyone who was had some influence and some connection with India. A long-time friend of India, filmmaker Mike Peters, was delighted, and fascinated, to hear of a place in India where they played baseball instead of national passion, cricket.

What impressed him most was that the game had survived against staggering odds, in a poor, isolated border state riddled with conflict. Here was the game played for the sheer love of it, unscarred by multimillion dollar salaries and steroid scandals. Says Roy, “My conversations with Mike sowed the seeds of First Pitch, a Manipur-US baseball project. The challenge was the construction of an interface between the US and Manipuri passion for baseball.”

One the one hand, the US is a superpower whose track record of interactions with other cultures has often been that of blundering and plundering. On the other were the remarkable but poverty-stricken Manipuri Meiteis, a proud people locked in a 45-year-old conflict with New Delhi. With travel severely restricted for foreign nationals, no tourism, sweatshops or outsourced jobs, globalisation comes to Manipur primarily through the film, television and the Internet.

The problem which Roy started with was the scant knowledge about Manipur among Americans. “The vast New York Public Library system carries a mere 148 entries on Manipur,” he says. “So, I decided that the first step towards a baseball project in Manipur would be to take Mike there. We were part of a group of seven artists and art producers that undertook a cultural-immersion week that I organised with the support of the Asian Cultural Council in New York and the Manipur state government. With a foot firmly planted in both cultures, I presented Manipur to my American friends and America to my Meitei friends.”

Today, First Pitch is working with Manipur's 18 leikai, or neighbourhood sports clubs. First Pitch will provide equipment, professional coaching, and health initiatives for athletes, and build South Asia's first baseball park at Imphal, to be named after Maharaja Churachand, the founder of modern sports in Manipur. First Pitch's goal is to establish India's baseball centre in Manipur, the only place in India where the game does not languish in the shadow of cricket.

As part of its Envoy Program, and in conjunction with First Pitch and the US embassy in India, Major League Baseball International (MLBI) will send Envoy Coaches to five cities in India—Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Imphal. The coaches will begin a series of clinics and camps for local baseball coaches and players in November 4-December 8, 2006.

The intensive coaching camp, aptly called Camp Manipur, for local Manipuri coaches, scheduled from November 4-14, highlights a joint initiative between MLBI and First Pitch—with support from sports equipment major Spalding—that marks the initial foray of First Pitch. A series of clinics for local baseball coaches and players in four other cities in India will instruct them in the fundamentals of baseball.

More than 250 Manipuri baseball players have signed up for a preparatory 10-day Fall Training programme in Imphal from September 17-27, organised by First Pitch and the Manipur Amateur Baseball Association. Coaches for the November camp will be selected here.

The Envoy Program, developed by MLBI in 1991, utilises top high school, college, and professional baseball coaches. Envoy Coaches are selected on the basis of their experience, expertise and passion for teaching the game of baseball to culturally diverse audiences the world over.

The Program has sent baseball coaches on more than 700 assignments in 72 countries and territories. MLBI and the US embassy will co-host Manipur’s first effort at upgrading the level of coaching, as well as conduct introductory coaching programmes in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.

“With its enormous reach and ability to influence, the Envoy Program is vital to the long-term growth of the game and an integral part of our overall mission to internationalise baseball,” says Paul Archey, senior vice-president, Major League Baseball International. “We are very excited about the opportunity to work with First Pitch and look forward to fostering the development of the game in India.”

Lauding this initiative, US Ambassador in India David Mulford says, “Baseball is to America what cricket is to India. We are delighted that we can work with Major League Baseball International and First Pitch to share this game with Indians. As sports enthusiasts, the Indian people may one day embrace baseball as they have cricket and other sports.”

Although Manipuri’s have been playing the game for decades, there is little infrastructure and no formal instruction, equipment or uniforms.

“What these people do have,” says Mike Peters, “is great joy in the game and tremendous athletic ability. It is this enthusiasm in such a remote corner of India that gave us the impetus to create a different Manipur—away from smoke and disease.”