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Straight out of Jharkhand: Salima Tete's journey to become India hockey captain
Summary
In the tribal village of Barkichapar in Jharkhand, people have always played hockey. In the Arjuna Award winning India captain Salima Tete, the village has its first national star
The mahua trees are in bloom. Everywhere across this landscape—rocky undulations carpeted with tough grass, dotted with small, dense groves of bamboo and the scraggly canopies of mahua trees, there is the messy profusion of pink flowers. This is a busy time for villagers here, in the tribal lands in the district of Simdega, roughly 150km from Ranchi in Jharkhand.
The mahua flowers bloom for a single day and fall, leaving a rich carpet of pink and pale green around the base of the trees. The flowers are highly coveted—fermented and distilled into the local drink of the same name—and most villagers are busy collecting them. A sweet, almost sickly smell permeates the air. The fragrance of the mahua attracts not just humans but also goats, cows, bears, bats, all manner of birds, deer, and monkeys.
Sulakshan Tete is not among the villagers collecting mahua flowers. He walks with purpose towards a shady grove of bamboo, his powerful calves showing under his shorts, his muscular shoulders straining against a T-shirt, his right hand wielding a machete. He inspects the grove, carefully going around it, till he finds a youngish stem to his liking.
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“See how this is the right size," he says, gripping the stem, “and look at the little bit of root poking out from the ground, that’s what tells me it has the right curve also."
With a few expertly placed hacks, Sulakshan cuts out the stem, root and all, from the grove. It looks…exactly like a hockey stick! It takes Sulakshan less than an hour of deft work with the machete to finesse the natural curve of the root into the smooth head of a hockey stick.
“This is what I played hockey with most of my life," he says. “My father played with a stick like this and taught me how to make one too. When my daughter was only eight years old, she asked me to make one for her, so I did."
Fifteen years later, Sulakshan’s daughter, Salima Tete, 23, is the captain of the Indian women’s team. The only woman hockey player from Jharkhand with an Arjuna award, a Commonwealth and Asian Games medallist, two-time winner of the Asian Champions Trophy, and named by the International Hockey Federation as Asia’s best new player in 2023.
“I was obsessed with hockey because I saw my father was obsessed with it," Salima says over lunch—fat, boiled rice, stir-fried foraged greens, and a spicy curry made with country chicken, simmered for a long time over wood fire—at her home in the tiny village of Barkichapar in Simdega. The house is a long, flat structure made of packed mud, with a thatched roof, like all the houses in this village of just 45 families. Outside, a gaggle of children run around the courtyard with hockey sticks in their hands, chasing, and being chased by, a mob of chicks. Salima was born in this house.
“I knew that he (Sulakshan) was well known in our village as a hockey player, and he would go to play at these local tournaments all the time, and come back with prizes—chicken, goats—and the entire village would gather together and sing and dance down the road to welcome him and the other players," Salima says. “And I was completely in love with that. I thought, when will I bring back prizes and make people happy like this?"
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By the time she was eight, Salima started riding pillion on her father’s bicycle, homemade bamboo hockey stick clutched tightly in her tiny hands, travelling to local tournaments all around Simdega and other adjoining districts.
“Once the tournament ended, I would go to the field and practise stick work with my father," she says.
It wasn’t long before she started playing in the tournaments herself, starting off with the smaller events organised for children, where the prize could be coconuts or other fruits, but soon graduating to the village side, even if she was the youngest by far in the squad, to compete in the main draw matches, for the coveted prize of a goat. The local events, called “Khasi Tournaments", derive their name from the prize—khasi is goat in the local languages.
“And then we would come back with the prize and dance and sing with everyone here, parading down the village road," Salima says. “I can never forget those moments, there was so much joy."
Even though Barkichapar, like most villages in the tribal areas of Jharkhand and Odisha, is crazy about hockey—no other game has any currency here, and children as young as six wield hockey sticks as tall as they are—Salima is the first from the village to make it big in the sport. Her sister Mahima, 19, is now a part of the Indian junior team too.
Salima’s achievements have brought some new things to the village. During the Indian women’s team’s sensational run at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 (no medal, but they became the first Indian women’s team to reach the semis with a series of breathtaking performances), Salima’s family was gifted a TV, the first in the village, by the district administration, so her family and the village could watch her play.
“That didn’t work out very well, because we had no electricity back then," Salima says, laughing.
Since then, the houses in the village have received a plethora of solar panels for electricity, and a large new water storage tank for common use (in an area where access to water is a major struggle). A dirt road for vehicles now connects Barkichapar to the highway, around 20km away. Otherwise, the village is like so many others in this tribal area, a smattering of long, low mud houses with thatched roofs, small patches of cultivated land, thin dirt roads winding through giant groves of bamboo and pretty mahua trees, rough hockey pitches on level ground—called “chaat fields" —and a thatched-roof mud church, outside of which there is a large stone placed upright like a menhir, with a cross etched into its surface.
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Indeed, the church and hockey are inextricably linked in the tribal belt, a unique sporting culture that has produced so many of the country’s greatest players over the years, including the current head of the Hockey Federation Dilip Tirkey, with Salima being the latest to carry the legacy forward.
Hockey historian Nikhilesh Bhattacharya, who teaches English at Birpara College in West Bengal, says that one of the first reported instances of hockey in the tribal belt of India comes from 1895 (just a few decades after the modern game was developed in the public schools of England), when a Reverend E.H. Whitley brought a team from the Ranchi Mission to play at the inaugural Beighton Cup competition in Calcutta (the world’s oldest known hockey tournament). The Statesman reported that a large number of spectators turned up to see this oddity: “Except for the captain, the Rev E.H. Whitley, the Ranchee team is composed of native Christians, all of whom played without shoes or guards."
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“Ranchi Mission was run by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in Foreign Parts, a Church of England enterprise, to spread Christianity among the tribal populations of Chota Nagpur plateau," Bhattacharya says. “The ‘native Christians’ in the mission’s hockey team were most likely converted Mundas, the dominant group among the region’s tribes. Their debut in the inaugural Beighton Cup makes them the first indigenous team to take part in organised hockey in India. It also means that their debut can be taken as the starting point in the history of Indian hockey."
Though there is very little written evidence from the period, it is widely believed by the people in the tribal areas of Jharkhand and Odisha that the British missionaries brought the game into the region in the middle of the 19th century, partly as an attempt to make the prospect of attending school more attractive for young people.
The people took to hockey with a fervour that remains undiminished more than a hundred and fifty years later.
“Everyone plays hockey here," Salima says. “Parents and children, brothers, sisters, even the Fathers (priests) and teachers."
A good hockey player is spotted quickly in these parts, and inevitably sent to schools with strong hockey programmes, and Salima was no exception. The other natural progression is the “hockey hostel" in Simdega town, a state-run residential facility to develop exceptional junior players. It remains the only hockey centre in the area with an Astroturf. Here, Salima hit a rough patch because while the coach at the centre allowed her to join training sessions, her name was not officially accepted in the facility’s rosters. As a result, she did not get the free accommodation, food and equipment that other trainees got.
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“I still don’t understand why I wasn’t picked to be part of the centre," Salima says, “maybe it was just some politics. But it made me angry and it made me very focused. I decided not matter what I will prove myself."
Finally, after a year on the margins, Salima became a part of the centre. From where it was only a matter of time before she made the junior national team, and then captained India to a historic silver medal at the Youth Olympics in 2018.
It was at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 that Salima truly rose into international prominence. Her speed, strength and stamina, combined with slick stick skills and an ability to find visionary long passes stood out as India played one edge-of-the-seat thriller after another.
That superb high was followed by the worst low in Salima’s career—the Indian team’s failure to qualify for the 2024 Olympics.
“I still feel terrible. It was such a bad blow," Salima says. “Not just for me, but all of Indian women’s hockey. But you have to get past that, what can you do? I worked a lot with a psychologist about this."
Now it’s Salima who has been given the responsibility to steer the national team into the 2028 Olympics.
“Which is kind of funny because I used to be very meek off the field, I hardly ever spoke," Salima says. “But I learnt that being like that is not good for my career. You can get sidelined easily. Others walk over you. So I learnt to be assertive off the field, I learnt how to speak up for myself. And now I am here, captaining the team, dreaming of an Olympic medal."
It marks the start of a new journey for Salima, who carries in her blood the beginnings of the game in India.
Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of Enter the Dangal, Travels through India’s Wrestling Landscape.
