A turf of their own

It is highly unusual for India, currently 153rd in the FIFA rankings, to come within striking distance of an international football title. But that is not why this story is being told.

This story is being written because the boy who led India to the final of the recently held under-13 Asian Youth Football Championship was groomed in a football academy run by an organisation of sex workers.

India, which finished runners-up to Iran in the Asian Football Confederation (AFC)-backed tournament hosted by the Iranian city of Yazd, was captained by its goalkeeper Subrata Das.

The talented boy learnt the ropes of the game at the Durbar Football Academy in Baruipur, on the outskirts of Kolkata.

“Iran is way ahead of us as far as football goes,” says Subrata. “It was a great experience for us playing in that country. The soccer infrastructure there is much better than what we have in India. We learnt a great deal.”

Sadly, India’s football authorities chose to ignore the success of the team and did not so much as host a simple felicitation function to welcome back the runners-up, let alone shower them with material rewards. This apathetic attitude of the football authorities speaks volumes in itself.

The Asian youth football tournament saw the plucky Indian boys put up a sterling show on their way to the final where they lost to the much higher-ranked host team by two goals to nil. That, incidentally, was the only game India lost in the entire tournament. The other nations that were in the fray were Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bhutan.

In the first round of the tournament, the Indian under-13 boys, with Subrata Das being a solid rock between the goalposts, trounced Yazd, a team representing the host city, 3-0.

A rampaging India played Bhutan twice and ran up a thumping 8-0 goal difference against the team from the Himalayan kingdom. India then played out two tame draws, with an identical 1-1 score line, against fancied Iran and Pakistan.

In the second round of the tournament, the Indians defeated Bhutan once again 7-0 and Sri Lanka 8-0 to storm into the final. Bengal boy Firozuddin Mollah scored two hat-tricks in the second round.

Among the other goal-scorers for India were Basu Mukherjee, Rajesh Goswami and Sandip Bhattacharjee. In the final, Iran scored once in each half to get the better of India.

The Durbar Football Academy is run under the aegis of Durbar Mahila Samanway Samiti, the famed organisation that, from its headquarters in Kolkata, runs a concerted campaign to better the lot of sex workers not just in the country but in all of south Asia.

Durbar, which means unstoppable, was set up in the early 1990s. The organisation has come a long way since. It now runs several formal and informal schools in different parts of the eastern metropolis for children of sex workers.

It also funds a home for such children in Baruipur. An informal school, Rahul Vidya Niketan, is an integral part of this home. The football academy was set up essentially for the sex workers’ children who go to this school.      

Durbar recently organised a function to felicitate the Bengal boys who played in the under-13 team. The event was attended by Indian football greats of the past like P.K. Banerjee, Chuni Goswami, Subhash Bhowmik and Deepak Mondal as well as the new sports minister of Bengal, Madan Mitra.

Subrata Das’s coach Biswajit Majumder told TSI: “The captain of the under-13 team was hugely disappointed because nobody, not even the All India Football Federation (AIFF), deemed it necessary to felicitate the boys. So we decided to make amends.”

Durbar has raised a team that will later this year participate in the under-12 Nursery Football League, organised by the Indian Football Association (IFA). Says Majumder: “Subrata will not be a part of this team as he is now above the age of 12, but the squad will have boys like Buddhadeb Haldar, Rohit Dutta, Amal Das, Sayan Chakraborty, Subrata Pal, Mohd Ismail and Palash Karmakar.”

All of the above-mentioned boys are children of sex workers. The rest of the Durbar team is made up of talented footballers from neighbourhood families that send their wards to the thriving soccer academy. Buddhadeb Haldar will be the captain while Palash Karmakar will be his deputy.

Subrata Das is essentially an ‘outsider’. He belongs to a general family that lives in the locality. But at the Baruipur home for sex workers, the teenager receives as much love and attention as all the 80 children who live there.

“I absolutely love playing with these boys,” says Subrata, who idolizes former Indian goalkeeper Bhaskar Ganguly and the current national custodian Subrata Paul, besides Germany’s legendary Oliver Kahn. “The parentage of my friends here does not matter one bit to me. I receive generous affection from everybody at the academy.” 

“The caretaker of the home makes no distinction between our own children and those who come here from outside by virtue of being part of the Durbar football team,” says Malati (name changed), a sex worker who resides in the Baruipur home. “Subrata has brought us glory and he is very much of a part of our family.”

More significantly, the fact that ‘respectable’ families do not have any reservations about sending their children to play alongside sons of sex workers in the Durbar football team is a sure sign of a social shift, if only marginal at the moment.

Dr Smarajit Jana, founder-mentor of Durbar, says, “Our aim is to bring these children and their mothers into the mainstream of society. We have achieved success to some extent.”

He points out that “sex workers are now running a multipurpose cooperative and its annual turnover is more than Rs 4 crore.” This outfit was set up only after Durbar managed to impress upon the state government the need to introduce an amendment in the Cooperative Act.

Says Jana: “We are now hoping to construct a full-fledged sports complex for these children in Baruipur. The bengal sports minister Madan Mitra has assured us that the state government will extend all possible assistance for the purpose.”

Meanwhile, Durbar has also put together a women’s football team. “All the members of this team are from the sex workers category," says coach Majumder. “We have decided to appeal to IFA to allow our team to join the local women’ football league next year.”

Has it been smooth sailing for Durbar’s football ambitions thus far? Majumder, a first division footballer of the 1990s, says, “Honestly, we haven’t faced much resistance. The initial hiccups were sorted out within two or three weeks. Now the elders of the locality are totally with us. In fact, they lose no opportunity to encourage us.”

Recently, Durbar organised a women’s football tournament at Sheoraphuli in Hooghly district, where only girl children of sex workers participated.

Eight teams from different districts like Howrah, Malda, North and South 24-Parganas, Midnapore and Hooghly participated. This was, incidentally, the second edition of the annual tournament.

Durbar is clearly going great guns in the football arena. Who knows, the next time around, many more boys from the Baruipur soccer academy might make it to the under-13 India squad and take the team a step forward and clinch the championship. That is the goal that the coach and the unstoppable boys under his charge have set for themselves.