Sports and State Awards of Madhya Pradesh: Facts and PYQs

Two sets of names make up this chapter, and papers of MPPSC, MP Police, the patwari and the vyapam examinations take questions from both. The first is sport: the state sport of Mallakhamb, the awards the state gives its players and coaches every year, the stadiums where records have been made and the hockey players, shooters and cricketers the state has produced. The second is the long list of honours in which Madhya Pradesh is richer than almost any other state, the awards named after Kalidas, Tansen, Kabir, Tulsidas, Iqbal, Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar, each one tied to a field and to a festival where it is given. Learn each award with its field and each player with the town and the game, and the questions answer themselves.

Sport in Madhya Pradesh

Mallakhamb, the old gymnastic art in which a performer works on a wooden pole or a hanging rope, was declared the state sport of Madhya Pradesh in 2013, which is the single most asked fact of this chapter. The state runs residential academies for its players, among them the shooting academy and the water sports academy at Bhopal, and in 2023 it hosted the fifth edition of the Khelo India Youth Games, in which the events were spread over Bhopal, Indore, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Ujjain and other towns.

The stadiums of the state carry the names of its players and rulers. The Captain Roop Singh Stadium at Gwalior is named after the hockey player who was part of India’s Olympic gold winning teams of 1932 and 1936, and it is the ground on which Sachin Tendulkar made the first double century in one day international cricket, two hundred not out against South Africa on 24 February 2010. The Holkar Stadium at Indore is the state’s Test and one day venue, the Aishbagh Stadium at Bhopal is its hockey ground and the Tatya Tope Stadium is Bhopal’s multipurpose arena.

• Shankar Laxman of Mhow was the goalkeeper of the Indian hockey team that won Olympic gold in 1956 and 1964 and silver in 1960, and he received the Arjuna Award and the Padma Shri.
• Captain Roop Singh of Gwalior, the younger brother of Dhyan Chand, played in the Olympic gold winning hockey teams of 1932 and 1936.
• Aslam Sher Khan of Bhopal was a member of the Indian hockey team that won the World Cup in 1975.
• Syed Mushtaq Ali of Indore was the first Indian to score a Test century outside India, at Manchester in 1936, and the national Twenty20 tournament is named after him.
• Narendra Hirwani, who played for Madhya Pradesh, took sixteen wickets in his first Test match, against the West Indies at Chennai in 1988, a record for a debut.
• Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar of Ratlam district is among the rifle shooters the state’s academy has produced for the national team.

The state honours

Madhya Pradesh began a group of national honours in the nineteen eighties, and they are now the best known awards given by any state government. The Kalidas Samman, instituted in 1980, is given by rotation in classical music, classical dance, theatre and the plastic arts, and it belongs with the Kalidas Samaroh held at Ujjain, the city of the poet. The Tansen Samman, of the same period, is given for Hindustani classical music at the Tansen Samaroh held every year at Gwalior near the tomb of Tansen, the singer of Akbar’s court who was born in that region.

Beside these stand the Maharishi Vedvyas Samman for Sanskrit and the Pandit Kumar Gandharva Samman for young talent in music, named after the singer who lived at Dewas. The festivals at which the honours and the performances come together are themselves examination material: the Kalidas Samaroh at Ujjain, the Tansen Samaroh at Gwalior, the Khajuraho Dance Festival in February, the Ustad Alauddin Khan Sangeet Samaroh at Maihar and the Malwa Utsav at Indore and Ujjain.

How to hold all this in memory

Three groupings do most of the work. First, the sports awards by age and role: Vikram for the senior player, Eklavya for the player below nineteen and Vishwamitra for the coach. Second, the honours by field: Kalidas for the classical arts, Tansen for classical music, Lata Mangeshkar for light music, Kishore Kumar for cinema, Kabir for poetry, Tulsi for folk and tribal art, Iqbal for Urdu and Maithili Sharan Gupt for Hindi. Third, the players by town and game: Shankar Laxman of Mhow and Captain Roop Singh of Gwalior in hockey, Syed Mushtaq Ali of Indore in cricket. With Mallakhamb as the state sport and the first one day double century at Gwalior, the chapter is covered.