8th April, 2023 Mumbai: Celebrities from the worlds of sports, music, art, and culture, as well as academics, businesspeople, and the media, joined his son HP Singh ‘Rishi’ & family to celebrate Sardar Pritam Singh’s birth centenary in Delhi on April 1, 2023. There were people of many ages and faiths there, and their unifying interests were sports and soulful music.
There was no better way to honour the young-at-heart Pritam Singh, who would have celebrated his centennial on that day if he were still living. To celebrate a Sports Noble’s big day, a magical musical tribute was prepared. The performers (Chaar Yaar), who represented a variety of religions and worldviews — in fact, a queer combination — almost cast a spell over the audience, putting them in a trance. It served as an homage to the man who never denied but defied age.
From 1968 onward, University of Delhi earned the prestigious Maulana Abul Kalam trophy for overall university superiority under his direction as the first director of sports and physical education. His athletic team often replicated its 1973 victory in the top Inter-University awards.
He made a name for himself in sports starting with captaining Khalsa College, Amritsar, and Panjab University in the days before partition and scoring six goals against Delhi University. He began his tenure as director of physical education and sports at Vaish College in Bhiwani before going to Khalsa College in Dev Nagar, Delhi, in 1951. In that year, with fewer than 100 students enrolled, Khalsa College broke the athletic monopoly of St. Stephen’s College.
Pritam Singh became the University of Delhi’s first founder director of sports and physical education in 1968. Since then, he has made incomparable contributions to the development of sports.
Prof. Avinash Singh, a journalist and academician who has written about this great sports legend, recalled that Pritam Singh, who was unafraid of criticism, once walked into the office of K. R. Wadhwani, the then-Sports Editor of The Indian Express, to complain that he had been missing his fault-finding and reprimanding in his columns for many weeks. He said to Wadhwani, “Your berating through your writings constantly push me to perform with increased enthusiasm. The sports writer was so moved by Singh’s approachable demeanour that Wadhwani never wrote anything negative about Singh after the incident.
Prof. Singh, who had previously worked as a sports reporter, continued, “Just before one of the Inter-University matches at University of Delhi, a strike by class IV employees forced him to deploy a novel technique. Singh asked the residents of adjacent villages to send their livestock to the university’s pastures for grazing. At the sports stadium, cattle removed the undesirable growth, and the class IV went back to work after apologies to Suo Moto. He served as the DU grounds’ chief administrator while serving as the venue for two significant Asian Games events in 1982. To the Atlanta Olympics, he received a special invitation as well!
He was a brave leader who consistently produced winners. He had a passion for poetry and traditional music, and he disseminated joy by singing aloud and acting as a hub of activity in his community, Ajay Enclave, in the Rajouri Garden region. He tragically went away on February 8, 2020.
Many people got into a tizzy as “Chaar Yaar” performed a sombre and dignified 100-minute performance as part of the celebration. The audience at a University of Delhi College knew what was in store for them when Pandit Pritam Goshal and Deepak Caterlino on their respective instruments prodded Amjad Khan to give the first ‘dhap’ at tabla and Dr. Madan Gopal Singh started his ‘alaaps’, forming prologue to formal musical expression. A wonderful and mesmerising musical feast!
The group physically led the audience on a transcendental voyage from Bhakt Kabir to popular music for just over an hour, passing through Rumi, Sheikh Farid, Guru Nanak, and Bulle Shah with admonitions to Ma Saraswati, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, and Kwaja Moinuddin Chisti. Many people became agitated when Deepak Casterlino took the lead or joined Dr. Singh, popularly known as (aka) Montoo Bhai, in the verses of Christian maestros. The Ensemble created a spell on the audience by singing in Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Persian, English, and Brij basha. Vandana, Allah Hu, Gagan Mein Thal (which contained a brief rendition of Nanak’s Aarti in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore), a few well-known Punjabi and English poems, and “Dama Dam Mast Kalandar,” which served as the crescendo and culmination, were among the recitations.
HP Singh Rishi expressed his gratitude to everyone for paying tribute to and remembering his father by saying, “We wish he were alive today to personally receive this distinction. I wish that the extraordinary sporting accomplishments of my father would inspire many young, aspiring athletes.
It is encouraging to see how his accomplishments, wonderful life, and contributions are now being gradually recognised and honoured as he richly deserved after his passing. May his heroic life serve as an example for our young people, he added.