‘Looks like you've brought a bit of India," a gentle man said gamely. Sunlight filtered through the trees of Central Park and streamed into the elegant Fifth Avenue drawing rooms of Elizabeth Brockman.

That humid June evening, about 100 New Yorkers with a passion for the Great American Pastime of baseball 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 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. The award-winning filmmaker Mira Bank, and Vic Losick, her cameraman, began shooting their full-length documentary on Manipuri baseball.
Their questions seemed to hang in the air: Baseball in the eastern Himalayas? Twenty-six teams? How? But wait, just where is Manipur?

Ever since 2002 when my cousin Ragini Salam, a city councillor, surprised me with a request for a few bats for a baseball team, I have had to answer these questions over and over again in the USA. Since my visit to Manipur in 2000 after an absence of about 15 years, I had been searching for a project that would bring together my love of my native Manipur, my experience in America, my adopted home, and as an independent media arts curator, my professional interest in cultural interaction. I am not a great baseball fan but I had always enjoyed the game as a dramatic, almost mythic, celebration and expression of America. I approached my friend Muriel (Mike) Peters, a film producer and a diehard New York Mets fan, with whom I had spent many summer afternoons at the team's Shea Stadium.

A long-time friend of India, Mike was delighted and fascinated to hear of a place in India where they played baseball instead of cricket. But what impressed her most was that the game had taken root and 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 multi-million dollar salaries and steroid scandals. It was my conversations with Mike that sowed the seeds of First Pitch. The challenge was the construction of an interface between the US and Manipuri passion for baseball.
One was a superpower whose track record of interactions with other cultures has often been blundering and plundering. The other was the remarkable but poverty-stricken 1.5 million Manipuri Meiteis, a proud people locked in a 45-year-old conflict with New Delhi in an isolated region. With travel restrictions for foreign nationals, no tourism, sweatshops or outsourced jobs, globalisation comes to Manipur primarily through the ether, via film, television and the Internet. Manipuri civilisation prizes physical culture and has given birth to polo and acrobatic dancer drummers who cannot sit still. So how might the isolated Manipuri Meitei respond to an American overture based on an appreciation of his athletic prowess, I wondered. What would Manipuri Meiteis make of foreign aid that did not first diminish them by saying something was wrong and try to save them?

The problem was the stunning void of information about Manipur even among Americans with a first-hand or academic familiarity with India. The vast New York Public Library system carries a mere 148 entries on Manipur. So I decided the first step towards a baseball project in Manipur would be to take Mike there. Mike and I went to Manipur in the fall of 2004. 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.

Mike brought two baseball rulebooks to replace the photocopies the players had been using, a dozen balls, and training DVDs. We screened Field of Dreams, the baseball film starring Kevin Costner. We surveyed a lovely field that the Sagolband Leikai's Western Star Club had pledged to us for a ballpark.

We established First Pitch upon our return. As the chairman of the organisation, Mike pulled together an amusingly diverse and generous board of baseball enthusiasts. We garnered the support of the Louisville Slugger Museum and Spalding, the manufacturer of baseball equipment. We made Baseball Dreams, a short promotional film, put together by Dave Thoudam, a young Manipuri Meitei filmmaker. A non-profit initiative, with a local chapter forming in Imphal, First Pitch plans to work with Manipur's 18 leikai, or neighbourhood sports clubs that have between them an astonishing 26 baseball teams and four women's teams.

It will provide equipment, professional coaching, and health initiatives for athletes, and build South Asia's first baseball park in 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, in the only place in India where the game does not languish in the shadow of cricket.

(The author is Executive Director of First Pitch.firstpitch@gmail.com and lives in New York)

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Meitei :A good start Mr. Somi Roy. While your initiative will bring in a new vigour to the base ball enthusiasts and players a n ...

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