Driven by intent, and fueled by resilience, Mihir Sen swam, steadily, smoothly, faster than he ever had. It was 27 September 1958. In front of him stretched 53 kilometres of deep, snake-infested waters. Colder than he had ever experienced. Utterly alone, he moved towards his destination, stroke by relentless stroke.
What kept him going was his resolve, and the certainty in his mind, that he would be the first Indian to swim the English Channel.
As he scythed through the sea, hour after exhausting hour, Sen reflected on the unlikely journey that had brought him to this point. A quest, even an obsession, that started five years ago.
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A letter to Nehru
In 1953, Mihir Sen was an emaciated, struggling law student eking out a living as a clerk at the Indian Embassy in London. The five pounds a week he earned was barely enough to sustain him.
Then there was a moment of serendipity.
On what was surely a whim, he wrote to Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru expressing his desire to swim the Channel. Sen asked for financial help explaining that he wanted to do the nation proud. He didn’t expect the letter to ever reach Nehru. But it did. And Nehru responded.
The response from the prime minister was encouraging. It promised a small government stipend that allowed Sen to start training. But it was not enough to afford a trainer or a coach. So he read books, watched others swim and taught himself the American crawl with which the Channel is usually tackled.
On 15 August 1955, Mihir Sen made his first attempt to swim from France to England. The direction was relatively easier to traverse and favoured by most swimmers. The chosen date was symbolic—India’s 8th Independence Day and Sen wanted to make it special for his country. It was going to be his own little contribution to the nation’s tryst with destiny.
That day, he could almost taste success. He had only two and a half miles to go after nearly 12 hours of continuous swimming. The white cliffs of Dover loomed on the horizon. Suddenly a storm broke out. The Channel turned into what Sen later calls a “raging hell”. Swimming became impossible. He couldn’t make it to the coast and was picked up by a boat.
Over the next three years, he made four more attempts. They all failed. A frustrated Sen wrote the Indian government journal Yojana in 1958, “strange bad luck prevailed in each of my attempts and until last year a total of five big and small assaults had ended in failure.”
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Seven attempts later
Five unsuccessful attempts would be enough to put off most people. But not Mihir Sen. He decided that having failed so many times, and gained valuable experience from them, he would attempt what no Asian has ever done. He would swim from England to France, taking on what has always been recognised as a far bigger challenge.
On 6 and 9 September 1958, he made two attempts—and failed. Sen had now failed to cross the English Channel seven times. Undaunted, he decided he would give it one more shot that month before the summer ended. And that is how he found himself in the water once more on the night of 26 September.
Fourteen hours and 45 minutes later, shivering and exhausted, Mihir Sen staggered onto a deserted section of the French coast. His friend who had been following him in a small boat, joined him on the shore.
He had done it. Finally.
Together, they held up a soggy tricolour, and in Sen’s words, sang “rapturously a few lines of our rousing anthem, ignoring the deafening roar of the English Channel.”
In India, his extraordinary achievement took time to sink in. At first, few understood the significance of it. A Reuters report picked up by all the Indian newspapers, bizarrely focused on the fact that ‘he is said to be the first man with a beard to ever complete the swim in the England-to-France direction’.
But when the full impact of his achievement was understood, Mihir Sen was widely feted. His crossing of the Channel, became a symbol of what the newly independent nation could achieve. Sen wrote an account of his swim in Yojana:
“My victory is indeed, a victory of the youth of India. If in spite of the ignorance of basic swimming skill and hordes of frustrating handicaps besetting me at every step, I could conquer the English Channel, my generation in India has nothing to be afraid of. Because if they only DARE , they will also DO! And together we can burn a blazing trail across the horizons of History……”
Neeraj Chopra, a man Sen would have held in high regard were he with us today, was asked after his recent World Championships win about the elusive 90-metre mark.
“There is no finish line,” he said. ‘The javelin will go just as far as it is thrown.”
It could have been a statement on today’s India.
Indians are daring to go further than anyone has gone before. They are doing the unimagined. Sen’s dream for the youth of India is alive and well.
Anindya Dutta @Cric_Writer is a sports columnist and author of Wizards: The Story of Indian Spin Bowling, and Advantage India: The Story of Indian Tennis. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)