Mahilpur in Hoshiarpur district is the football nursery of India. A small Doaba town has produced dozens of internationals and a very large share of the Indian national side over decades.
The tradition runs through the Guru Gobind Singh Khalsa College at Mahilpur, founded in 1946, and through a chain of coaches and village clubs in the surrounding villages. Jarnail Singh Dhillon, captain of India and one of the best defenders in Asia in the 1960s, was from here.
India in the 1950s and early 1960s was a serious football country: Olympic semi-finalists in 1956 and Asian Games champions in 1951 and 1962. A disproportionate number of those players came from a twenty-kilometre radius in the Doaba.
Emigration took the pipeline. The best young players now go to Canada or Britain and play there or not at all.
A town of twenty thousand people supplied the national team for a generation. There is no museum, no archive and no written history of it.
The game came through the college and the villages around it, each with a ground, a club and a coach who had played. A boy could go from a village team to a college side to a services team without leaving the district, which is what a nursery actually is.
The employers were the services and the public sector. Punjab Police, the Border Security Force, the army units, the banks and the state electricity board all ran teams and hired players, and a football career meant a salary and a pension. When those teams were wound up the pathway went with them.
Indian football's centre of gravity moved to Kolkata and Goa and then to franchise leagues that recruit somewhere else entirely. The Doaba villages kept playing and stopped being scouted, and what was a national pipeline is now a local competition.