About this stamp
Free India’s First Football Captain
India Post issued this ₹5 stamp on 28 January 2018 for the birth centenary of Dr Talimeren Ao (1918–1998), footballer and physician, and perhaps the most famous Naga of his time. He was born on 28 January 1918 in the village of Changki, in the Ao homeland of Mokokchung in what was then the Naga Hills District of Assam; his name means “all-glorious” in the Ao language.
From Impur to London
Football reached him at Impur, where he captained his school team, and at Cotton College, Guwahati, where he was the leading all-round sportsman and joined Maharana, the city’s biggest club, which turned him from a striker into a defensive midfielder. In 1943 he moved to Calcutta to study medicine at Carmichael Medical College (now R. G. Kar Medical College) and joined Mohun Bagan, for which he played for nine seasons and which he captained.
He captained India and carried the flag for the Indian contingent at the 1948 London Olympics, where India almost upset France in their first match, missing two penalties in a 1–2 defeat. On the tour that followed, India beat Ajax Amsterdam 5–2.
Doctor
He gave up competitive football for medicine, took his MBBS in 1950 and returned home to Kohima as an assistant civil surgeon in 1953. He retired as Nagaland’s Director of Health Services in 1978 and died in 1998, aged 80. An indoor stadium at Cotton College and a ground at Kaliabor are named after him.
On the Stamp
His portrait in a jacket and tie, with the silhouettes of footballers behind. It was designed by Alka Sharma; 600,000 were printed by wet offset at the Security Printing Press, Hyderabad.
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