Techno Aryan

Techno Aryan Football Club is a Kolkata football club founded in 1884 as Aryan Sports Club. It started playing football some years later, making it one of Asia’s oldest football clubs.

Before the advent of East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting, it was Aryan and Mohun Bagan who enjoyed an elite status among Indian football clubs. While Aryan didn’t enjoy the same degree of success as Mohun Bagan, they did perform well in patches. One of Aryan’s greatest moments came in 1940. That year, they won IFA Shield, one of India’s premier tournaments. They became only the 3rd Indian run club to win the prestigious title. Moreover, they crushed Mohun Bagan 4-1 in the final. Sir Dukhiram Majumdar was father figure of the club during those days. It was he who started Aryan’s famous policy of bringing up unknown yet talented footballers.

Aryan enjoyed another spell of success in mid-1950s, reaching the final of Shield in 1955 and 1956 with an ageing Sahu Mewalal in their ranks. As the years progressed they gradually lost their status as a top club, instead Aryan became the breeding ground of some of the most famous players in Kolkata maidan. Players like Pradip Kumar Banerjee, Prasun Banerjee, Goutam Sarkar and Sudhir Karmakar started out in Aryan, before moving on to the bigger clubs. Other than another IFA Shield win in 1983 (title shared with East Bengal), Aryan didn’t achieve a lot of success in modern era.

On the morning of August 5, 1971, the Naxalite intellectual and poet Saroj Dutta was killed by the police in the grounds of the Aryan club on the Calcutta maidan.