by James Astill
There were a few reasons for this poor performance. Indian pitches were slower and easier to bat on than foreign ones, which made Indian batsmen ill-prepared for the green seamers they often encountered abroad. India’s paucity of fast bowling made this adjustment even harder. It left Indian players woefully unprepared for the barrage of English, Australian and West Indian fast bowling they invariably faced. The result could be humiliating. In a series against England in 1952, Polly Umrigar, a beefy Parsi who was one of India’s best players of the 1950s, was visibly terrified by fiery Fred Trueman. Weak leadership and capricious selection also helped sap the Indian players’ confidence. Yet the main reason for the national team’s underwhelming results was simply that it did not represent the nation.
Though cricket’s fan-base was spreading rapidly, the India side’s talent pool was stagnant, or even shrinking.
This was another effect of corporate patronage. Where India’s princely patrons hadn’t cared a hoot who they hired so long as they could score runs and took wickets, Indian companies wanted college graduates. Thus Bishan Bedi, whose father was a small-time businessman in Amritsar, recalled being hired by the State Bank of India in 1968. ‘They needed an India player who was a graduate, which I was. So I got a job. If I’d had to pass a test, I would not have made it. I was very lucky. Had I not played the game I’d have been a big zero at home in Amritsar, with nothing to do. But because of my involvement with the game I had a good public sector job.’
According to an analysis by Richard Cashman, of the 143 Indians who played Test cricket up to 1979, half had a college degree, compared to 1 or 2 per cent of Indians as a whole. There were always colourful exceptions to this elite bias; poor men who rose to play for India. Yet they had often received exceptional help. One was Chandu Borde, the Maharashtrian all-rounder chastised over his choice of headgear by Tiger Pataudi. He was one of ten children born to a poor couple in Poona and Tiger’s jibe was at least the second time he had been patronised by a prince – at 13 Borde had received a cricket scholarship from the Maharaja of Baroda.
For the vast majority of young Indians, cricket was simply not a viable career option. Niranjan Shah, the longstanding boss of Saurashtra’s cricket association, told me that in the 1970s and 80s he had found it hard to persuade the local fathers even to let their sons play. ‘It was not like now,’ he recalled. ‘There was not much incentive for a poor man to play cricket.’ To some extent, this shortage of opportunity reflected what was happening in India’s economy. Nehru aimed to industrialise India very rapidly, chiefly through massive state-led investment in factories and dams. To provide the engineers and managers required to operate these ‘temples of concrete’, as Nehru called them, the government invested heavily in India’s small, Anglophone middle class. Amazingly, in a country where 82 per cent of people were illiterate, it spent as much on a handful of universities as on primary education. Such policies helped perpetuate the advantages of the metropolitan elite but left hundreds of millions trapped in poverty. India was a democracy in which power and wealth was controlled by a tiny elite. Similarly, Indian cricket, though immensely popular, was an elite game.
It was therefore appropriate that the saviour of Indian cricket was a prince. Tiger Pataudi’s greatest contribution to Indian cricket, however, was a down-to-earth observation: that India should stop worrying about what it could not do and play to its strengths. Above all, this meant dispensing with a fiction that it had world-class fast bowlers, cricket’s main attacking weapon. Under Pataudi, India started picking three specialist spin bowlers, no matter where they were playing or on what sort of pitch. This was a bold, or eccentric, innovation. It also ensured that, with rarely more than one specialist seamer in the side, India’s fast bowling was even quirkier. India’s new-ball attack became little more than an exercise in getting the ball roughed up sufficiently for the spinners to grip. This was a service often provided by the batsmen, on occasion by Tiger’s own monocular medium-pace. One commentator referred to the tactic as India’s ‘non-violent bowling policy’. Like the Mahatma, Tiger had turned a traditional form of defence to attack.
It sometimes worked, because India’s spinners were at this time superb. Between June 1959 and January 1968 India lost 17 consecutive overseas Test matches, the most wretched away sequence in cricket history. Yet having arrested that run in Australia, they proceeded to New Zealand where, the next month, on a dry pitch in Dunedin, they won their first overseas victory. Led by Erapalli Prasanna, a cerebral Bangalorean off-spinner, the Indian spinners took every New Zealand wicket in the second innings except for two run-outs. India also won the last two Tests, to take the series 3-1. Their spinners, including Bedi, an ungainly Sikh with a bowling action that flowed like running water, took 54 of the 74 New Zealand wickets that fell in the series. New Zealand’s own spinners took only 17.
Throughout the next decade India’s spinners were among the world’s most recognised cricketers. They were dominated by a foursome, immortalised as ‘the Quartet’, of Prasanna, Bedi and two south Indians, Srinivas Venkataraghavan and B.S. Chandrasekhar, a leg-break and googly bowler. Operating as a trio – and on one occasion all together – they brought a style to Indian cricket which aficionados of the game relished. From 1967 to 1978 India played 68 Tests, including 55 with at least three spinners. They won 14, lost 25 and drew 16. If that was, again, a fairly modest improvement on the previous decade – in which India had won seven and lost 19 out of 56 – the Quartet made Indian cricket gloriously distinctive.
They were different characters: Bedi ebullient, Prasanna gracious, Venkat brooding, Chandra modest and shy. Yet they were a team within a team, discussing the theory and practice of spin between themselves. ‘We were very proud of each other. All four of us,’ Bedi said. ‘If somebody got seven wickets, say Chandra got seven wickets, no one was unhappy for him, we were all thrilled.’
Chandra was the most attacking of the four. He was also another emblem of Indian pluck in adversity – his bowling arm having been cruelly withered by a childhood attack of polio. Yet this disability, unlike Pataudi’s, appeared not to hinder his genius. Some said it accentuated it – that his skinny bowling arm cut through the air like a raw-hide whip. There was certainly something uncanny about the steepling bounce Chandra could extract. He himself could never say what the secret was. ‘I wasn’t good at cricket,’ he once admitted, ‘but one year it clicked.’ On his day, Chandra was unplayable.
Pataudi had made the Indian side more confident and competitive. But he would miss out on the full glory of India’s spin-bowling revolution. In poor form, he was replaced as captain for a 1970–71 tour of the West Indies by Ajit Wadekar, a fine Bombay batsman. Tiger then went off to fight a different contest. With a general election looming, Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter and successor, had announced a plan to abolish the former princes’ state stipend, the Privy Purse, even though it had been promised in perpetuity. Incensed, Tiger announced that he would quit cricket and seek election as an independent, representing his ancestral seat of Pataudi and its environs. His film-star wife, Sharmila Tagore, joined him on the campaign trail.
Yet Congress was at the height of its power and Pataudi’s stand won little sympathy. Tiger won less than 5 per cent of the vote. And Mrs Gandhi, promising to abolish poverty, swept the poll. Meanwhile, Wadekar was leading India on a great run of victories.
It began with a 1-0 series win in the West Indies, chiefly due to the batting of two other Bombay batsmen, Dilip Sardesai and the pint-sized debutant Sunil Gavaskar, who scored seven centuries between them. Unlike so many of their predecessors, neither appeared remotely scared by fast-bowling. India had found some steel.
Shortly after, India travelled to England, where in the summer of 1971 they won their greatest victory yet. On the fourth day of a Test match at the Oval, Chandra ripped through England’s batting, taking six for 38 to leave India needing 173 for victory. The next day was a propitious one, Ganesh Chaturthi, the birthday of Hinduism�
��s elephant-headed god of fortune. To celebrate, some local Indians hired an elephant from a visiting Russian circus and paraded it around the ground before the start of play. India proceeded to win their first Test victory in England and, due to some rotten weather that had washed out two previous Tests, a 1-0 series victory.
Only four years before, Pataudi’s inaugural overseas win in New Zealand had been celebrated fairly nonchalantly in India. Wadekar’s victory in the West Indies had also caused little stir. But this win against the old colonial power was a different matter. The team was due to fly back to Bombay, but at the last minute the plane was diverted to Delhi so that Mrs Gandhi could personally congratulate India’s heroes. They proceeded to Bombay, and a scene of mass jubilation. More than 100,000 people were estimated to have turned out to cheer the players and shower rose petals on their motorcade as it crawled 35 kilometres from the airport to the Brabourne Stadium. There, in front of a full house, they were welcomed by Dev Anand, the biggest Bollywood star of the time.
The biggest cheers were inevitably for Wadekar, Bombay’s victorious captain. ‘They could have been heard across the Arabian Sea,’ he recalled. Wadekar had no doubt of the significance of his success: ‘The victories in 1971 marked the start of a new era. They enabled us to shed the inferiority complex for good. We started believing that we could beat anybody anywhere. I will always remain grateful to my colleagues and, more so, the giants of yesteryear, who sowed the seeds and provided the platform. My generation reaped the harvest.’
India was still no world-beating cricket power. Wadekar’s triumph amounted to only two Test wins, in Trinidad and at the Oval. Yet Indian cricket had clearly improved. In 1972–73 England came to India looking for revenge; this time the Indians won 2-1. Their spinners took 71 of the 77 English wickets to fall. Again Indian cricket fans celebrated wildly. Yet when the Indian side returned to England in 1974, it was whitewashed 3-0. In the last game, at Edgbaston, England won by an innings and 78 runs, losing only two wickets in the match. In the circumstances, Wisden’s verdict was kind: ‘India relied mainly on three spinners, Bedi, Prasanna and Venkataraghavan and with no genuine fast bowler available the attack once more proved docile.’ This was the flip side of the all-spin policy – when it went wrong, it could be humiliating.
In India meanwhile, the flip side of India’s raised expectations was horribly apparent. Wadekar’s house was bombarded with shoes by an irate mob. In Indore a triumphal concrete bat, raised to commemorate the historic victory at the Oval, was smeared with mud and tar. This was enough for Wadekar. As his team fell to feuding, he announced his retirement, which allowed Pataudi to return for a brief swansong.
Later that year, Tiger led India in a home series against the West Indies, which the Indians lost 2-1. That was respectable in the circumstances. India’s opponents were taking off on a rather longer winning run than they had managed. For the next two decades, West Indian pace would dominate cricket, not Indian spin. Yet India’s brief burst of success was an important marker, nonetheless. In the Quartet, India had a bowling attack admired around the world, and in Gavaskar one of the world’s best batsman. And Indian cricket’s popularity had soared on the back of their successes. In 1977, 80,000 spectators would turn up to the last day of a Test match against England at Eden Gardens in the sure knowledge that India would lose. In the event, they were beaten after little more than an hour’s play.
At least the spectators had known what to expect – because Indian crowds were becoming a lot rowdier. Between 1967 and 1975 Indian stadiums saw four serious riots during Test matches, two each in Calcutta and Bombay. They were attributed mainly to overcrowding. Yet the violence was also a sign of the nationalist sentiments that India’s winning streak had encouraged. Cricket, as the opportunistic Mrs Gandhi had appreciated, was now firmly associated with Indian national pride. And many Indians, especially those newly attracted to the game, were no longer prepared to settle for individual heroics and an occasional victory. They had started expecting India to win all the time, and when they lost, as Wadekar found out, their anger was terrible.
The populist strain in India’s cricket culture was becoming more prominent. Hence, too, cricket’s increasing association with Bollywood-style celebrity. It was not only Pataudi, a debonair man with a beautiful wife, that Indian cricket fans considered glamorous. They thought all cricketers were, especially foreign ones. English and Australian players, even those little known in their own countries, were routinely mobbed in India. ‘The Indian public treat a visiting cricket team as English youngsters would treat pop stars – with unquestioning idolisation,’ wrote an appreciative England captain, Tony Greig, in 1975. Even a team from the British daily newspaper the Guardian, a light-hearted bunch of weekend players, found themselves playing on Test grounds and being presented to the vice-president when they had toured the previous year.
The foundations of India’s shrill modern cricket culture were in place. But India was still modest and understated in the 1970s. The failure of the Congress governments’ leftist economic policies had left it mired in poverty. Mrs Gandhi’s solution, tragically, was to lurch even further to the left. In 1969 she nationalised 14 banks, and state takeovers of coal mines, oil and insurance firms followed. The economic cost was appalling. India’s economy grew during the 1970s at 3 per cent a year, a pace since disparaged as the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. Poor Indians, denied the opportunities that come with growth, were the main victims of this failure. But middle-class Indians were also, in global terms, hard up. The meagre earnings of Indian cricketers were an indication of this.
In 1971 they received 750 rupees – or around $100 – per Test match. That represented a three-fold increase over the previous decade. But, given that India only played two Tests in 1972, it was hardly a decent wage. India’s best cricketers remained dependent on their day jobs, which in turn made them unavailable to play in the great training-ground of West Indian and Pakistani cricketers, English county cricket. This was another reason why their results were slow to improve.
Bedi was one of the few Indians who did make it to county cricket. Having received a special dispensation from his employer, the State Bank of India, he spent six seasons with Northamptonshire, from 1972 to 1977. He was one of the best bowlers in the world at the time. Yet even in England he made little money from playing cricket. ‘I’m not at all ashamed to say the first refrigerator I saw in our house was after I became a Test cricketer,’ Bedi said. ‘I became a Test cricketer on a bicycle. I didn’t have any transport, any scooter, any car, nothing. The first car I ever bought was in 1972 after my first season with Northants. It was a VW Beetle. I still have it.’
But a fridge, to be sure, was a considerable status symbol in India at this time. Tiger Pataudi was rumoured to have wooed his film star wife with a gift of one.
The successes of the early 1970s left its mark on Indian cricket, including in the literature it inspired. By the standards of English or Australian cricket writing, the Indian cricket library offers slim pickings. It has no Neville Cardus or Jack Fingleton; nor has the Indian readership much appetite for one. India’s leading sports bookshop, Marine Sports, is housed in a cubbyhole – about the size of an American walk-in closet – in a bustling district of central Mumbai. Its Goan owner, Theo Braganza, reckons to sell 100 books in a good week. But his inventory, including dusty piles of obscure tomes, entitled Vijay Merchant: In Memoriam, An Umpire Remembers or My Innings in Mumbai suggests even this modest target may be ambitious.
In the work of Mihir Bose, Ramachandra Guha, Boria Majumdar, Rahul Bhattacharya and others, however, Indian cricket writing has seen a modest flowering in recent years. And in much of their writing is a sense of Indian cricket coming of age in the era of Tiger and the Quartet. This is also implicit in an unusually recondite Indian cricket book, The Tao of Cricket, by the respected Bengali sociologist Ashis Nandy.
It opens magnificently: ‘Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English.’
Nandy then argues that cricket’s success on the subcontinent was testament to the game’s intrinsic compatibility with ancient Hindu culture. With reference to the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, he argues that Indians prefer slow-burning dramas and endless digression, that they have an equivocal view of destiny, in which victory and defeat are always partial. These qualities, Nandy argues, are provided by cricket. Thus, Indians did not merely acquire the game of their colonial occupier – in some deep cultural sense, they owned it all along. On a chilly Christmas Eve in Delhi, I arranged to meet Professor Nandy to hear more of his theories.
We met on a veranda of the India International Centre in central Delhi, a redoubt of whisky-sipping retired bureaucrats and academics, of Gandhians, Fabians and unreformed Marxists. ‘Please understand,’ said the bearded professor, drawing a soft brown shawl around his shoulders, ‘that there’s a rhythm, if not an algorithm, to cricket that many South Asians identify with. No one’s fully defeated; no one’s fully victorious. Just when you think you’re fully defeated, someone scores a double-century.’
‘But professor ...’
‘In cricket,’ he continued, ‘the opposite is the total opposite. Your heart may bleed, but you have to clap your opponent’s century. This is, of course, why Imran Khan is so popular in India. He’s a demon, but an attractive one, who plays the game well, even better then the gods ...’
‘Yes, but ...’
The professor was uninterruptable. ‘Management of ambiguity, chaos and ambivalence, this is the definition of all South Asian society. Please imagine, we have 330 million gods and not one priest. This means that anyone may declare himself a god and you have to gulp it down, you have to digest it! It makes life unpredictable. Cricket is also unpredictable, in cricket you are playing against your own destiny ...’
