by James Astill
India’s white rajas were quick to recognise the Parsis as potential allies. The British admired their commercial flair and fairer-than-average complexions. By the late-18th century Parsi merchants were among the most prominent investors in Bombay’s shipping industry, and in its spice, cotton and opium trade. As they prospered, many adopted European education, dress and manners. They were soon considered by other Indians, often resentfully, to ‘represent themselves as being like the British’. It was only a matter of time before they started laying bat on ball.
That happened, according to Parsi chronicles, in the 1820s or 30s, on the same Bombay park where, a hundred years later, Nayudu would put the MCC bowlers to the sword. It was bigger then, and lay to the west of another British citadel, Fort George. Bombay’s European residents called it the Esplanade and rode their horses or promenaded across it, enjoying a ripple of sea breeze. Indians called it the Maidan, an Urdu word, from the Persian for ‘town square’.
It is easy to imagine the Maidan back then, looking much the same as many Indian parks today. There would have been a few supple geriatrics performing yoga contortions; the odd courting couple, seeking a furtive escape from parental eyes; and gaggles of sexually under-exercised youths blocking the pathways, greedy for a view of an uncovered female face. But, unlike today, there would have been no Indians playing cricket. Instead, they would have played traditional Indian games, like kabbadi, a cross between military training and game of tag, or gilli-danda, which involves flicking a small stick into the air and whacking it with a bigger one. But then the Parsis crossed over.
Shapoorjee Sorabjee, one of four Parsi cricket chroniclers writing at the end of the 19th century, has provided a fanciful description of the event. He imagined that: ‘Parsee boys began with a mock and farcical imitation of European soldiers and officers playing at Fort George, Bombay, their chimney-pot hats serving as wickets, and their umbrellas as bats in hitting elliptical balls stuffed with old rags and sewn by veritably unskilful cobblers. Some enthusiastic boys at first only gleefully watched from a distance the game played at Fort George, and then hunted and returned the balls from the field to the players. For such gratis services rendered heartily and joyfully the officers sometimes called them to handle the bat, which was done with extreme pleasure and delight. Thus were learnt the initiatory practical lessons in cricket by the Parsees ... the more they watched the game the intenser grew their desire to play it.’
Maybe. Another report suggests a British schoolmaster in Bombay, by the name of Boswell, started teaching the game to his Parsi pupils in the late 1830s. At any rate, there is little doubt that soon after Parsi youths started playing cricket the elders of their community were encouraging them to practise it. The first Parsi club, the Oriental Cricket Club, was launched in Bombay in 1848. Two years later it was superseded by the Young Zoroastrian Club, founded with financial support from two wealthy Parsi families, the Tatas and Wadias. All three are still thriving. The club still plays cricket on the Maidan. The Tatas still patronise venerable British institutions: in recent years the family business, the Tata Group, has bought the remnants of British Steel and Jaguar Land Rover. It also still supports Indian cricket – as do the Wadias, who in 2008 added a stake in the Kings XI Punjab IPL side to their property, textiles and airline empire.
Thus provided for, Parsi cricket flourished. At least 30 Parsi cricket clubs were formed in the 1850s and 60s, mainly in Bombay. The British played little or no part in this development. According to Sorabjee – an early Indian cricket nationalist – they were often disdainful of Parsi cricket. He describes an occasion in 1868 when Parsi boys were banned from playing cricket on the Maidan after a ‘random ball struck, not in the least injuriously, the wife of a European police constable whilst enjoying a stroll around the cricket field’. But the Parsis were not without British champions. The main source for Sorabjee’s account of this incident was a letter that ran in the establishment Bombay Gazette, protesting against the ban. It was written by a British judge, Sir Joseph Arnould, who wrote: ‘Tastes differ, but for my part it does my heart good to see and hear these vigorous lads so earnest about their manly game.’
The Parsis must have been glad of his support. A successful minority, they were needful of their rulers’ goodwill. But they were no one’s lackeys. The leading Parsi families were among the richest and most sophisticated in the British Empire. They dominated Bombay’s municipal politics, founded several newspapers and were prominent in the city’s flourishing theatrical and literary circles. If, as some have claimed, the Parsis adopted British culture as a means to ingratiate themselves with India’s rulers, their use of it expressed their own genius.
In 1886 a team of Parsi cricketers went on the first self-funded tour of England by non-Europeans (a team of poor Australian Aborigines had toured in 1868). To improve their chances of success, the community had shipped over to India a Surrey professional, Robert Henderson, to help them prepare for the tour. It was nonetheless a sporting disappointment. The Parsi cricketers won only one of their 28 games, and lost 19. ‘In arranging the fixtures, the powers of the players have been much overrated,’ said Wisden. Yet their reception in England was gratifying. The Parsis were honoured with a game at Lord’s against the MCC, including the great W.G. Grace, but were bowled out for 23 and 66, mainly by W.G. Their final game was at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park and attended by members of the royal family.
Two years later, in 1888, the Parsi cricketers returned to England and this time performed better. They won eight of their 31 games, and had frequently the best bowler on either side in Dr M.E. Pavri. A fast, round-arm bowler, inevitably known as the ‘W.G. Grace of the Parsis’, Pavri took 170 wickets on tour at an average of 11.66. After bowling one of his victims at Eastbourne, one of the dislodged bails was said to have flown nearly 50 yards.
In England the Parsis were treated almost as equals. But back in Bombay, playing cricket was not quite the same passport to white society. Having largely ignored the Parsi cricketers, Bombay’s British rulers proceeded to incense them, in 1877, by enclosing a quarter of the Maidan for the sole use of the newly formed Bombay Gymkhana. Making matters worse, the Gymkhana’s polo players raced their ponies on the rest of the Maidan, which cut up the Parsi cricket pitches horribly. Enraged by the injustice of this, Sorabjee launched a campaign to have the European polo players evicted from the Maidan, or else for an alternative area to be made available for Parsi cricket.
In a series of elegantly worded petitions, he berated Bombay’s rulers for their inconsideration and double standards. The effect was like being gently massaged with acid. On 27 October 1881, for example, Sorabjee sent the following missive to Bombay’s then governor, Sir James Ferguson, on behalf of 460 Parsi cricketers. It expressed their view that it was:
... a little unfair that the comforts and conveniences of the half-a-dozen gentlemen, who generally play polo, should be preferred to the necessary healthful recreation of over five hundred native youths ... Your petitioners need scarcely remind your Excellency in Council how much good cricket depends upon the state of the turf, and if any proof of the fact were wanted it would be furnished by the circumstance that the Gymkhana carefully preserves its own cricket field from being trampled on by the ponies and even by passers-by.
The Parsi struggle for a more level playing field, meticulously recorded by the historian Ramachandra Guha, can be viewed in a broader context. It coincided, in 1885, with the formation in London of the All-India Congress party by some Hindu, Parsi and British members of the occultist Theosophical Society. Their purpose was no more inflammatory than was that of Sorabji and his fellow petitioners. Imbued with British education, manners and prejudices, they were intent on winning more freedom for Indians within the parameters of British rule. In politics as in cricket, India’s increasingly forthright elite were demanding not revolution, but merely fair play.
The Parsi cricketers succeeded first. In 1887 the Parsis were granted a parcel of lan
d for a gymkhana of their own, on newly reclaimed land a mile or so west of the Maidan. This triumph was swiftly followed by the first victories by Indian cricketers over white opposition in India. In 1889 the Parsis beat the Gymkhana’s cricket team. Then, in 1889, they claimed a bigger scalp, an English touring side led by the Middlesex amateur G.F. Vernon. Records of this two-day game show how popular Parsi cricket had become by this time. According to the Parsi captain, J.M. Framji Patel, it drew a crowd of over 12,000 to the Gymkhana Ground, and ‘the dark-eyed daughters of the land for the first time mustered strongly’.
After the first day’s play, the honours were even. The English side were bowled out for 97. In their reply, the Parsis scored 80 for nine then declared. In the second innings, the English were skittled for 61, with Pavri, the Parsi slinger, taking seven for 34. The Parsis proceeded to win by four wickets, whereupon the crowd went wild, celebrating their heroes. According to Framji: ‘The imaginative and emotional Parsi youth felt for a day or two that he was the victor of the victors of Waterloo.’
One or two of those vanquished victors, the British in other words, did not like it one bit. ‘The crowd that “demonstrated” at the close of that game was more attractive to the artist than to the administrator,’ wrote one horrified British witness to the Parsi triumph, Captain Philip Trevor. ‘Few of us who saw it will forget that surging, lowing, multicoloured throng. Its reproduction defied the pen and the brush. But the faces of those who composed it wore an ugly expression. Of that vast multitude not a thousand knew the name of the thing at which they were looking, not a hundred had even an elementary knowledge of the game of cricket. But they were dimly conscious that in some particular or another the black man had triumphed over the white man, and they ran hither and thither, gibbering and chattering and muttering vague words of evil omen.’
There were many British who felt uneasy about risking the myth of European inconquerability on the playing field. Set against that, however, was a counterview that the Parsis’ enthusiasm for cricket affirmed the superiority of British culture – from which Indians would surely benefit. Hence, from this time on, the increasing British support for the Indian game. Yet, though Indian cricketers would long remain keenly motivated to beat white opponents, the cricket culture that was emerging in Bombay owed less and less to the British example. As more Indians took to cricket, their fiercest rivalries were increasingly between themselves.
The first Hindu cricket clubs were formed in Bombay the 1870s. Many were backed by the Parsis’ main rivals on the Bombay stock exchange, the Gujarati merchant communities that had founded it. Bombay’s first Muslim cricket clubs were founded in the 1880s. Both communities soon demanded land for a gymkhana of their own. Two matching parcels of land were duly allotted to them, on the same strip of reclaimed land as the Parsi Gymkhana occupied, by Lord Harris in 1892. All three sports clubs – the Parsi, PJ Hindu and Islam Gymkhanas – are there to this day, facing what is now one of Mumbai’s most fashionable boulevards, Marine Drive. But Harris refused to make any more such handouts – thereby disappointing the Bombay Jewish Cricket Club and Mangalorian Catholic Cricket Club, which were also formed around this time.
Cricket was by now spreading to other Indian cities too. High-caste Hindus in Madras (later Chennai) picked up the game from the local British in the late 1880s. This would spawn an annual grudge-game, known as the Presidency Match, between teams of Indian and European cricketers. Cricket in Karachi, a few days west of Bombay by dhow, was at first dominated by Parsis and high-caste Hindus, the latter forming the Young Hindu Cricket Club in 1899. In these and India’s other great cities, cricket’s growth was unplanned, organic and almost exclusively on sectarian lines.
What explains this chauvinism? Some Indian authorities consider it the result of British divide-and-rule tactics at their worst. Thus, the Parsis learned their cricketing apartheid from the British, the Hindus copied the Parsis, the Muslims followed suit; and the British then institutionalised the arrangement by providing all three communities with land. That is incontestable. Yet the communal organisation of Indian cricket also reflected how most Indians lived. Even in cosmopolitan Bombay, people mostly socialised and almost always married within their religious or caste-based communities. It was only natural that cricket should be similarly arranged, with Hindu cricket additionally subdivided on the basis of caste – thus the formation of the Kshatriya Cricket Club and Gowd Saraswat Cricket Club, two Bombay clubs named after the high Hindu caste of their members.
That cosmopolitan Bombay was no less sectarian than anywhere else in India was also unsurprising. It was India’s commercial capital, and Indian business networks were invariably founded upon sect or caste. It was indeed no coincidence that the first Indian cricket clubs were started by members of two of India’s most successful business communities, the Parsis and their Gujarati rivals. Playing cricket within these communities, much like marrying within them, became a means of reinforcing a valuable network. Seen in this light, Bombay’s Parsi and Hindu cricket clubs operated less like atavistic dens than golf clubs the world over.
These days the communal Gymkhanas are no longer exclusive, following a decision of the Islam Gymkhana to offer membership to non-Muslims in 1949. But many lesser Indian cricket clubs still operate in the traditional way. On a visit to what remains of the Maidan, to pay homage at the Gymkhana Ground, I got chatting to a group of cricketers waiting their turn to bat on one of the public pitches adjoining it. Seated under a dirty canvas awning, they were of different ages, skinny teenagers and paunchy middle-aged men. But all were of the same Gujarati Brahmin stock. Indeed they were mostly related to each other. Their team was named after the ancestral village, near the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad, from which their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had migrated almost a century before.
Out on the worn and tussocky pitch, their opponents – also of Gujarati Brahmin extraction – were playing for the honour of a neighbouring village, whence their own forefathers had come. The game was part of a tournament contested by eight teams, each representing its members’ ancestral village. It was an astonishing show of fidelity to tradition. Yet the cricketers also showed how India is changing. Their migrant forebears had all been bookkeepers – a traditional Brahmin occupation – but the cricketers were all businessmen. ‘Some in textiles, some in packaging, all very well settled,’ one of them, Mukesh Pandya, told me, as he sat padded up and fiddling nervously with his bat handle. Busy with their work, they struggled to keep up with each other these days. Their annual cricket tournament was therefore an increasingly important way to keep their community intact.
I strolled on to the next pitch, set in front of a shabby tin-roofed hut that bore the legend ‘The S.F. Sassanian Cricket Club ESTD: 1873’. It was on this rutted ground, in 1988, that a 14-year-old schoolboy called Sachin Tendulkar and his friend Vinod Kambli, aged 16, broke a world record. Playing for their school side, Shardashram Vidyamandir, they put together an unbroken stand of 664. Today the pitch was hosting some less distinguished cricket. The batting side, sprawled along the boundary in the morning sunshine, was younger and more boisterous than the Brahmins. I asked their scorer, a young man with a muddy tattoo on his writing arm, who they were.
‘We are the Marwari cricketers,’ he said, giving the name of one of India’s most prosperous Hindu business castes.
‘And who are you playing against?’
He looked up in surprise: ‘They’re Marwaris too.’
The habits of centuries die hard. As this might suggest, the communal organisation of early Indian cricket reflected how Indian society was arranged. This made it displeasing to a small, but increasingly vocal, group of Bombay liberals, who viewed sectarianism as an obstacle to India’s development. Yet it was also the main reason why the Bombay Pentangular was so successful.
The tournament originated in 1892, in an annual fixture between the Parsis and Europeans of Bombay. In 1907 the Hindu Gymkhana was admitted, to make a Triangular contest
, and the Hindu–Parsi games soon became especially popular. The Parsi crowd, which prided itself on its knowledge of cricket and the prowess of its players, barracked the Hindus mercilessly, calling them ‘Tatyas’, or ‘bumpkins’. The Hindu spectators responded by calling the Parsis ‘Kakdas’, a nickname derived from the Hindi word for ‘crow’, which referred to the Parsis’ custom of leaving their dead to be picked to pieces as carrion.
The Muslims were accepted into the tournament in 1912; and pretty soon the Hindus against the Muslims became its most fiercely contested and popular game. By the time Gilligan’s men came to Bombay, in 1926, the Parsis, whose tiny community represented less than 1 per cent of India’s population, were slipping behind. They had won the Quadrangular in six of its 14 years and would win it once more, in 1928. But afterwards the Hindus or Muslims won every year and the Parsis began to fade from Indian cricket. The contribution of these remarkable people had been enormous. They had injected the game into the bloodstream of Bombay’s middle-class society, where it would thrive.
Yet they and the Pentangular were not the only reasons for Indian cricket’s rapid spread in the early 20th century. Outside the cities, a major new source of cricket patronage was emerging.
It was the first day of half-term and the car park outside the Rajkumar College in Rajkot, Gujarat, was in chaos. Children and luggage were being packed into family cars for the holidays. Boyish goodbyes were being shouted from open windows as the cars pulled away ... then stopped, so a door could be opened and a seat belt retrieved. It was a familiar sort of chaos. The only difference from the British school scenes of my youth was the presence of servants, who were everywhere, loading the luggage and driving the cars, creating some of the confusion and most of the order.