by James Astill
I walked through the school gates into a handsome stone quadrangle, where more servants were clearing away folding chairs that had been set out for a concert the night before. I asked one of them for the headmaster and was directed to the cricket pitch. I would have been surprised had he been anywhere else.
The Rajkumar is one of four public schools known as the Chiefs’ Colleges, which were founded in north India in the late-19th century; the others are in Indore, Ajmer and Lahore. Their founding mission, in the words of Lord Curzon, was ‘to fit the young Chiefs and Nobles of India, physically, morally and intellectually, for the responsibility that lay before them’. This was a British objective of the utmost importance.
With never more than 900 British colonial officers in India – ministering to a population of 450 million at its height – the Raj functioned through dependable local allies, of whom the Parsis were a minor example and princely rulers by far the most important. They controlled 565 states, to varying degrees independent from the British, which accounted for a third of the subcontinent’s area and two-thirds of its population. The Chiefs’ Colleges were founded to turn their princeling sons into loyal British proxies. They were modelled on British public schools, with a strong emphasis on character-building and team sports. Cricket was very much on the curriculum.
At the Rajkumar’s cricket pitch, which is one of only a handful of turf wickets in arid southern Gujarat, a broad-shouldered fast bowler was running in, kicking up puffs of dust with every step. The game was the first of an intra-school tournament, and pitted the school’s secretaries against the servants. The bowler, it turned out, was one of the Rajkumar’s gardeners; he bowled pretty fast and straight.
As I stood watching, the headmaster, Vinodkumar Thakkar, approached carrying my business card in an outstretched hand. He was short, bald and extremely courteous, despite my having called at a busy time and unannounced. ‘Welcome to the Rajkumar College,’ he said as we shook hands and I told him why I had come. But, of course, he knew already.
The Rajkumar is the alma mater of the first great Indian cricketer, Kumar Shri (His Royal Highness) Ranjitsinhji – though Ranji, as he was called, played for England. After leaving the Rajkumar at the age of 16, he proceeded to Cambridge, in 1890, where he won his blue, then went on to play for Sussex and England. He played 15 Tests between 1896 and 1902, a time of great cricketing fervour in England, later romanticised as the ‘Golden Age of English cricket’. And nothing was so romantic as Ranji. His feats of run-scoring are dazzling to this day. He was the first man to score a Test century before lunch, the first to score centuries on his home and overseas Test debuts, the first to score 3,000 runs in an English season. He remains the only man to have hit two centuries, in separate innings, on the same day.
Mr Thakkar invited me on a tour he must have given many times. It started at the school’s Victorian cricket pavilion, and as we walked towards it the headmaster explained the principles on which the Rajkumar was run. ‘Our philosophy is education through cricket and that means real cricket. It means the right sort of cricket, it means ...’ he said, pausing as we stepped into the gloom, ‘... the cricket played by these fellows.’
Inside the pavilion was a shrine to the school’s cricketing old boys. The far wall was hung with honours boards, listing the names of the 42 Rajkumars who had played first-class cricket, mostly for the local first-class side, Saurashtra, and of the six Rajkumars who had played international cricket, for England, India and Kenya. Another wall was dedicated to Ranji. It was hung with a board showing his vital statistics: his Test batting average of 44.95, his highest Test score of 175, and so on. It also displayed half a dozen sepia photographs of Ranji in rigid batting poses, frozen for the Victorian camera’s slow exposure.
On the opposite wall was a similar shrine to Ranji’s brilliant nephew, Duleepsinhji, also of Sussex and England. Duleep’s record was if anything better than his uncle’s: a batting average of 58.52 from 12 Tests, with a top score of 173. Yet Ranji is better remembered, because of his novelty and the time in which he played. ‘For us ...’ said Thakkar, pausing dramatically, ‘Ranjitsinhji was the greatest player the Rajkumar College has ever produced.’
One might go further. He was for a time the world’s best batsman, one of the most famous Asians of the Western world. In late-Victorian England Ranji was a sensation. And it was not only his prodigious run-scoring that won him this reputation, but also the style of it. Slender, light-footed, with sharp eyes and supple wrists, Ranji batted with a balletic, back-footed grace never seen before in England. He didn’t step forward and thwack the ball, as Nayudu would; he stood back and dabbed and guided it, with cuts and glances just sufficient to accelerate its passage to the boundary. He is credited – also uniquely – with inventing two cricket strokes, the leg-glance and the late-cut. ‘For the first time,’ as another Indian princely cricketer once said in homage to Ranji, ‘a game of forearm became a game of wrist.’
That this genius was an Indian, and a prince to boot, made him all the more irresistible. ‘In the 1890s the game was absolutely English; it was even Victorian,’ wrote Neville Cardus, that florid cricket writer who, as a boy, had watched Ranji batting at Old Trafford. ‘It was the age of simple first principles, of the stout respectability of straight bat and good-length balls; the flavours everywhere were John Bull’s. And then suddenly this visitation of dusky, supple legerdemain happened; a man was seen playing cricket as nobody in England could possibly have played it. The honest length ball was not met by the honest straight bat, but there was a flick of the wrist, and lo! The straight ball was charmed away to the leg boundary. And nobody quite saw or understood how it all happened.’
There were whispers that Ranji had magical powers. He encouraged the rumours. He claimed to have begun playing cricket in earnest only at Cambridge, a couple of years before he walked out to bat for England. He hinted that his Indian eyes were different from English ones – they were quicker, keener. He never played down reports of his fabulous wealth. He got credit on the strength of them. But this was more legerdemain, because the only thing about Ranji that the English had really understood was the genius of his batting.
From the pavilion Thakkar led me on a stroll through the college grounds. He pointed out the stone bathhouse that Ranji had dedicated to his old school; the war memorial listing the old Rajkumaris who had died fighting in two world wars; the library, with its voluminous college history, life’s labour of a whiskery British schoolmaster; and the school hall – where I had a shock.
It was a fine room, like an Oxbridge dining hall, with panelled walls and a high vaulted ceiling. Close to the entrance, two small portraits of Rajkot’s most famous sons were hanging. There was Ranji, in a batting pose, and next to him another who had lived in the town as a boy, Gandhi. They made an interesting pair: one great Indian wearing white flannels, the other naked except for his dhoti.
Yet it was the far wall that had startled me. It was hung with a collection of massive oil paintings, darkened by dust and age, of the Victorian royal family. At the centre was the queen-empress herself, festooned in black silk. Hanging about her, inside ornate gilded frames, were portraits of her royal children and cousins, as chinless as the Rajput princes whose portraits lined the other walls. I had never before in India seen such a display of unabashed Anglophilia.
As we turned to leave the hall, Thakkar was telling me how difficult life was getting for the Rajkumar. Boarding schools were becoming unfashionable in India, and male teachers hard to recruit. ‘For now the College is managing, but I worry a great deal about the future,’ he said gravely. ‘I need men to keep these hundreds of youths in line but, since all these computer companies and outsourcing businesses started, all the English-speaking people can earn huge salaries there and rise very fast. They don’t want to be teachers,’ He paused, then said, ‘In India, you know there’s not that great a respect for teachers. For a man to say he’s a teacher, well, he feels rather shy.’
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p; ‘But we are trying our best,’ he said. ‘At least we are trying to preserve that great cricket of the past. I mean real cricket, played with decorum, with good manners, the right sort of cricket.’
Ranji was not really a prince at all, in fact. His family were poor relations of the rulers, or Jam Sahibs, of the small princely state of Nawanagar, located on what is now Gujarat’s southern coastline. Yet when Ranji was aged six, one of these despots, a Jam Sahib called Vibhaji, in need of an heir, his own son having attempted to poison him. He was persuaded to adopt little Ranji. And the boy was duly sent to Rajkumar College to begin his training. This was well known to Ranji’s adoring English public; yet Ranji, at the height of his fame in England, omitted to mention that, while still at the school, he had been rudely cut off by his adoptive father. A Muslim consort of Vibhaji’s had given him a son, so Ranji was longer required. He was able to complete his schooling and proceed to Cambridge only because he had become a favourite of Chester McNaghten, the Rajkumar’s cricket-loving headmaster. McNaghten extracted a small compensatory allowance for Ranji from the Jam Sahib and accompanied his favourite pupil to England.
Ranji was already by then a promising cricketer. Yet at Cambridge he set himself to becoming a great one. He practised almost every day to a state of near-exhaustion. Though his batting was beautiful, Ranji’s success was not magical or casual, but the result of hard work and steely focus. Having been robbed, as he believed, of his kingdom, he had identified in cricket an alternative route to riches.
Runs for Cambridge and more for Sussex led to Ranji’s Test debut, against Australia at Old Trafford. This was despite opposition to his selection from Lord Harris. True to form, his lordship argued that only an Englishman should play for England. Yet the Test side was at that time picked by the bosses of whichever cricket ground was hosting the game – and those in Manchester, defying Lord Harris, picked Ranji. His century on debut confirmed him as a great celebrity. But he was meanwhile, unbeknown to his adoring public, mired in debt, pursued by aggressive creditors and on the brink of serious embarrassment. He therefore returned to India in 1898, while on his way home from touring Australia, to try to cash in on his new fame.
Vibhaji had recently died and Ranji claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne of Nawanagar. There was no legal basis for this claim and the British official adjudicating the matter rejected it in favour of the old Jam Sahib’s natural son and anointed heir, Jaswantsinhji. Nonetheless, Ranji received the respectful hearing that was due to a great England cricketer. His claim was subsequently reviewed by the viceroy and debated in the House of Commons. In the process, it became credible.
Ranji returned to England the following year. He then enjoyed four years of tremendous cricketing success while suffering, despite patronage from a couple of sympathetic Indian princes, serious money troubles. Again, this forced him to return to India to press his case for a kingdom – and, while there, Ranji had some remarkably good luck. His rival Jaswantsinhji took ill and died. His doctor claimed the cause was typhoid; it is also rumoured that Ranji had had him poisoned.
He certainly had motive. Jaswantsinhji’s death left three claimants to the Nawanagar throne; but only one was a hero of the British Empire. Ranji’s claim, though very weak, was accordingly recognised by the British and he acceded to the throne of Nawanagar in 1907. This, his biographer Simon Wilde has calculated, gave him a kingdom of 3,800 square miles, 340,000 vassal subjects, a private army of 2,700, and he had cricket to thank for it. Had he not won such fame in the game, it is inconceivable that Ranji’s claim would have been recognised.
In a coronation speech that was not written for his ragged subjects, he seemed almost to acknowledge this. He vowed to ‘endeavour to play the game so as not to lose whatever credit I have gained in another field’. He also swore ‘to abide loyally by the traditions of this state, in its deep unswerving loyalty to the British throne’.
Ranji consequently devoted more effort to building opulent palaces in Jamnagar, his royal capital, than to cricket. He formed a Nawanagar cricket team, which under his successor was briefly the best in India. But he played little part in developing the Indian game outside his state. He refused to captain the All-India team that toured England in 1911 or contribute to its expenses. He also forbade his nephew Duleep from going on the 1932 Test tour. ‘Duleep and I are English cricketers,’ he was reported to have said.
This attitude has offended some Indian historians. Ramachandra Guha takes Ranji at his word and does not consider him an Indian cricketer. But this seems wrong. Ranji was born and raised in India, learned cricket in India and his achievements were all the more remarkable because he was an Indian. He also played like an Indian, defining a style of wristy stroke-play that is now one of India’s richest cricketing traditions. Yet perhaps above all Ranji demands inclusion in India’s cricketing pantheon because of the power he gained through cricket. Many early Indian cricketers sought political advantage by mastering the revered national game of their rulers. But Ranji’s success in this regard was unrivalled. It also proved inspirational.
Around the turn of the century, several Indian princes became interested in cricket. One of the first was an early patron of Ranji’s, Rajendra Singh, the Maharaja of Patiala. Briefly bored with pig-sticking, at which he was superb, the Maharaja formed a cricket team in the 1890s and, like the Parsis, paid for a string of English professionals to come out to coach it. Over the next two decades, following his lead and Ranji’s, the princely rulers of Bhopal, Baroda, Holkar, Kashmir, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Dungarpur, Cooch Behar, Rajputana, Nawanagar, Natore and many other states all piled into cricket.
They had various motivations. Patiala, his son and successor Bhupinder Singh, and his son and successor Yadavindra Singh, were talented sportsmen, who also patronised hockey, wrestling, football and other games. Bhupinder and Yadavindra were good enough batsmen to play for India, as they did, on merit. Other princely cricketers, such as Porbandar, were woeful. Of a hapless cricketing maharaja of Kashmir, a British observer left this account: ‘He was padded by two attendants and gloved by two more, somebody carried his bat and he walked to the wicket looking very dignified, very small and with an enormous turban on his head. In one of the matches I happened to be bowling and my first ball hit his stumps, but the wicketkeeper, quick as lightning, shouted “No Ball” and the match went on. The only way the Maharaja could be given out was lbw. And after fifteen or twenty minutes batting he said he felt tired and he was duly given out lbw. What the scorers did about his innings, which was never less than half a century, goodness only knows.’
Such vanity was easily mocked. Yet the princes, albeit extravagantly, were only following the British example. A system of upper-class privilege remained embedded in the English game until long after India won independence and princely power was no more. It was built on the distinction between ‘gentlemen’ amateurs and mostly working-class ‘players’ that endured until 1962: most English grounds had separate dressing-rooms, dining-rooms and entrances for these two classes of cricketer until then. Lord Harris was a beneficiary of this system. Though a decent batsman, certainly better than Porbandar, he would not have played for England on merit.
This was further proof of the high status the British reserved for cricket. So was the prominence of upper-class cricketers in the high echelons of the Raj. A close contemporary of Harris’s, F.S. Jackson, was a former England captain and governor of Bengal. Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India at the time of Gandhi’s salt march, was, like Harris, president of the MCC. By the early 20th century, these cricket-loving sahibs were heartily encouraging the Indian game, attending matches and presenting prizes. Investing in cricket was therefore a good way for the princes to get their attention. ‘Cricket was one of the languages of the Raj,’ writes the Australian historian Richard Cashman, ‘and those who could master its subtle inflection and rhythms could expect to exert a greater influence over colonial policy-makers.’
Whatever their motivations, t
he princely cricketers provided a big boost to Indian cricket. They imported some of the finest cricketing stars of the era, including Jack Hobbs, Herbert Sutcliffe, Clarrie Grimmett and Learie Constantine, to play for their sides. They also provided jobs in their armies and household staffs for many Indian cricketers. And this largesse, unlike the communal cricket played in the cities, came with little or no regard to a player’s caste or creed. In 1898 Patiala’s side included four Englishmen (though one was perhaps an Anglo-Indian, a member of a Eurasian community begotten during the freewheeling early decades of the British in India), three Parsis, two Hindus, including Ranji, a Muslim and, in the capacious form of the Maharaja himself, a Sikh.
Poor cricketers were among the beneficiaries of princely patronage. They included four brothers, the Palwankars, who were born into a Hindu caste reviled as ‘untouchable’ by higher-born Hindus. The eldest and best Palwankar, Baloo, was a star of the 1911 All-India tour to England; his brother, Vithal, was Nayudu’s captain on that momentous day in 1926, when CK battered the MCC. During the first three decades of the 20th century, the Hindus team generally had one or another of the untouchable brothers in its line-up. Notwithstanding the genius of Ranji and Duleep, they have a claim to be considered among the first families of Indian sport.
The princes also wrote cheques for India’s fledgling national cricket set-up: much of the cost of the 1911 tour was borne by Patiala. He was also partly responsible for launching India’s first inter-regional tournament, the Ranji Trophy, in 1934. The contest was of course named after the first cricketing prince, who had declared his innings the previous year. Patiala donated a fine gold cup to be awarded to its winner.