The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  There were also downsides to princely patronage. The princes injected their own medieval brand of politics into the administration of the Indian game – and their feuds could be vicious. One of the most serious, which endured throughout the 1930s, was between Patiala and an eccentric Indian princeling, the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram.

  Vizzy, as he was called, ruled a microstate in the holy north Indian city of Varanasi, on a bank of the Ganges. He was short, fat, myopic and cricket-mad. He was a better batsman than Porbandar, but not by much. To improve his chance of runs, Vizzy allegedly had a habit of bribing the opposition bowlers with gold watches to persuade them to bowl gently to him. Even then he rarely scored fifty. Yet Vizzy’s lack of talent in no way tempered his burning ambition, which was to captain India.

  He realised his ambition on India’s second Test tour of England, in 1936. It had been expected that the side would be captained by another Indian prince who had played for England, the Nawab of Pataudi, or else by Nayudu or by Patiala’s hard-hitting son, Yadavindra, who was captain of the Hindus at the time. But Vizzy outwitted these rivals through a campaign of brilliant toadying and manipulation. He at first claimed to be unavailable for the tour. Meanwhile, he campaigned among India’s recently formed state cricket associations, promising to select their players for India in return for their support. He was also in good odour with the British: having named both a stand at the new Feroz Shah Kotla stadium in Delhi and a splendid silver trophy after the viceroy, Lord Willingdon. One by one, Vizzy’s rivals dropped out of the running. Nayudu, a prickly character, lacked high-level support. Yadavindra was unpopular with the Bombay public, and Patiala’s standing with the British had dived, partly due to Willingdon’s disapproval of his lascivious sex life – the Maharaja had at least ten wives and 80 children. Pataudi, seeing the intrigue and factionalism in Indian cricket, didn’t really fancy the job. Whereupon it turned out that Vizzy was available to tour after all.

  He arrived in England with 36 pieces of luggage, two personal servants, and a team that already despised him. He did not win its confidence. Unlike Porbandar, Vizzy picked himself for every important game, including the three Tests. He was, besides being a poor batsman, a clueless captain. An official post-tour inquiry led by the chief justice of Bombay, Sir John Beaumont, concluded that Vizzy, ‘did not understand the placing of the field or the changing of the bowling and never maintained any regular order in the batting.’ Yet the enquiry was occasioned by a bigger problem, a civil war that erupted in the tour-party between Vizzy and Nayudu, which led to disgraceful rows. The most heinous saw Vizzy and his loyal tour manager, Major R. Britton Jones, conspiring to send one of India’s best players, Lala Amarnath, home for insubordination.

  A rambunctious Punjabi and free-spirited cricketer, Amarnath was a fine and popular all-rounder. On his Test debut, against England in Bombay in 1933, he had scored the first Test century by an Indian. Yet to Vizzy this made him a threat, as also did his friendship with Nayudu. After Amarnath dared to challenge one or two of the prince’s idiotic field placings, Vizzy therefore turned against him. He juggled him in the batting order, showed no consideration for his injuries and, when Amarnath complained, Vizzy ignored him. Amarnath did not respond well to this treatment. After telling his team-mates what he thought of it, Britton Jones ordered him back to India.

  This incident, which was exhaustively reported in the British press, was a great embarrassment to India, but somehow it did not ruin Vizzy’s reputation. After India won independence in 1947 he reinvented himself as an Indian patriot – forswearing the knighthood bestowed on him in England during the 1936 tour. As a cricket administrator in Uttar Pradesh, he also sought to heal the divisions of the past: he invited Nayudu, at the age of 61, to captain the state. Vizzy, at last, became popular in a way – as a famously uninspired cricket commentator on All-India Radio. The joke was that Vizzy hunted tigers – of which he claimed to have bagged over 300 – by placing a transistor radio in the jungle and boring them to death with his commentary.

  But at least Vizzy was consistent in his support for cricket: he clearly loved the game. Another drawback of princely patronage was that it was liable to dry up suddenly, when a prince died or found a new toy. The death in 1911 of Sir Nripendra Narayan, the cricket-loving Maharaja of Cooch Behar, thus sparked a dramatic demise in Bengali cricket. And this phenomenon was evident on an India-wide scale after 1947. In the space of just two years, 1947 to 1949, India’s new Congress government entreated or bullied more than 500 princely rulers to sign away their states to the newly formed republic in exchange for a generous stipend, known as the Privy Purse. Many left cricket thereafter.

  The killer blow to princely cricket came in 1971, when the Privy Purse was stopped. No longer able to afford their cricket teams, most of the remaining cricketing princes withdrew from the game. Some turned their palaces into luxury hotels and lived quietly off the proceeds. Most simply hunkered down, to meditate on their past glories and present fears of falling masonry.

  ‘What a treat for you!’ the Jam Sahib exclaimed. ‘What a lovely creature!’ Through the windscreen, we watched in silence as a tiny fawn took its first trembling steps. Behind it, through a tangle of thorny acacias, I could make out a section of sweeping palace roof. ‘What a treat!’ sighed the king, a broad-shouldered septuagenarian called Shatrusalyasinhji. ‘I must tell you that the spotted deer is in my opinion the prettiest deer in the world.’

  He had also been a cricketer, though a much lesser one than his uncle Duleep and great-uncle Ranji. Sat, as he was known to his friends, was also a different character. He was dressed all in white, as a mark of his devotion to the god Shiva, and had a snowy, waist-length beard. He looked a bit like Gandalf.

  I had come to Jamnagar, where he lived alone in a small bungalow, to discuss cricket with him. But Sat was more interested in natural history. The moment we had met, he had urged me to join him on a safari to ‘a small nature reserve of mine’. This turned out to be a 45-acre walled enclosure, in the middle of Jamnagar, just across the road from the small bungalow where he lived alone. It was one of his palace gardens. The Jam Sahib, as Sat was still respectfully known in Jamnagar, had let it grow wild and stocked it with deer and antelopes that had been brought to him, ‘half torn up by jackals’, by the villagers of his former ancestral estates.

  This was the least of his passion for nature. At one time, Sat said as we drove through the thorn scrub, he had kept 8,000 pets in his palaces. ‘There were, you know, a lot of birds and reptiles and things in the bedrooms,’ he explained. ‘I think you could say it got a bit out of hand.’ The main problem was apparently the constant grieving. ‘When you keep an animal you get very close to it and when it dies it is, you know, extremely painful. So I said to myself, “Now come on, you’ve got to harden your heart,” and I think that’s helped me to deal with everything else, too.’

  We trolled on through the undergrowth, braking for a couple of peacocks, and occasionally stopping to view a spotted deer or small herd of nilgai, a muscular Asian antelope. ‘We had 135 gardeners working here when I was a boy ...’ the Jam Sahib said. And suddenly I gasped in wonder, as the palace came into view. It was vast and ornate, decorated with fairytale turrets, domes and battlements. ‘Ah,’ he said, observing my surprise. ‘It is quite handsome. But completely unaffordable these days, I’m afraid. It’s crumbling to pieces. All my palaces are. It’s the typhoons mainly that are the nuisance.’

  I asked the Jam Sahib how many palaces he had these days. ‘Just three at the moment,’ he said distractedly, and then sighted a rare albino spotted deer: ‘Now look at that chap! There’s a story to him, I can tell you!’

  We left the nature reserve and proceeded to what Sat described as his Guest Palace. He said he had high hopes we might find, ‘fingers crossed, a cup of tea and perhaps even a cheese sandwich’ waiting for us there. I had envisaged this building as a sort of coach-house. But it turned out to be even more massive than the first. It was the
size of an English stately home and topped with a lofty watchtower and more domes and turrets. Both palaces had been built by Ranji. This one was formerly occupied by Sat’s sister. ‘But, of course, I had to move her out after the earthquake ...’ he said sorrowfully, as we walked up to its massive double doors.

  They opened ahead of us, and as we entered the palace I glimpsed an attractive middle-aged woman, wearing a green and red sari, who was standing behind one of the doors with her head bowed. The Jam Sahib swept past without acknowledging her. Then, without a backward glance, he whipped off his white knitted cap and flung it over his shoulder. His cousin caught it cleanly, and closed the doors.

  Sat led me down a long corridor filled with large stuffed animals. ‘That chap ate 107 people before he was shot,’ he said cheerily, pointing to a glass case holding a snarling tiger. ‘Ah, here we are!’

  We entered a dining room, where a beautiful rosewood table had been laid for two. ‘You must sit here I think,’ he said. ‘And will you not try one of those? If I’m not mistaken, the triangular ones are chicken and these others are made with peanut butter – all the way from America!’

  As a boy, Sat had been a fair batsman. After attending public school in England, he had therefore spent three months playing for the Sussex second team, accompanied by his father, Ranji’s nephew Digvijaysinhji, who was both Jam Sahib and president of the BCCI. ‘It was one of our happiest times,’ Sat recalled fondly. ‘We attended the matches together. We even carried our own sandwiches!’

  I asked the Jam Sahib why he thought cricket had proved irresistible to Indian royalty? ‘Well, of course, that is obvious,’ he said briskly. ‘The rulers wanted to get into the good books of the British by showing what like-minded people they were. It was simply to impress the British.’

  Throughout the 1960s Sat played for Saurashtra, a state formed by amalgamating Nawanagar and other princely states. He also dreamt of becoming the first Jam Sahib to play for India. But the days of princely privilege were waning, and he was not good enough to win selection on merit. The highlight of his career was a painstaking 164 for Saurashtra in Pune. It was Sat’s first first-class century and on the train back to Jamnagar he wondered if it might qualify him for his other great ambition – which was to wear the cricket blazer of the defunct Nawanagar team.

  ‘But when I came home father said absolutely nothing to me about my innings all day,’ he said, with his air of practised sadness.

  ‘A week went by and still he said nothing about it. After a while, I could bear it no longer. So I said to him, “Father, you may have read in the newspaper that I scored a century in Pune. May I now wear the famous Nawanagar blazer?” And father replied: “For scoring 164 in seven and a half hours? Certainly not!” So I never did get to wear the Nawanagar blazer. Father had said nothing doing and, you know, you can’t very well award it to yourself.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the Land of the Blind

  The nawab surveyed me with his good eye. I had asked him a question but he, seated in an ornate silver chair, had ignored it. ‘What I meant to say,’ I tried again, ‘is that I’d really like to know who’s telling the truth ...’

  I thought this was what he had been expecting, an informal and off-the-record chat about the enormous corruption scandal in which he, Mansoor Ali Khan, the ninth Nawab of Pataudi, had become unwittingly embroiled. This was what we had arranged, here in this very room of his Delhi townhouse, only the previous day. But if Pataudi remembered that, he gave no hint of it. He looked distinctly unimpressed.

  ‘Have you played?’ he replied in his rich bass voice. ‘Have you played cricket?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Where? What cricket have you played?’

  ‘Well, you know, at school and university ...’ I said, feeling surprised and rather uncomfortably pleased. ‘At Oxford, but I didn’t get a blue ...’

  ‘Oxford. No blue,’ said Pataudi, cogitating. ‘Fair enough. I imagine you were a bowler?’

  I nodded again, wondering whether I should provide details. I would have been glad to, but it might have sounded strange.

  ‘Fair enough. How can I help?’

  Pataudi was the fifth and last prince to captain India, and by far the most important. He led India in 40 Tests between 1961 and 1975, more than twice as many as anyone previously had. He was probably India’s greatest cricket captain. Pataudi, or Tiger as he had been called since childhood, is remembered as the man who made India win.

  Great things had been expected of him from a young age. Tiger’s father was the last nawab ruler of Pataudi, a fly-speck state 60 kilometres from Delhi. He was also the only man to play cricket for both England and India – having missed out to Vizzy’s machinations in 1936, he led India on a tour to England in 1946, as English cricket roused itself from its enforced wartime slumber. Already in poor health, the nawab died six years later, while playing polo on Tiger’s 11th birthday. Tiger then inherited his father’s title, though not his ancestral state, which had by then been signed away to India. He had also inherited his father’s talent. A born batsman, Tiger was a natural timer of the ball. Untrue to the princely stereotype, he was also a lightning fielder at cover or, before the disaster that would blight his career, short-leg.

  At Winchester, Tiger broke the batting record set by his father’s old England captain, Douglas Jardine. He made his debut for Sussex – Ranji’s and Duleep’s old county – as a 16-year-old schoolboy. He then went up to Oxford in 1960 and hit a century in the Varsity match as a freshman, as his father had done before him. He was made captain of Oxford the following year, in which he scored heavily against the best county bowling. With three games left to play, he was top of the English batting averages and within 92 runs of his father’s record for the most runs scored in an Oxford season.

  But then Pataudi suffered a cruel blow. In July 1961, he was half-blinded in a car crash: a splinter of glass had pierced his right eye, rendering it almost useless. Many assumed his cricket career was over.

  ‘How much could you actually see?’ I asked him, after we had been chatting for some time.

  Pataudi’s face clouded over, and he covered his glassy right eye with one hand. Then he pointed at me with the other and said: ‘I can see there’s someone standing there. But I can’t make out it’s you. It’s almost useless. Not that people ever believed that, you know. When I got out for a duck, they said I was no good because I’d only got one eye. And when I got a hundred, they said there must be nothing wrong with my eyesight after all. I’m afraid Indians are a very cynical people.’

  With one good eye and the peak of his cricket cap pulled low over the broken one, Tiger resumed playing within a few weeks of his accident. At first he struggled: ‘I could pick up the line of the ball but I was very troubled by straight bowling. I couldn’t really pick the length of the ball. You need two good eyes for that.’

  Yet Pataudi made adjustments for his disability. ‘If the ball was straight, I tried to be cautious,’ he said. ‘But anything wide I hit hard, because I knew that a fast straight ball would always get me out in the end.’

  Amazingly, the runs began to flow again. He scored a pair of fifties for Delhi, against Indian Railways, and was picked to play for India, against England, only a few months after his accident. In his third Test, in Madras, he destroyed the English bowling in an innings of 103 that included 16 fours and two sixes. This was Nayudu-esque hitting, which had hardly been seen in India since CK’s time, most Indian batsmen having put aside their early habit of lofting the ball. But Tiger had no such inhibition. He was maimed yet all the more swashbuckling for it.

  He was picked, as vice-captain, to tour the West Indies later that year; whereupon Indian cricket suffered another painful setback. Nari Contractor, India’s captain and one of the last top-class Parsi cricketers, was brained by a bouncer from the Barbadian Charlie Griffiths. It took emergency surgery and a blood transfusion from his West Indian counterpart, Frank Worrell, to save his life: his Tes
t career was over. So Tiger, at the age of 21, became India’s captain – and the youngest ever in Test cricket.

  Plagued by capricious selection and feuding, India had hardly ever had a settled captain before this. Against West Indies in 1958–59 they were led by four different men in five games. No wonder the team was rarely united. But Pataudi changed that. ‘Before Tiger, the Indian team was quite parochial,’ one of his former charges, the left-arm spinner Bishan Singh Bedi, told me. ‘He was the first Indian captain who told us, “OK, you’re not playing for Delhi or Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, Mysore, no, you’re playing for India. So think India.” Tiger was by far the best captain I played under.’

  It helped, perhaps, that Tiger’s own regional loyalties were distant. It was said he once chastised one of his batsmen, Chandu Borde, for wearing a Maharashtra state cricket cap on India duty; at which Borde pointed out that Pataudi himself often wore his Sussex cap. ‘Ah, Chandu,’ Tiger replied, ‘but Maharashtra is not Sussex.’

  Pataudi captained as aggressively as he batted. His predecessors were often timid, happy simply to avoid defeat. But Tiger played to win. He was a gambler, after the fashion of sporting gentlemen, and though his aggressive declarations and eccentric bowling changes sometimes backfired, this was part of the excitement. India’s weakness, his leadership suggested, was no excuse not to play with spirit. That was also the message of his monocular batting. ‘I was lucky,’ he told me. ‘There were no very fast bowlers around when I was playing.’ But this was too modest. For most of his career – which included six Test centuries – Tiger was India’s best batsman.