The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  It was heroic stuff. But the fact that a one-eyed batsman was the best in India also suggested how modest its standard of cricket remained. The improvement in results that Tiger oversaw was, in fact, rather small. When he became captain in 1962, India had been playing Test cricket for three decades and won only five games out of 78. It had taken two decades to record India’s first victory. Under Tiger, India won eight victories over a decade, including their first overseas, in a series victory against New Zealand in 1967.

  Yet Pataudi’s appeal to Indian cricket fans was about more than results. He was a handsome prince, married to a film star, the Bengali beauty Sharmila Tagore. Tiger exuded brio and dash – even if, judged by today’s megaphone standards, Indian cricket was a low-key affair in the 1960s. ‘There was no television in my day and the reach of cricket was not great,’ he said. ‘When we were playing in Bombay, it was a big event. Bollywood had to sit down for a week. But at other times, no one made a fuss.’

  ‘Even when we won the first series overseas, in New Zealand, it was not such a big thing,’ Tiger continued. ‘It was so far away. I don’t think most people even knew about it.’ On the journey back to India, he recalled, the team plane stopped to refuel in Singapore and the players were invited to step out to be felicitated by some local Indian diplomats. Pataudi, in a state of nervous exhaustion owing to his fear of flying, declined to leave the plane; whereupon an Indian diplomat stepped aboard to berate him. ‘He said it was disgraceful of me,’ Tiger recalled wryly. ‘He said, “just you wait until I tell your mother!”’

  That would not happen today, when India’s cricket captains are godlike celebrities, richer than film stars, courted by politicians. But Pataudi did not envy them. He was largely unimpressed by India’s modern cricket mania. ‘There’s a great passion for cricket in this country, but little knowledge,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Everyone loves cricket, but very few people have played the game properly. The facilities are too poor. If you’re watching a match in England, most of the people around you will have played some sort of cricket. Here there’s plenty of enthusiasm, but most people haven’t got a clue.’

  Hence the success of the IPL, he suggested. Pataudi had until recently sat on the league’s governing council – an undemanding role, for which he had been paid $200,000 a year. He had supposed this was some sort of a payback, Tiger’s father having captained the father-in-law of the BCCI’s then chief, Sharad Pawar, on the 1946 tour to England. Yet Tiger’s proximity to the IPL, such as it was, had not improved his view of the tournament. He had only been to see one IPL match, in Delhi, and he had left after a few overs.

  ‘Too noisy,’ he said. ‘You can’t see anything and you can’t even hear yourself think. And you know the really sad thing about the IPL? It isn’t even very good. I don’t think it is ever going to produce great cricket. It’s what we call a tamasha, you know, music, lights, fireworks, ladies dancing and all that other rubbish.’ Pataudi shrugged. ‘Each to his own, but it’s not for me. I like watching cricket in a proper environment. You know, hushed crowd, occasional glass of beer, preferably from a deckchair in the village near Horsham where I lived for half my life.’

  Tiger had been dropped from his comfortable role in the IPL a few months previously, in a sudden reorganisation of the league. This had been occasioned by a gross corruption scandal, which was then gripping India, and it was to discuss the details of this affair that I had come to see Pataudi. He was happy to tell me whatever he knew of it. But he was not, for all that, terribly interested in the scandal. He found it depressing. ‘Nothing seems to raise eyebrows in this country anymore. It seems you can get away with almost anything. Ah well. I’m afraid I went to the wrong school,’ he said drolly, shaking his head. ‘They didn’t teach us to make money at Winchester.’

  We had been talking for over two hours and I sensed Pataudi had had enough. So I ventured one last question. ‘And what if your accident hadn’t happened? How good might you have been?’

  Pataudi replied without a pause. ‘Well, I suppose twice as good,’ he said. ‘I should have scored a lot more than I did.’

  Shortly after midnight on 15 August 1947, the union flag was run down the flagstaff of Red Fort in Delhi and the Indian saffron, white and green tricolour run up. India was now a free country. And in due course many other colonial emblems were erased. British statues were taken down from their plinths in New Delhi and dumped in an Ozymandian park outside the capital. The Imperial Civil Service became the Indian Civil Service. The Bombay Presidency was divided into the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. Yet India retained much more of the Raj than it threw out.

  The civil service, as well as the legal and education systems, was largely unreformed. English remained the language of most government business.

  Meanwhile, educated Indians lost none of the regard for British culture that had been imbued in them over the course of two centuries of British rule. When I asked Madhav Mantri, India’s oldest living Test cricketer, what the highlight of his career had been, I assumed it would involve playing for India. But Mantri said it was without doubt being introduced to the young Queen Elizabeth at Lord’s in 1952. I wondered what Mantri’s nephew Sunil Gavaskar, a deeply nationalist (and much greater) Indian cricketer, would have made of that.

  This Anglocentric view was strongly represented by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, who ruled until his death in 1964. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Nehru jokingly called himself the ‘last Englishman to rule India’. To pass the time in prison, where he was often locked up during the freedom struggle, he used to write out lists of great Old Harrovians. He was the sort of accomplished, anglicised Indian the British had sought, as a matter of policy, to create. He was, as Lord Macaulay would have noted approvingly, ‘brown in colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’

  For Nehru and other Congress leaders, India’s inheritance of British culture and colonial institutions was not a cancer to be cut out. Rather, it formed a part of India’s national history and endowment. Naturally, Nehru was also fond of cricket. He enjoyed watching the game and turned out faithfully to play it – enthusiastically but not well – in the annual match between the upper and lower houses of the Indian parliament.

  There was a less conciliatory strain in Indian nationalism. Some nationalists understood swadeshi, or self-sufficiency – one of the great rallying cries of the freedom movement – to have a cultural as well as an economic dimension. During an outbreak of anti-British protest in Bengal in 1905, such nationalists threw cricket bats on to their bonfires of Lancashire cotton. This recalled a contemporaneous attack on Irish cricket, once one of Ireland’s most popular games, by Celtic revivalists. But while Ireland revived hurling and Gaelic football and largely abandoned cricket, in India these protests soon fizzled. Few Indians, it transpired, wanted to go back to gilli-danda.

  By the time the British left India, there was little doubt that Indian cricket would continue to thrive. As an elite game, it retained a certain British quality – including a sense, beloved by the well-to-do Indians who mostly played it, that cricket was a morally superior game.

  Yet Indian cricket was now a century old and had its own character and traditions. It was also immensely popular. Cricket was written about in newspapers, played in the street and gossiped about at home and around chai stalls across the subcontinent. And cricket’s roots were deepest in India’s most populous and fastest-growing cities including Bombay and Madras. During the Pentangular, crowds of 40,000 flocked to Bombay’s handsome new Brabourne Stadium, which hosted the tournament from 1937.

  In Bombay and other big cities, cricket was one of India’s most popular entertainments, ranked alongside Hindi films, religious festivals and political rallies. And Indian fans enjoyed cricket and all these diversions in much the same emotional way. A big cricket match was a dramatic event, in which the crowd participated exuberantly. This was not something learned from the British. The theatricali
ty of Indian cricket crowds expressed a striking feature of Indian society – Indians’ love of a show. ‘We’re all drama queens,’ the Bollywood actor Aamir Khan once told me. ‘Compared to British or Americans, people in India expected their theatre to be that much more. The emotional key here is different.’

  Cricket’s complicated form was amenable to this Indian sentiment. It provided many, broadly predictable, changes in the pace and rhythm of the game, which the Indian crowds hammed up in delight. As the bowler began his run-up, they would begin to murmur and then, as he accelerated towards the stumps, a rising clamour would build around the ground, until the glorious climax of the delivery. ‘Booooowled!’ the crowd shouted, as the bowler released the ball from his hand; and if the batsman then hit a boundary or the bowler took his wicket, it would explode into shouting and applause. Then the spectators would settle, murmuring, and the whole process begin again, ball by ball, over after over.

  This episodic quality makes cricket, as C.L.R. James has written, an unusually theatrical sport. So do the many micro-dramas it contains within the wider drama of an innings, a game or a series. Thus the duel between a clever spinner and a big-hitting batsman; or a fast bowler and a tailender; or the eternal tension that exists between individual achievement and victory for the team. James compared cricket to Greek tragedy. Yet the game’s multitudinous subplots more obviously recall India’s epic, the Mahabaharat.

  Indian cricket had also, by the time the British left India, a fairly well-developed institutional structure. There was the BCCI, its constituent state cricket associations and hundreds of gymkhana, school and company cricket teams. Most had never had much to do with the British, so it made little difference to them that the British were gone. Yet Indian cricket also faced certain difficulties.

  One was the demise of its most popular tournament, the Pentangular, which had fallen victim to political events. The tournament was first cancelled in 1930, owing to the protests sparked by Gandhi’s salt march. After it resumed four years later, it was increasingly targeted by liberal protesters who considered the tournament, perhaps rightly, an incitement to sectarianism. Asked for his view of the Pentangular, in 1940, Gandhi agreed with these critics. The Mahatma was almost entirely uninterested in cricket. Yet he considered it unseemly that the tamasha should be held while in Europe the ‘flower of manhood was being done to death’. Moreover, he added, ‘I would like the public of Bombay to revise their sporting code and erase from it communal matches. I can understand matches between colleges and institutions, but I have never understood the reason for having Hindu, Parsi, Muslim and other Communal Elevens. I should have thought such unsportsmanlike divisions would be considered taboo in sporting language and sporting manners.’

  This was a painful criticism. Earlier that year India’s freedom movement had fractured fatally on sectarian lines – Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League having issued its demand for a Muslim homeland. In this febrile time, Hindu–Muslim cricket contests were anathema to many in Congress. Yet, contrary to a popular belief, Gandhi’s criticisms were not sufficient to end the Pentangular. They persuaded the Hindu Gymkhana to withdraw its team from the tournament that year. But it went ahead without them, and the following year the Hindus, unable to resist a windfall of gate receipts, returned to it. There would be four more Pentangulars, all immensely popular. The Hindus won in 1941 and 1943, the Muslims won a nail-biting final against the Hindus in 1944, and the Hindus won again in 1945–46. But there it had to end. In August 1946, a few weeks before the next Pentangular would have been held, 10,000 people died in the so-called Great Calcutta Killings, the first wave of the Hindu–Muslim massacres that would attend India’s calamitous partition. The tournament was cancelled and never revived.

  Partition was itself a setback to Indian cricket. It entailed the loss of some of India’s richest cricketing terrain, especially Karachi and Lahore, to Pakistan. Some of India’s best players, including the fast bowler Mohammad Nissar, were also lost to the new state. As early as 1952 this led India’s great batsman Vijay Merchant to predict that India’s fast-bowling stocks would suffer as a result. ‘Above all, the partition has deprived India of future fast bowlers,’ he wrote. ‘In the past, India often relied for fast bowling on the North Indian people, who because of their height and sturdy physique, are better equipped for this kind of bowling than the cricketers of Central India or the South.’ So it has proved. India’s first fast bowlers, Nissar and Amar Singh, were quite possibly the best opening pair India has ever had. While Pakistan has gone on to produce a stream of brilliant pace bowlers, India has hardly produced even one out-and-out quick.

  The reduction in princely patronage, between 1947–49, was another blow to the Indian game. But this was offset by growing support from Indian companies, especially in Bombay. The city’s prestigious company tournament, the Times of India Challenge Shield, to some extent replaced the Pentangular. A big Shield game between such cricketing titans as the Tata Group and Associated Cement Companies, could draw a crowd of 10,000 to the Maidan. This was valuable advertising, which led them and other companies to hire India’s best cricketers. During the 1960s Tata’s side included five Test cricketers.

  Many Indian cricketers, though officially amateurs, could not have played without corporate patronage. Even during Pentangular times, Mantri recalled, the most important fixture for many Hindu players, including himself, was not against their arch-rivals the Muslims, but against the Europeans. This was because it delivered a potentially lucrative opportunity to impress a British boss. ‘The Europeans were the top bosses back then, and naturally you wanted to come into contact with them,’ Mantri said. He ended up working for Associated Cement, which won the Shield five times between 1952 and 1961.

  The rise of corporate patronage reasserted Bombay’s primacy in cricket. Because the city was home to India’s biggest companies, its players had the best chance of a decent job, ensuring that talented cricketers moved to Bombay in search of one. For a staggering 15 years, between 1958 and 1973, the Bombay side did not lose a single Ranji Trophy game. Until 1990, a third of India’s Test players came from Maharashtra, the state of Bombay. Yet at the same time, in a counter-wave, cricket was spreading across India.

  Radio played a big part in this. Live Test match commentary was introduced in 1952, and commentary soon became available in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Bengali, as well as English. A big increase in international cricket fixtures also raised the game’s profile. Between 1932 and 1947 India played seven Tests. Between 1947 and 1957 it played 42. This in turn helped boost the Ranji Trophy, which by the 1960s had become extremely popular. The biggest grudge games, as between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, or between Delhi and the armed forces could draw a crowd of 30,000.

  While cricket spread to the regions, they were seeing serious unrest. During the 1950s, India saw waves of strikes and protests calling for a redrawing of its state boundarires on the basis of language. Sometimes they turned violent – as when, in January 1956, 106 people were killed in Bombay during riots sparked by Marathi-speaking protesters. This led to a major redrawing of India’s state boundaries on linguistic lines later that year, spawning Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and other new states. The rise of regional political movements was another boost for the Ranji Trophy, which became an important means of asserting regional pride. And, because it is always easier to make new constituencies in democratic India than kill off old ones, the tournament also became a unique record of India’s changing political map. Thus, many of the states scrapped in the shake-up continued to exist in cricket. Saurashtra, a short-lived conglomeration of former princely states, continues to this day to field a team in the Ranji Trophy, as does its erstwhile neighbour, the now-defunct princely state of Baroda. English cricket, it is interesting to note, has a similarly nostalgic tendency – long non-existent Middlesex is still included in the County Championship.

  The relentless rise of Indian cricket is reflected in the much slower growth of I
ndia’s other main popular sports, football and hockey. Football had delivered one of Indian sport’s great patriotic successes: when a team of barefoot Bengalis, Mohun Bagan, defeated the footballers of the East Yorkshire Regiment 2-1 in 1911. The game’s simplicity and cheapness, which has enabled it to sweep the world, also made it seem appropriate to India. Yet enthusiasm for football hardly spread beyond a handful of states, including West Bengal, Kerala, Goa and the far north-eastern state of Manipur. The mixed fortunes of Indian hockey are even more striking – because it is a game in which India was not merely somewhat competitive, as it was in cricket, but the world’s best.

  Between 1928 and 1956 India’s hockey players won six successive Olympic gold medals, the third coming at Hitler’s 1936 Games in Berlin where they beat Germany 8-1 in the final. Hockey accounts for eight of India’s nine Olympic golds, the other being in shooting. Indian cricket has never enjoyed anything like this success. Yet Indian hockey never assumed anything like cricket’s importance among India’s metropolitan elite. Consequently it never enjoyed anything like the same level of support: the maharajas of Patiala were rare examples of princely hockey patrons. Nor did hockey take off in any big city, with the partial exception of Delhi. At the height of Indian hockey’s success, it was played mainly in the small towns and villages of north India. A single Punjabi village, Sansarpur, has produced 14 Olympians at hockey, which says a lot for Sansarpuris but less for the game’s national reach.

  But why, given how rapidly cricket was spreading, was India’s playing record so slow to improve? Indian cricket fans always had fine individual performances to celebrate. Vijay Hazare scored a century in each innings in Adelaide in 1947. Vinoo Mankad scored a total of 256 runs and took five wickets during a Test match at Lord’s in 1952. Yet while Indian hockey players swept the world, India’s cricketers struggled to win a game. Indeed it took them two decades to win their first Test, at the 25th attempt, against a second-string England side in Madras in 1952.