[NB: One of the sadnesses of this year is that the young actor who played Dhoni in the film on his life – if I have a favourite actor in Bollywood, it would be him – took his own life. Sushant Singh Rajput. The movie is worth watching: MS Dhoni: The Untold Story].

Anyhow…

Exactly 100 years before Dhoni’s exploits, a cricket team was making plans to leave, from the same Bombay, as the first ‘All-India’ team to tour Great Britain, in 1911. I feel another opportunity to indulge my fascination with the social history of South Asia is beckoning…

It is. 

In some ways it is a strange book. Like an airplane (remember those things? we used to see them in the sky) circling the airport and taking an age to come into land, Kidambi circles this cricket tour and doesn’t land in an actual cricket game until page 262. 

Kinda like a rain-delay, I guess. But, on this occasion, there are no complaints from this reader because the rain was so interesting.

The subversion

As noted in the Preface, in those days ‘cricket was truly authentic when it was inviolately English’ (vii). And yet, as time has passed and a passion and skill for the game has surfaced in South Asia, it would appear now that cricket is an ‘Indian game accidently discovered by the English’ (vii). But there is more, much more, subversion than this going on. The book

charts how the idea of India took shape on the cricket pitch … (it) argues that the nation on the cricket field was originally constituted by, and not against, the forces of empire … (it) documents how the project to put together the first national cricket team was pursued by a diverse coalition comprising Indian businessmen, princes, and publicists, working in tandem with British governors, officials, journalists, soldiers and professional coaches … ‘India’ was represented by a cricket team long before it became independent (viii).

Although the intention was to do the opposite, cricket helped destabilize the relationship between colonizer and colonized, ruler and ruled. In unleashing cricket in India as a way to foster unity and values across the empire, ‘a valuable instrument of imperial soft power’ (292), the seeds were sown that helped break up the empire. The 1911 tour demonstrated that India could exist, on the cricket field, and so this team ‘inaugurated a new register in which the nation came to be imagined’ (330). Sadly, today, four decades since the last member of the team died, the tour is seen as a ‘curiosity. As the context that lent it meaning has entirely receded from collective memory, the event has been divested of its historical significance’ (329). But it played its part in the journey towards independence, gained eventually in 1947.

The religions

It was in Ramachandra Guha’s book where I first discovered this feature of the early decades of South Asian cricket. The teams were comprised along religious lines. It started within the urban Parsi community in Bombay (originally, Zororastrians from Persia – and Freddie Mercury’s heritiage, by the way). Parsis were generally in favour of British rule, taking to the English language and to Western attire. They sent their own team to Britain in 1886. The team played against the legendary WG Grace. One Parsi player, Jalbhai Merwanjee Morenas, hit Grace for three consecutives 6s. Grace was so impressed that he gave Morenas a photo of himself. I love that story!

By the time 1911 arrived, the Parsi peoples were declining and their dominance in the team was a cause of tension. The manager was Parsi and the main financial backers of the tour were the Tata family, also Parsis. “Men in White” (131-165) tells the story of each member of the team, one religion at a time. Along with six Parsis, there were five Hindus (incredibly, mingling three Brahmins with two Dalit siblings, which isn’t really possible!), three Muslims and one Sikh. The Sikh, a scoundrel called Bhupinder Singh, the 19 year old Maharaja of Patiala, was made the captain. Ah yes, it is ‘symptomatic of an era when it was taken for granted that the princes were natural leaders of society’ (167).

[NB: The wicketkeeper, the Tamilian Brahmin Seshachari, received some of his coaching in Ooty from CT Studd, while he was a pastor there (after his cricket career with England and his missionary career in China and before his missionary work in Sudan and Congo)].

The context

In 1911, London was ‘an imperial metropolis at the zenith of its glory’ (191). The team settled into Bayswater, known at the time as ‘Asia Minor’ (194), as it was already seeing ‘the rise of cafes and restaurants that served Indian cuisine’ (194). It was the hottest summer on record, too hot for some of the Indian players apparently. It was the year of the coronation of King George V, an Imperial Conference, a Festival of Empire, a Universal Races Congress … it was all on.  

Then there were the ‘rebellions’ rumbling away in British society. With the switch from the Victorian era to the Edwardian one, self-denial shifted to pleasure-seeking and with it came ‘a new mood of insubordination’ (242). Trouble in the relationship between the Lords and the Commons, labour strikes, women enfranchisement, and home rule for Ireland were all simmering away, with violence erupting. ‘Against this tumultuous backdrop the Indian cricketers travelled the length and breadth of the United Kingdom’ (244).

Because the politics became so difficult, the next tour by an All-India team was not for another 21 years. Mahatma Gandhi returned to India in 1915. The Amritsar massacre happened in 1919. Nationalism overwhelmed India. ‘As the political tapestry of the Raj swiftly unravelled, the first Indian cricket tour of Britain was shorn of its symbolic meanings with which it had once been freighted’ (319). European and Parsi power gave way to Hindus and Muslims, where ‘increasingly fractious relations … began to generate intense collective emotions in a polarized political climate’ (320).

But back to 1911 for a little interlude. Even the cricket contributed to the context. On the day before the team arrived in London, cricket witnessed what John Arlott (the doyen of cricket writers) described as ‘the most remarkable innings ever played’ (246). ‘Alletson’s Innings’ (check out wikipedia). Coming in with three wickets left and only nine runs ahead, in ‘forty frenzied minutes, Alletson scored 142 runs, with eight sixes and twenty-three fours’ (246).

The characters

(a) One cricketer lurking in the background of the story is Ranjitsinhji (or, ‘Ranji’). Adopted into a princely family (Kathiawar), Ranji had travelled to Britain for university studies. He took up cricket and soon his ‘sublime batting bewitched Britain and the wider imperial world’ (viii). He played for England and although he was pressured into captaining the 1911 team, he maintained ‘a lofty indifference towards the venture’ (167). He had too much to lose as his eyes were on a bigger prize: becoming the legitimate prince of Kathiawar and he needed the help of the British and the Maharajas to do so. 

However, Ranji was still part of the subversion. The British public were mesmerized by the fact that there could be such talent to be found among the conquered non-white people of the empire. ‘His dazzling feats with the bat disrupted prevailing assumptions about cricket and race in late Victorian Britain’ (299). For the first time with a non-white cricketer, here was ‘a cricketing ability that could not be doubted or disparaged’ (299-300). The trickle was to became a flood with West Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Indians supplying the cricketing world with some of its most mercurial talents and leaders, like Dhoni.

(b) Palwankar Baloo. This is the man who had me rushing to this book. I had met him before, in Guha’s story. Seriously, he needs a careful biography and then a movie (I have seen talk of one being done). He was the older of the Dalit brothers and he became ‘the hero of the tour’ (316). ‘It was his exceptional skills and the recognition bestowed upon him by his European and Parsi opponents that prompted the leaders of Hindu cricket to overlook Baloo’s caste status’ (149). He bettered both the British and the Brahmin…

Born in Dharwad, in Karnataka (a sister city to Hubli, which Barby and I visited back in January), Palwankar was a left arm spin bowler. He was ‘beyond any doubt the greatest Indian bowler of his generation’ (274). His three younger brothers all played sport at the highest level with Shivram accompanying him on the 1911 tour. In fact, after a long string of losses, it was these two Dalit brothers, a batsmen and a bowler, who were responsible for turning the tour around, by being instrumental in consecutive victories over Leicestershire and Somerset.

On his return to Bombay, he was given a gold medal at a ceremony in which the speaker was ‘a young man named Bhimrao Ambedkar, future leader of the Dalit masses and the principal architect of independent India’s constitution’ (317). [NB: I checked – Ambedkar was 20 years of age at the time]. The welcome home was different from the farewell a few months earlier when the Palwankar brothers were the only ones left ungarlanded. Despite the ‘clamour’ from the public, he was not installed as captain of the Hindu team and quickly struggled to hold his place in the team. Palwankar moved into politics, siding more with Gandhi than with Ambedkar in the mounting tension between the two of them, with their respective visions of India. At one point, Palwankar was brought in as a negotiator between the two of them … like I say, bring on the book, the movie, the T-shirt.

The 19 year old Bhupinder, Maharaja of Paitala, captain of India, receiving help with his pads.

(c) An entire chapter is devoted to “The Captain’s Story” (166-189). Bhupinder Singh, Maharaja of Patiala was large in life and larger than life. This Maharaja was ‘the natural leader of the Sikh community from whose ranks half the British Indian army was drawn’ (171). The tour was all about rebuilding his reputation amongst the British aristocracy in order to consolidate his power back home. 

nice chatting

Paul

PS: Here is an interview with the author.