History, geography, princes and politics meet in Prashant Kidambi’s book on the first Indian team’s tour to Britain
Sharda Ugra06-Sep-2019On page 168 of of Palwankar Baloo, slow left-arm bowler and the 1911 squad’s stellar performer. The same Talyarkhan whose acerbic columns were later sent to the newspaper , my first employer. For nine months, before he died, I dealt with the legendary commentator’s pieces, and he had seen Baloo, arguably the most exceptional cricketer produced by India, one who stood stereotype and convention on their head.Baloo, a central figure in Ramachandra Guha’s , an exploration of Indian cricket history, was a Dalit whose excellence at cricket shook every establishment he ran into and had them bend previously iron-clad caste rules to get him to play in their XI. He belonged to a family of outstanding athletes (the four Palwankar brothers were competitive cricket and hockey players across Bombay tournaments). After retirement he became a political activist for Dalit rights. In 1911 he was a titan, without whom victories could not have been crafted in England.The first All-India team, which toured England that summer, was drawn from the three sectarian units that constituted Indian cricket back then: Parsis (six players), Hindus (five – one each from Madras, Mysore, Bombay, and two Dalits from Poona) and Muslims (three from Aligarh). They were led by a Sikh royal, the ruler of the princely state of Patiala.The Parsis had been the first cricketers to travel out of India, with two tours of Britain in the 1880s. After a tour failed to get going in 1903, with social unrest growing around British rule in India, the Indian elite sought to re-establish a bond between ruler and ruled. Renewed plans for a tour to England began as a mission to encourage fraternity with the Empire establishment in London (and no doubt to maintain business interests and influence).The book places the 1911 tour in the context of its times and environment, when the British empire was at its peak, London was the centre of the world, and the Edwardian era of excess and opulence played itself out during the coronation of George V. is a formidable piece of scholarship that recreates the time in staggering detail.We learn about shenanigans in the Patiala court and the indifference of the regal captain to his team’s requirements on tour. There are Indian complaints about the scheduling of fixtures (having to play the strongest counties at the start, which led to ten consecutive defeats), problems with food, and the disappointment of spectators when the players turned out in regular flannels and not some exotically oriental gear.There appear in cricketer-journalist and India enthusiast Edward Sewell’s weekly dispatches to the is a hike through a landscape of diverse riches. In the end there is a chance to reflect on what has come to pass.In the last chapter, which recounts the post-tour lives of the 1911 team members, we learn that batsman Mukund Pai died aged 66 in his neighbourhood of Chikalwadi in Bombay in August 1948. Less than a year later Chikalwadi welcomed the birth of a boy who would go on to become a formidable, world-beating batsman and give Indian cricket a badge of pride. Sixty years after 1911, the career of Sunil Gavaskar was to add more heft to a prediction made in an 1892 Bombay newspaper that cricket in India, which, it said, should have been “merely a pastime”, was going to be “regarded” as the “business of life”.Cricket Country – the Untold History of the First All India Team
By Prashant Kidambi
Penguin Random House
453 pages, Rs 699
