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The gully, the maidan and the mali When I started writing this book, the kindly man who edited it suggested to me that I should explain how a seven or eight year old in India takes to cricket. We know how he does so in England but surely the Indian process is very different? Indeed it is. If English cricket is essentially rural and village cricket, in George Orwell’s picturesque phrase of the light falling towards evening and a ball hit for four killing a rabbit on the boundary, Indian cricket is urban. Its roots lie in the lanes of India’s teeming cities and on the broad patches of green, called the maidans, that occasionally break up the monotony of concrete. Talk to almost any Indian Test cricketer, particularly of the last fifty years or so, and he will trace his cricketing roots back to the maidan and the gully. The wonder of the maidan is well captured by Budhi Kunderan, in this recollection of how he started playing cricket as recorded by Richard Cashman in Players, Patrons and the Crowd: Since my parents moved to Mumbai, when I was eight years old, I hadn’t seen cricket in my native place. None of my family members [have] ever seen or played cricket in their lives. The first time that I saw a cricket match on a maidan in Mumbai I fell in love with the game . . . this is the only game we could play on the maidan, apart from running, to play any other game in Mumbai [in] those days you had to be a member of big clubs, where you could play tennis or other indoor games. But I had no opportunity as such. An evocative picture of Kunderan, the villager moving to the big city and being claimed by cricket, sufficiently early for India to have a remarkable wicketkeeper and batsman. Similarly, gully cricket, often with a tennis ball, was part and parcel of the make-up of almost every Indian cricketer – as much part of Visvanath’s batting, as Chandrasekhar’s bowling or even Azharuddin’s rise to fame. It was gully cricket at the old MLA ground of Hyderabad that started Azharuddin off and he and his mates getting together and forming a gully team provided him with his first taste of cricket. All this can be simply stated. But how does one convey gully cricket? It does not have the natural cadences or the rhapsodic melody that comes naturally to English cricket. It can be hard, brutish, often messy, though
