5
An English sporting Eden in India So we know how an Indian takes to cricket. But what about the sporting world he inhabits? What shapes it? India is changing all the time but the sporting world that existed in the 1950s and 1960s when I grew up in India has rarely been examined and in many ways its influences still weigh heavily on contemporary India. My generation was brought up to believe that England was the ultimate sporting heaven: a unique, wondrous world where skill reigned supreme and sportsmanship was never in doubt. I had first glimpsed this world as a nine-year old when I saw Tom Graveney score a hundred in each innings of the match played at the Brabourne Stadium to celebrate the silver jubilee of the Indian Board. To mark the occasion an England A team toured India. The beauty Graveney produced was so great that not even Fred Trueman, who broke the fingers of Vijay Hazare – my favourite Indian batsman – could dim it. Trueman, who was playing in India for the first and only time, may have been the great English saitan, devil, who ate Indian batsmen for breakfast but my mind was filled with Graveney, the English enchanter. I can still see him elegantly stretch his left leg and stroke the ball through the covers, so sweetly that he had hardly finished the stroke before it was hitting the concrete just in front of the East Stand where I sat. Elegant, said the retainer my father had assigned to escort me to the match, and elegant repeated I, not quite sure what the world meant but certain it was a term of approval. Not long after this my cousin had presented me on my birthday with Graveney’s Cricket Through the Covers which I read and reread many times not least for his praise of my hero Subhas Gupte. I particularly savoured his prediction that in 1959 Gupte’s leg spin would devastate England. It did not come true and was angry but this was nothing like the anger I felt when someone, I believe the servant who every morning dusted the furniture with a piece of felt cloth, tipped a pot of ink on the book. It stained it a hideous dark blue, including the picture of W. G. Grace, but I insisted on keeping the book and refused to let my mother throw it away. At around that time I had also became a Surrey supporter – they were in the middle of their seven champions in a row sequence – and eagerly lapped up Jim Laker’s Over To Me, although I wasn’t sure how to take his criticisms of Peter May. However, when Surrey
