6
Ranji’s burden
So far we have discussed the puzzle of Indian cricket. A country that is cricket mad turns out to be not so much mad about the game as mad about the spectacle that is associated – or it has created – around the game. A game that is played in the country not in the structured, organised fashion of village to club, club to county or state and then to national team as in England or Australia but in a more ad hoc, hit-and-miss fashion. But despite the considerable number of individually talented cricketers it has produced, rarely, as one of its best-loved captains the Nawab of Pataudi confesses, have ‘they combined to make a composite team which could produce consistent performances over a period of years . . . When Vijay Merchant or Gavaskar was flourishing, the middle order was brittle: when India had world class spinners there were no opening bowlers. And when Kapil Dev eventually turned up, the spinners had gone’. It is just as well that an Indian prince should have made the point: cricket, a team game that allows the individual unbridled opportunities for glory should become in India a game where glorious individuals occasionally drag their team to odd moments of triumph. A prince needed to make that point for, in many ways, it is the legacy of the Indian princes’ involvement with Indian cricket. The English had promoted the game in an ad hoc fashion: here a governor, there a viceroy, here a district official who particularly liked the game and wanted to see his Indian subjects take to it. The Indian response had come, initially, from the Parsees who, despite having lived in India for almost 1,300 years before the English arrived, understood, or thought they understood, the English sense of alienation in India and saw cricket as forging a bond between the Parsees, the old interlopers in India, and the English, the new interlopers. But what of the Indian princes? What of Ranji – surely here we have examples of a particular group of Indians who had royal blood, promoting and organising cricket in India? No writer of Indian cricket can ignore the princes, yet few, it seems, have bothered to study their effect on Indian cricket. Virenchee Sagar, the modern business patron, previously mentioned, who employed Gavaskar and a number of other Indian cricketers may be overstating the case when he accused the Indian princes of retarding rather than promoting Indian cricket. But he has a point. Certainly for them, cricket and its promotion
