Cricket, India: A history

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Introduction

FOR INDIA, LIFE’S A PITCH

From minnows to World Champions, Team India has come a long way.

Boria Majumdar

The Times of India

Cricket in India had started in real earnest in the 1880s with the first Parsee tour of England in 1886. While this team was hastily put together and did not fare well, the second Parsee team to tour England in 1888 did much better. The improved standard of cricket in 1890s India is something the TOI drew our attention to when the Parsees, the early patrons of cricket, played G F Vernon’s touring English side in Bombay. Vernon’s team won all its matches in India except the one against the Parsees, which the visitors lost by four wickets. Commenting on the Parsee victory, Times of India wrote, ‘The Parsees are heartily to be congratulated on their really splendid victory . . . It is a great feather in the cap of the Parsees to have pulled off the match.’

The improvement was consistent and it was finally in June 1932 that India cut their teeth in international cricket against the English at Lord’s. This tour, from its very inception, was controversial and was marred by a bitter tussle over captaincy, which was beautifully documented in the pages of TOI. The struggle between the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram and the Maharaja of Patiala for captaincy finally ended in favour of Patiala with Vizzy offered the strange designation of Deputy Vice Captain. He soon withdrew from the tour citing health reasons. Patiala followed suit and ultimately the Maharaja of Porbander led the first official Indian touring team to England. Interestingly Porbander was the worst player in the touring party and India’s first homegrown superhero, C K Nayudu, had the privilege of leading India out at Lord’s on June 25, 1932.

After independence, TOI played an important role in documenting the growing importance of cricket in the Indian public imagination. Wins in the West Indies and England in 1971, considered watershed moments in Indian cricket history, found first-page mention as did India’s first ever Test win against England in 1952 in Chennai. K N Prabhu’s dispatches from the Caribbean in 1971 are invaluable in understanding the significance of this victory and in chronicling the early impact of Sunil Gavaskar on Indian cricket. To their credit the TOI correspondents were farsighted in their analysis. This is borne out from stories on Sachin Tendulkar’s debut series in 1989. Reporting from Pakistan, Sunder Rajan predicted that Sachin was a special talent.

That cricket had become the most potent symbol of Indian nationalism was borne out from coverage of world cups in 1996, 1999, 2003 and 2007. The 1999 World Cup match against Pakistan occupied many pages drawing attention to the political significance of the encounter against the backdrop of Kargil. And in documenting the curse of match fixing in 2000 or the high of the 2011 World Cup triumph, the paper set new benchmarks. These reports will forever serve as valuable source for historians and aficionados of sport in understanding the emergence of cricket as India’s secular religion.