The passage of time, and indeed, the transformation of a British colony into the world’s largest parliamentary democracy, has made it difficult to draw a comparison between the Indian cricket team of today, and the one of 1932. However, it appears that the wheel has turned full circle for two reasons.
For starters, the Indian outfit that will take the field for the country’s hundredth Test against England will look to its pace bowlers to peg the opposition back. This is in stark contrast to India’s spin-oriented bowling attacks for most of her 79 years as a Test-playing nation. Like the current side, C.K. Nayudu’s team that took on Douglas Jardine’s England in the inaugural Test on 25 June 1932, reposed its faith in the ‘fast men.’
Mohammed Nissar and Amar Singh Ladha constituted India’s best new-ball combination, until Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad emerged on the scene in the mid-1990s, coincidentally, on a tour of England (1996).
The team of 1932 made waves for its fielding. 79 years later it can be said that after having a turbulent relationship with the most neglected, but very critical, department of the sport for decades, the Indian team has evolved into a fine fielding unit.
India toured England thrice in the pre-Independence era, in 1932, 1936 and 1946 respectively. Each of these sides represented an entire subcontinent, with Sir Cyril Radcliffe nowhere on the scene. While the start of each tour was eventful and laced with controversy, particularly over the captaincy, the cricket more than made up for it. The team of 1932 had at its helm the Maharaja of Porbandar and Ghanshyamsinhji of Limbdi as captain and vice-captain. Both were modest cricketers who had been elevated to the top posts because of the prevalent thinking that only someone with blue blood could handle a side as diverse as India’s. Thankfully, birth gave way to merit on the eve of the inaugural Test at Lord’s. Both individuals stepped aside in favour of the nation’s greatest cricketer of the age – Col. Cottari Kanakaiya Nayudu.
India got off to a dream start in the Test, with Nissar and Amar Singh making a tremendous impression. England recovered from 19 for three on the first day to win the three-day Test by 158 runs.
England toured India the following year for a three-match series and won 2-0. This time, Nayudu was appointed skipper well in advance, and although he did his best, it wasn’t enough. Some outstanding individual performances notwithstanding, the experienced touring side had the better of its opponent.
Nayudu was very much a part of the side that toured England in 1936, but only as a player. The Maharajkumar of Vizianagaram (Vizzy), whose bid to preside over the team of 1932 had come a cropper, won this time around, and became captain. He was a poor cricketer, and it showed. The 1936 tour was marred by squabbles and intrigue. Lala Amarnath, who had scored a hundred on Test debut against England at Mumbai in 1933-34 was banished from the squad on the grounds of insubordination. Nayudu was not treated well, and there was even a claim that Vizzy had rewarded a member of the team with a Test cap because the latter had abused Nayudu at the breakfast table. India’s openers Vijay Merchant and Syed Mushtaq Ali put on a record 203 in the second Test at Manchester. India lost the series 0-2, but what the side would have achieved with Amarnath in it, and an effective captain in charge, is anybody’s guess.
The team that toured in 1946 was the first to visit England after World War II. The side also earned the distinction of being the first-ever cricket team to undertake a tour by air. Prior to the tour, Vijay Merchant had been considered a frontrunner for captaincy, only for Iftikar Ali Khan Pataudi to get the job. Merchant, who was named vice-captain, overcame his disappointment with some outstanding batting. The team did well after losing the first Test and returned with the reputations of most of its players enhanced. One of them – an all-rounder named Mulvantrai Mankad – completed the double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets on the tour.
Ironic as it may seem, the first three Indian teams to tour England after independence and partition, were a lot more unsuccessful than their three counterparts of the pre-independence era. One would have imagined that a team representing a free nation would have given a better account of itself than one representing a colony, but that wasn’t the case.
Vijay Hazare’s side of 1952 was on a high when it reached England, thanks to the previous series against the same team on home turf, which it had tied 1-1. The victory in the fifth Test of the 1951-52 series at Chennai was in fact India’s first in Tests. The Test featured two centurions from the Indian camp, both of whom were part of the touring party – Pahlanji Umrigar and Pankaj Roy.
However, not everything was hunky-dory. The England team that had toured India in 1951-52 was a second-string side, with most of the heavyweights of the time declining to visit India. Secondly, and far more critically from the Indian team’s point of view, the man who had taken twelve wickets in that Chennai Test was not in the squad that arrived in England in 1952.
Mulvantrai ‘Vinoo’ Mankad had asked Col C.K. Nayudu, the then Chairman of Selectors, for a guarantee that he would be picked for the England tour, in which case he would reject a lucrative offer to play in the leagues in England. However, Nayudu, for reasons known to himself, refused to give a guarantee, and Mankad declared himself unavailable for the tour. It was a pity that the communication gap between the two titans wasn’t bridged.
India’s annihilation in the very first Test of the 1952 series at Headingley, Leeds called for desperate measures, and the upshot was a call to Mankad to join the team for the second Test at Lord’s and the rest of the series. What happened at Lord’s is history, as Mankad contributed 72 with the bat, then bowled the small matter of 73 overs to finish with figures of five for 196, and proceeded to score 184 in the second innings. He then took three more wickets in England’s second innings, but it wasn’t enough to prevent a defeat. His performance ranks amongst the best by an all-rounder in the game’s 1999 Test-old history.
There were some notable individual performances on that tour, as in the next one in 1959, but the Indians failed to fire as a unit. England won the four-match 1952 series 3-0, and swept the 1959 series 5-0.
It wasn’t that Indians lacked talent. Indeed, they possessed loads of it, but the issues encountering them were a combination of the technical and the mental. The batsmen found it difficult to come to terms with English pitches and conditions, save one or two individuals. The partition of the country in 1947 probably robbed an entire generation of the opportunity to hone their skills at home against quality pace bowlers. A fair number of the fast bowlers who had represented, or come close to representing India before 1947, hailed from the region that became Pakistan after partition. While the likes of Dattu Phadkar, Col. Surendranath, Ramesh Divecha and Ramakant Desai, to name just a few, did take the new ball for India at different stages in the 1950s, they were outnumbered by the ‘slow men.’
The 1950s saw spin being established as India’s greatest cricketing tradition, but on English pitches it wasn’t enough to take twenty opposition wickets. Some of the greatest exponents of that art played during that period, but these individuals were let down by poor fielding and catching.
The national team’s cause wasn’t helped by the captaincy changing hands several times in the 1950s. The 1959 tour of England was preceded by a home series against the West Indies, in which the team had as many as four captains. A fifth captain – D.K. Gaekwad – was appointed for the tour of England, and a sixth – Pankaj Roy – deputised for him in the Lord’s Test. Both men were then overlooked for the top honour in the 1959-60 season, and Gulabrai Ramchand, who had not been on the England tour, was appointed. Those were turbulent times.
The 1960s commenced with an attempt to stabilise the top. The 26-year-old Nariman Contractor was named captain for a home series against Pakistan, the idea being to give him a long reign at the top given that his best years seemed to be ahead of him. Contractor went on to preside over a 2-0 subjugation of Ted Dexter’s England in 1961-62. The gains made from India’s first-ever series win over England were however nullified on the subsequent trip to the Caribbean. India were blown away 0-5, and the captain nearly died after being hit on the head by speedster Charlie Griffith. Contractor never played Test cricket again as a result, and his 21-year-old deputy, whom the selectors had wanted to put under an apprenticeship for the next few years was pitchforked to the captaincy.
India’s new captain was a conqueror of adversity. The loss of an eye did not deter Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, a teenage cricketing prodigy, from picking up the bat within months of the accident. He led India in a five-Test series against England at home in 1963-64, which ended in a 0-0 stalemate. The high point of the series was his double hundred in the Delhi Test. That in itself was sensational, for not many Indian batsmen had performed this feat in Tests.
What ‘Tiger’ Pataudi achieved over the next few seasons was far more critical. An outstanding fielder himself, he got his players to improve by leaps and bounds in the field, quite literally. Catching standards improved as well, and they complemented the greatest spin quartet in the history of the sport. It was under Pataudi’s leadership that Bishan Bedi, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar and Srinivas Venkataraghavan made their Test debuts, and Erapalli Prasanna blossomed.
All four spinners were part of the team that toured England in 1967, with Pataudi at the helm. The Indian public was a lot more optimistic than it had been in the 1950s, and justifiably so, for Pataudi knew the conditions inside out, having spent his formative years in the country. Chandrakant Borde, his deputy, had played in the leagues and had scored two Test hundreds against Garry Sobers’ mighty West Indies side just a little while before.
Unfortunately, the batsmen let their team down, not for the first or last time in series against England, as indeed in the history of Indian cricket. They did make a statement in the first Test at Leeds, when India scored 510 after being asked to follow-on, 386 runs behind. Pataudi led the charge with an innings of 148. But they were as inconsistent as their predecessors of 1952 and 1959, thereafter.
In their post-tour analyses, the pundits noted that it was one thing to possess potential, and another to translate it into performance. It would also help, they said, if some members of the squad overcame their mental hang-ups while playing a country that had ruled theirs for more than a century.
Devendra Prabhudesai is Manager – Media Relations and Corporate Affairs – BCCI. He has also written five books, including ‘SMG – a biography of Sunil Gavaskar,’ and ‘The Nice Guy Who Finished First, a biography of Rahul Dravid.’
