Raja, Rinku and a tainted Run-out

 It’s almost midnight in London. A group of Indian gentlemen are huddled over a telephone, nervously listening to the tring tring of the trunk call in progress. ‘Click’, call gets picked up. It's probably picked up by a servant. Few whispers and a minute later the Maharaja of Patiala is at the other end, still groggy in the wee hours of the day. The call ends with the Maharaja’s stern words of rebuke and warning. Brows sweating in the cool English midnight, the group of gentlemen disperse with disappointment and their heads down. 

It's Year 1932. This is the Indian cricket team’s second tour of England, to play their first ever test match. The team comprised amateurs, royalty, also a couple of promising cricketers, was led by the King of Porbandar, who jokingly is said to have acquired more Rolls Royce than runs in that tour. After a poor run in the first-class games of the tour, he volunteered to step down as captain on the eve of the test match and handed over the captaincy to CK Naidu - who would go on to have a successful tour with 3 centuries, and a worthy cricketer by all means.

 

Still marred with feudal subservient mindset and an inferiority complex, the team could not imagine playing under a commoner (Naidu). This led to break out of a rebellion of sorts. Few secret meetings later it was decided to call and consult the Maharaja of Patiala who was the erstwhile patron cum funder of the team.

 

Apparently, Maharaja fumed at the team's reluctance to play under Naidu, and warned them to fall in line immediately.

 

There is another infamous tale of the skipper of the Indian side - Raja Vizianagaram ‘Vizzy’, on the 1936 tour of England, growing insecure of the talented all-rounder Lala Amarnath and effecting his ouster from the team mid-tour on the fabricated disciplinary grounds. It's also believed Vizzy once gifted Mustaq Ali a gold watch in exchange of running out Vijay Merchant. 

 

Indian cricket lore is replete with eccentric, idiosyncratic and hedonistic tales of Royalties and their entitled obsession with the game. These histrionics aside, in all fairness the contribution - both on field and off field, of Indian Maharajas, Nawabs and Princes in sowing the seed of cricket and nurturing its root so deep that today India has become a cricketing powerhouse, is undeniable and indelible. 

 

Ranjitsinghji was the first Indian to play test cricket and scored a century on debut while playing for England against Australia. His nephew Duleep Singh played a dozen tests for England. A huge credit for establishing cricketing culture in those early days goes to Maharaj of Patiala. Kingly influences of Royals of Holkars and Baroda in the proliferation of the sport too has been seminal. 

 

You can love, hate, ridicule, detest but cricket & royalties (in India) is a connection that can’t be ignored, especially in the last century.

 

Cut to Nov 23,2023. It's only 5 days past India's heartbreaking defeat in the World Cup final. A 5’ 5 lad from a non-descript neighbourhood in Aligarh smashes a last ball six to win a T20 game against Australia. This is not enough to alleviate the pain of the finals but gives cricketing fans a flicker of hope that’s all’s not lost. What’s noticeable and enthusing is that small towners like Rinku have defiantly become the mainstay of  the team’s strength. Just a week earlier another small towner from Amroha, Shami, had earned global accolades for one of the best displays of pace bowling by a pacer in the World Cups. 

 

Today cricket and its vagaries are no longer headquartered in palaces and royal banquets. Yadavs and Patels from the hinterland have gently displaced Pataudis and Gaekwads. In a very fascinating tale of this transition, the country has witnessed this shift in stages.

 

Right after independence the princely states, Rajputanas and Riyasats were rendered irrelevant in governance and also cricket. The cricket hegemony shifted to upper caste, urban elites of Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The players, administration and related commerce was concentrated in these privileged geographies until the turn of the century. For almost four decades the majority of the team was composed of big city boys of the likes of Kirmani and Vengsarkar.

 

It was the early 2000s that saw the emergence of players from tier 2 & 3 cities. Combination of factors like advent of cricket broadcast, 83 World Cup win and rise of iconic players like Tendulkar, Gavaskar and Kapil Dev contributed to this tectonic shift. Emergence and success of Dhoni, Raina, Kaif from the small cities/towns further fueled the popularisation and penetration of the sport in semi urban areas. This inspired an entire amateurish cricket playing generation. Becoming a professional cricketer now became an achievable, tangible ambition for an average Indian.

 What led to the next stage of grass root democratisation of the sport was the juggernaut of IPL. Up until then the pursuit of the sport wasn’t lucrative enough unless one is representing the national side. The probability of which is nanoscopically low given the fact that cricket is the only sport played in a country of 1.5 Bn population . IPL suddenly increased that probability multi-folds. Ravi Bishnois and Mukesh Kumars while playing school cricket could seriously think of pursuing cricket as a career option, and it no longer remained a statistical impossibility. The money and the clout that came to BCCI with the success of IPL set a chain reaction which after a decade and a half of the start of IPL, has posed a privileged problem of overflowing bench-strength to the selectors and administrators. It’s not a far-fetched extrapolation that India could be considering fielding more than one Indian team in the future, given the availability of an enormous pool and depth of players and prodigies. 

 Decent remunerations, umpteen T20 leagues, further strengthening of the domestic ecosystem at every level and day by day improving infrastructure has led to further penetration of the game to such an extent that the number of players in the team from urban centres have become a minority. 

 

 Bumrah, from a humble family, is the current leader of Indian fast bowling unit

Tiger Pataudi was once asked by Ian Chappel what he did when not playing cricket. To which he haughtily replied ‘I am a bloody Prince’. Today’s cricketing superstar on the contrary doesn’t bear a royal lineage but sold pani-puri for sustenance, did odd jobs for survival and is a son of a watchman or an auto driver, and could be hailing from Dindigul or Gopalgunj. This strikingly resonates with the turnaround of India and a common Indian’s fortunes too. 

 

Today, no Vizzy would be able to manipulate the team and players by throwing the weight of his riches and clout. Intriguingly, the level of democratisation and meritocracy that we would like to see hasn’t made it to the cricket administration, which unfortunately is still dominated by political heavyweights. Has the Royalty merely shifted from the seat of King to that of Kingmaker? Let’s hope someday an administrator does a Maharaja of Porbandar and makes way for a worthy Naidu, and we see a revolution which takes the sport to the unprecedented heights of success and glory.