Willow the king is monarch grand

IN 1956, I attended a cricket coaching camp at Chail, set up to be a rival of Simla (it was not Shimla those days), by Maharaja of Patiala Bhupinder Singh. My father had talked about Chail where he had faced Mohammad Nissar, the fastest bowler India has produced. He square cut him to the boundary more than once. When he got out, he remembered a man from the crowd saying, ‘Yeh to Hammond ki tareh cut marta hai’ (he cuts like Hammond). Walter Hammond was the great English batsman and later captain of the English team. I remember an article by Don Bradman on the 1928 Ashes series. This was the series in which Don Bradman joined the Australian team as a rookie. It read: “We lost the first Test match because of a double century by Hammond. We lost the second Test because of another double century by Hammond. We lost the third Test because of a century in each innings by Hammond.”

But this is a year of revival of the first Indian team to tour England in 1911, with Maharaja Bhupinder Singh (19) as captain. Earlier attempts had fallen through because of the stupid rivalry among three main teams — Hindus, Muslims and Parsees. In 1911, the knot was untied; the team consisted of all three communities, led by a Sikh, who for his activities outside the cricket ground was to become a legend. Two Dalits were also in the team, Palwankar Baloo and his brother Shivram. Baloo, a left-hand spinner, was the finest bowler in the team and returned with laurels and 100 wickets. All the matches were two-day affairs and like the two Parsee teams, which toured England in 1886 and 1888, this team fared rather poorly.

Father also told me that Chail had one of the fastest cricket pitches in the world. When I reached there, I found a concrete pitch with a coir matting draped over it. All the cricketers from Punjab were there, Gurpal Singh, Chaman Lal and Lokesh Khanna, Harold Ghosh, Jitender Billoo et al. The oldies, our seniors like Harpal Singh Makkar, were not there. Vijay Mehra had not arrived on the scene as yet. The great Lala Amarnath was the manager, coach, organiser, call him what you will. Lala would make us run a mile in the mornings. He would run about 3 miles himself. He was keeping in shape to manage the 1958 team to England, that disastrous tour with Dattaji Rao Gaikwad as captain. My brother was in the cricket team with Gaikwad at Baroda College and thought much of him. But he wasn’t really Test class.

The most interesting times were when Lala would unfurl his stories from the past. He would smoke his pipe and regale us. For instance, he told us about the famous (in those days) Test match when Jasu Patel, off-break bowler, wrecked the Australian team with nine wickets in the first innings at Kanpur. Since I have stayed for four years in Junagadh, I am aware of Patel’s reputation in Kathiawar. Some cricketers thought he snapped his elbow while bowling. Amarnath was chairman of the selectors. He found the Kanpur pitch being watered by untreated water from the Ganga. That meant river sand had settled on the pitch, which would break. He insisted on Jasu Patel being selected. In the first innings, Patel took nine wickets. In the second innings, he and Polly Umrigar polished off nine of the wickets and India won for the first time against Australia.

I was in the 10th class in school and came to Amritsar in 1951-52 to watch Amarnath play against the MCC. Swaranjit Singh Bhatt scored 25 and Amarnath 97 not out against Statham and Ridgway. Amarnath also told us about his travails as a youngster. The selectors were Englishmen, and his English was no good. Muslim cricketers told the selectors that Amarnath was an opening batsman. He was at sea playing the new ball and failed. At last he managed to convey that he had never opened. Next, he scored in the eighties. Still the selectors were unhappy. Then he scored a double century and got selected to face Jardine and his men and scored India’s first Test century.

After Partition, communal bickering in office and sports has been taken care of.

The problems now differ, not thinking enough of others. For instance, in the recent national ‘Unlocking’ telecast, the holidays mentioned were Guru Purnima, the month of Sawan, Raksha Bandhan, Janmashtami, Ganesh Chaturthi, Onam, Kathi Bihu, Navratri, Durga Puja, Dasehra, Diwali and Chaath Puja. Not a mention of a Christian or Muslim festival, as if they don’t matter. And what about Christmas, so felicitously renamed by Madam Smriti Irani as “Good Governance Day”?