Anindya Dutta recounts India’s tennis journey, since 1885

Gaurav Kanthwal

Who is the greatest tennis player India has ever produced? Leander Paes, right? Wrong. Ramanathan Krishnan, says Paes. “...getting to two Wimbledon semifinals (1960, 1961) and World No. 3, how can you possibly beat that?” he asks.

Paes, winner of 18 Major titles and India’s only Olympic medal winner in tennis, has been canonised as the nation’s greatest-ever doubles player. However, both him and author Anindya Dutta feel no Indian has even remotely touched the heights scaled by Krishnan, the undisputed ‘king of Indian tennis’.

‘Advantage India’ by Dutta introduces readers to former greats of the game, the journeymen and the millennials of Indian tennis. It covers all the major players, their achievements and their place in the pantheon of the sport in the country. The book is a tribute to all the Indian lawn tennis players since 1885, when India hosted her first-ever tournament, the inaugural Punjab Lawn Tennis Championships at the Gymkhana Club in Lahore. A sizeable portion of the book goes towards highlighting the men who played the sport in India before 1950, of which there is little recorded history.

Divided into five sections, the beginning of the sport in the country, Indian tennis’ coming of age, Indians and their success in the doubles format, rise of women’s tennis and the future of sport in the country, the book outlines the part each player played in taking the sport to where it is today. Given the Indian players’ success in the doubles format over the years, the eight-page analysis about ‘What is it about Indians and Doubles’ is a short but engrossing read.

The book also brings into focus the many firsts in Indian tennis. B Nehru, who entered the Wimbledon Championships in 1905 as a British player, qualified as the first Indian origin player at a Major championship. Dr Ali Azhar Hassanally Fyzee (Hassan-Ali), with his 65.7 per cent (223-116) win record in tournament singles, stands out more than 100 years later too.

Mohammed Sleem, who beat Lewis Deanne 6-3 6-2 6-3 in the final of the Punjab Championships at Lahore on February 13, 1915, became the first native Indian to win a major championship in India. Sumant Misra, one of India’s post-Independence greats, is widely referred to as the ‘grandfather of Indian tennis’. Our watershed moment, however, came in 1949 when India hosted the first official international tennis tournament, the Asian Championships, at South Club in Calcutta.

The book reiterates that individual brilliance apart, Indian tennis draws a lot from its Davis Cup history — reaching the final in 1966, 1974 and 1987. The game’s golden age began in the 1960s when Ramanathan Krishnan, Premjit Lall and Jaidip Mukerjea (The Three Musketeers), later joined by Vijay Amritraj, went on to make the most formidable Davis Cup side in the history of Indian tennis. The amateur players of yore faced the same challenges — financial constraints, players’ rift, internal politics, preferential treatment of the top-10 versus the rest — as the professional players face on the tour today.

The greatest success of Dutta, a seasoned author and columnist, lies in getting the players to talk about their peers. What puts one off, however, is how he repeatedly sidesteps the controversies with phrases such as ‘be that as it may’. The individual achievements of Leander Paes, Sania Mirza, Mahesh Bhupathi and Rohan Bopanna as also the present crop have all been well-documented; it is their ego clashes and the association’s failure to promote the sport which the reader would be keener to know about.

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