Sachin Tendulkar: A Definitive Biography

the bandra boy

Someone’s a witness, Someone a bearer, Someone’s a narrator, Someone a listener…, What then, is life?

A tale told by someone to someone, about someone else:

That is its only meaning

– Ramesh Tendulkar, Prajakta

(A collection of his Marathi poems)

November 1983. A sizeable crowd had gathered at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium for the third day of the fourth Test between India and West Indies. It wasn’t the prospect of India batting that had drawn the crowd. It was one name that had: Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards. Part of this eager mass of cricket-crazed humanity that trundled up the stands of the Wankhede that morning was a ten-year-old boy from Bandra, Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. He had come along with his elder brother, Ajit Ramesh Tendulkar.

India had scored 463 in their first innings, and on a slow, turning and rather scuffed wicket, the West Indians were expected to stay subdued against the home team’s spinners. All of them did, except Richards.

The West Indies were forty-seven for two when Richards arrived and began only as he could have, with a hell-I-care attitude. Casual but exuberant, he cut and drove savagely, crunching good-length balls from middle and off-stump away through mid-wicket. Throughout this assault, it wasn’t as if he didn’t give a chance to the Indians. He did. Two, in fact: the first when he was at forty and then at fifty-eight. But as was the opponent team’s wont, both catches were missed.

In the post-lunch session, Richards launched a particularly brutal assault on Shivlal Yadav’s off-spin. In less than half an hour, Yadav was hit for five fours, four of them between long-on and mid-wicket. It was a combination of sheer physical prowess and fine art. There was power, a fine eye for detail, timing and placement, all rolled into one. The crowd applauded deliriously as Richards reached his hundred off just 130 balls, with thirteen fours and a six.

Childhood impressions are forever. Ten-year-old Sachin saw in Richards an entertainer, a master stroke-player, a skilful improviser who didn’t have a pile-on-the-runs approach, but batted as if he didn’t bother either about the sniff of a hundred or a double hundred. He just wanted to enjoy his cricket. Above all, Viv Richards was the embodiment of the modern game. A killer of the cricket ball.

A day earlier, Sachin had seen Dilip Balwant Vengsarkar (the two later played together in several matches) in full flow being suddenly snapped up at gully by Richards. The catching too was imperious, and the fielding bossy.

If little Tendulkar desired an endorsement of his own natural attitude toward cricket, this was it. If he wanted a bolstering of the belief that this attitude was right, again, this was it.

It is therefore my contention that this match marked the psychological birth of a great cricketer.

*

The imperious are, in a strange way, impervious to tradition. Even when they have one foot firmly rooted in it, the other is a long way forward or behind – in either case, distant. Sachin Tendulkar has had this distance since early childhood. The very fact that he became a cricketer from a locality called Sahitya Sahwas is proof of that.

A more uncricketing place than Sahitya Sahwas for the birth of a great cricketer is hard to imagine. This colony of litterateurs (as the literal translation of Sahitya Sahwas goes) in suburban Bandra in Mumbai boasts of an academic culture where traditions of scholarship, collections of books and ways of writing are handed down from one generation to another. Cricket, its culture and cricketing equipment would struggle to find a place on the last rung of Sahitya Sahwas legacy ladder.

The government of the western Indian state of Maharashtra set up the Sahwas as a co-operative housing society for writers and poets in the 1960s. The plan was twofold: one, to bestow State honour on well-known litterateurs by offering them houses at concessional rates, and two, to create an atmosphere for intellectual activity. The plan succeeded as leading members of the literary community came to settle here.

One such family that moved into Sahwas from its small home in Dadar was that of Marathi poet and professor, Ramesh Tendulkar. Tendulkar bought a flat in a building called Ushakkal, meaning, The Dawn. It is unlikely this choice of building had anything to do with his poetry, but it is interesting because Professor Tendulkar had often tended toward darkness in his verse. In one of his poems he wrote:

Surya vishwala prakashit karto

Hey ek ardhasatyach...

Ardhe vishwa tya kshani

Purna andhaarat budalele aste

(It is a half-truth that the sun lights up the universe... for in that moment, half the universe is plunged into total darkness.)

In the same poem, he expressed concern over the discovery of dark spots on the sun, saying this finding had fuelled a new fear in his heart. However, all that was to change soon after as the professor’s youngest son, Sachin, who was to prove the brightest spot in his life, was born on 24 April 1973. And it was in Ushakkal that he grew up.

*

The year 1973 was a curious one in the history of post-independent India. The rate of inflation had registered an all-time high of twenty per cent as international oil prices went through the roof; the monsoons had failed; there was massive labour unrest and strikes; factories had shut down and the decline in production hurt the economy further. The then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay, had become the de facto power centre much to the dismay of all those who believed in democratic values; Sanjay’s Maruti car affair had snowballed into India’s Watergate; word of increasing government corruption spread to all corners of the country; and veteran socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan launched his Youth for Democracy movement to cleanse the political system, sparking unrest among a large number of idealistic youngsters. Amidst all this, the one happy news was that the Indian cricket team led by Ajit Wadekar had triumphed 2-1 over Tony Lewis’ Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC).

Still, more than these standout stories, it was the few years immediately before and after 1973 that made it an oddly remarkable year. In fact, judgements about these years were so widely contradictory that Sachin’s year of birth would appear to be an accommodation for the warring factions of hope and despair in India’s national identity.

In the parliamentary polls held in February 1971, Indira Gandhi rode handsomely to power with her slogan of Garibi Hatao (Remove Poverty). She was young for Indian politics, ambitious and confident, and appeared to symbolize a progressive India coming into her own. That image was further crystallized when, early in December 1971, India launched a war to liberate East Pakistan from the military dictatorship in West Pakistan. When the Pakistani forces surrendered in Dhaka to Lt General Jagjit Singh Aurora in less than a fortnight, Indira became strong enough to evoke slogans such as Indira is India and India is Indira. One of her strongest political opponents and later India’s prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, took the adulation into the realm of religion. He compared her to the Hindu goddess Durga, the slayer of evil forces.

In the middle of 1972, Indira Gandhi hit a new high. She signed the Simla Agreement with the then Pakistan President, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that, importantly for India, had a clause saying India and Pakistan would in future refrain from use of force and resolve all issues bilaterally. Pakistan had sought to internationalize the Kashmir issue and this clause was seen to have cancelled out its demand for involving other nations in the dispute. Indira had by now emerged as a world leader of no mean stature.

However, hopes began fading soon thereafter. Growing political corruption coupled with Sanjay Gandhi’s terror tactics resulted in a kind of fear psychosis across India. Indira refused to listen when Jayaprakash Narayan along with some other conscientious citizens and even some of her advisers and government officials warned her of the consequences of his behaviour. She heard rumour-mongers eagerly who fed her all kinds of tales. To begin with she was anyway hemmed in by the grave economic crisis of 1973 and even tried to cut government expenditure, but the nation’s problems were ultimately overshadowed by perceived threats. Indira began her inexorable march towards acquiring absolute power, even if that meant a subversion of democracy. Meanwhile, Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement gathered widespread support in 1974 and posed severe problems for her. So did the George Fernandes-led railway strike.

However, the entire country seemed to have temporarily forgotten its problems and welcomed India’s foray into the nuclear age when, under Mrs Gandhi’s leadership, it carried out successful nuclear tests in Pokhran in May 1974. But the demons did not leave Indira, and after the Allahabad High Court in June 1975 set aside her election to the Lok Sabha on grounds of unfair practices, she responded by imposing a state of Emergency in India. Opposition leaders were arrested, the press was gagged, and all dissent stifled.

In more ways than one, the story of Indian cricket in this period reflects the story of Indian democracy. For Indian cricket 1971 was the most glorious year. Sunil Gavaskar’s Test debut coincided with India’s first win against the West Indies. The young batsman from Ramesh Tendulkar’s city of Mumbai bettered George Headley’s record of maximum runs in a debut series. He got 774 runs at a baffling average of 154.80. After this victory, the team went to England and beat them on their home soil for the first time. B. S. Chandrasekhar, revered for his googlies, got six for thirty-eight and bowled out England for 101 on the fourth afternoon of the last Test at the Oval, leaving only 173 for India to chase. Ajit Wadekar, the then captain of the triumphant team, again from Tendulkar’s city, and almost every member of his team became a national hero. The team got an incredible welcome on its return home. The flight was first taken to New Delhi for a meeting with the Prime Minister, and in Mumbai, more than a lakh people lined the route of the team’s motorcade and waved jubilantly as the players journeyed twenty kilometres from the airport to the heart of the city. The 2-1 win against the MCC in 1972-73 was the third in a row.

But just a year later, in 1974, India’s England tour turned out to be disastrous. At Lord’s, India were all out for forty-two after England scored 629. Out of the three Tests, India lost two by an innings. The debacle continued off the field too. Captain Wadekar and one of India’s star spin bowlers, Bishen Singh Bedi, had a major clash that affected the junior players; one Indian player was arrested for shoplifting, and the incident was seen as a national disgrace; Bedi was pulled up by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) for appearing in a television programme in England; and the entire team was admonished when it arrived late for a reception held in its honour by the Indian High Commissioner. Ajit Wadekar, the biggest victim of the series, never played for India again. In almost every sense, India went from big hopes in 1971 to despair in 1975; and the year 1973 was the uncomfortable middle of a sad chapter. It seem to mirror poet Ramesh Tendulkar’s darker portents more than ever before.

*

But the Tendulkars, of course, had reason to see things in a brighter light. They named the new arrival in their family Sachin, after the noted Hindi film music composer, Sachin Dev Burman, a favourite in the Tendulkar home. Sachin had three siblings: Nitin, Savita and Ajit, the last being eleven years his elder. All three were born of his father’s first wife. After her death, Professor Tendulkar had married her sister, Rajni.

Ramesh Tendulkar hailed from Alibaug, a village 130 kms away from the island city of Mumbai. He came to Mumbai some time before independence to pursue higher education. While studying, he took up a job in the Modus Operandi Bureau of Mumbai police which was responsible for maintaining and storing the city police’s records.

Although young Ramesh had to divide his time between his job and lessons, he won the Tarkhadkar gold medal at his Bachelor of Arts exams and the Na Chi Kelkar gold medal for his Masters in Arts from the University of Mumbai. After this he joined Siddharth College in Fort as a Marathi professor. Here, on his own initiative, he took extra classes for cricketers who could not attend lectures every day due to their playing schedule and didn’t charge them anything. (Sunil Gavaskar maintains the professor was gifted with a son like Sachin because of what he did for these young cricketers.)

As a teacher, Tendulkar did not seek to mould students in his own image. He tried to help them see the world as it was, in all its gloom and beauty. Sachin once said that his approach towards his own children was pretty much the same:

He never sat me down on his lap to tell me anything. It was his behaviour, his conduct that taught me a lot. I learnt from him that one must not be puffed up with pride in victory and one must not be crushed in defeat.¹

After some years of teaching at Siddharth, Ramesh Tendulkar joined Kirti College in Dadar in Central Mumbai, where he eventually became head of the Marathi department (Sachin studied at the same college later). Fellow professors at the college remember him as a fair-complexioned man, slightly obese, with a wide forehead and unkempt hair. He was quiet and would not talk much even with those he knew. In the company of close friends, though, he would open up and chat for hours, ‘emptying any number of tea-cups’.

To Ramesh Tendulkar’s friends, what characterized him above all else was his lack of self-importance. He had no interest in academic positions and was unsuited to political ambition. His one passion was to spend his life reading the Marathi poets, V. V. Shirwadkar (a.k.a. Kusumagraj), Bal Kavi and the English poets Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats and Eliot. He was so influenced by Kusumagraj’s poetry that he named his first collection of poems Manas Lahari (Thought Currents) after Kusumagraj’s classic Jeevan Lahari (Life Currents). Some of the poems in Manas Lahari, written in 1948-49, were published in a literary magazine in the 1950s, but the collection was brought out in book form only after Ramesh Tendulkar’s death by his eldest son Nitin who, unlike the other sons Ajit and Sachin, took to literature. Many publisher-friends had tried to persuade Professor Tendulkar to bring out the collection earlier, but he had consistently frustrated their efforts.

Professor Tendulkar saw reading not as a passive exercise but as a dialogue with the minds of the past. The academic world is divided over whether a reader can understand an author wholly as he understood himself or must unavoidably make his own interpolations that make the writer’s thoughts and sentiments unimportant. Tendulkar felt a reader could do both – understand an author in the light of his intentions and then construct one’s own text, well beyond the author’s control. His analytical study of Bal Kavi’s poems, again published as a book only after his passing, is reflective of this attitude that mocks at both the traditional and fashionable academia.

Tendulkar’s aesthetic instincts also drew him to music, films and theatre. He was so taken by these arts that he hated the idea of entering a cinema hall, a playhouse or a music hall just when a show was about to begin and leaving it the moment it ended. He believed in the atmospherics and wanted audiences to aid it. ‘One must reach before a performance begins and wait for a while after it ends. An audience must participate, for the experience is incomplete if one does not take in the atmosphere,’ he told his friends often. (One does not know about cinema-goers, play-goers or music aficionados, but lakhs of cricket lovers in stadiums across the world have religiously followed his principle whenever his own son, Sachin has turned out to bat.)

What made Ramesh Tendulkar all the more special to his friends was his sense of humour. A Marathi magazine called Pradeep, edited by poet Praful Dutt, had published Tendulkar’s poems in some of its issues. The magazine shut soon afterwards. ‘What else would happen (if they published my poems)?’ Tendulkar had asked.

The professor would be away at work for most part of the day. So would his wife Rajni, who worked with the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation or LIC. So Sachin, the toddler, spent most of his time with his siblings and the maid in the house, Laxmibai Ghije. The maid, in fact, was the first bowler he faced in life. When he was two-and-a-half, she bowled to him with a plastic ball, which Sachin would hit with a dhoka, a wooden washing stick found in many Indian households that roughly resembles a cricket bat.

As he began to grow, Sachin showed himself to be a most impetuous child, and as unwieldy as the curly mop of hair he had at that time. He would not sit in one place for long and preferred running to walking. He always wanted to be out of the house, and on to the colony playground.

As a child, Sachin was also known to be a big bully. His close friend Atul Ranade, who met him in kindergarten at the New English High School, Bandra East, recollects:

I distinctly remember meeting Sachin first in junior KG. He had created a big chaos by holding a boy against a bench and beating him up. With his huge locks and strong body, he was a brattish, bullying character who always wanted to dominate proceedings. He was the kind of person who easily registered in the minds of others by his deeds. In both junior and senior KG, he stood out from among all of us little ones.

All of us used to fight during the break. Sachin once bullied a boy much older than him and thrashed him. The boy waited at the school gate with some friends at the end of the day, so that he could give Sachin a reply. Sachin simply vanished. Nobody knew where he went.

This was the time Sachin started playing cricket with a tennis ball on the 30x30 yard playground in Sahitya Sahwas with other children in the colony. How was his first feel on the cricket bat? What was the grip like? How did his feet move? Did his batting show at all that he was a natural? These details are essential because we are looking at a four or five-year-old boy taking to cricket without the conditioning of experience or training, and sans any recall factor which eventually shapes the style of a cricketer. For these details we would have to therefore rely on Sachin’s brother Ajit and his childhood friends like Sunil Harshe.

According to what they recollect, Sachin began by clutching the bat tightly around the bottom of the bat handle. So the wrong grip that later became a topic for much discussion was wrong from the word go. Like the grip, the batting too was instinctive, almost carefree. He had just about begun to watch batsmen on television but didn’t copy anyone. His feet moved correctly most of the time. He was authoritarian with the ball in that he loved hitting it hard and ferociously and into the foliage in the colony. This was a most useful practice on the 30x30 yard playground, because there were hardly any fielders close to the foliage or the buildings. He could send the ball in that direction without fear of losing his wicket. If he plodded, there was always the chance of being caught close to the crease.

Sachin was luckier than many other boys playing cricket in Mumbai, for the surface on which he played his earliest game was even. He therefore learnt to sense overpitched, underpitched and good-length balls and adjust to their respective lengths. The surfaces of so many streets, street corners and so-called maidans in the city where boys often play their cricket are so rough that there are big holes all across the field, a major crack where a half-volley could land and ridges where the bowler may hope to put his good-length ball. Uneven surfaces have their own uses: they prepare a batsman for all kinds of playing conditions. But a player would rather play his first game of cricket on a sound surface, if only to discern correctly the basics about the variety of deliveries in a bowler’s repertoire.

Sachin nevertheless also had to adjust to erratic bowling and unpredictable bounce in many a colony games as a result of some enthusiastic albeit amateur cricket. His brother Ajit noticed that even in those early years, Sachin made quick adjustments, had a good feel for the ball and judged its line and length well.

But cricket wasn’t the only game developing into a passion; Sachin loved tennis just as much. As an eight-year-old he had a great fascination for John McEnroe whose legendary clashes with Bjorn Borg were then splashed across TV screens, and in 1981, Sachin sat glued before the small screen at home as McEnroe defeated Borg at Wimbledon in one of their more famous finals.

He celebrated crazily when McEnroe won, much to the chagrin of his brother Ajit and sister Savita who were rooting for Borg, and soon demanded from family elders a tennis racquet, a headband and two wristbands. He wanted to look like his idol. He had a McEnroe hairdo already, the other accoutrements would complete the image, he thought.

McEnroe madness has more than just anecdotal importance in the life of Tendulkar. Sachin seemed to have imbibed from the maverick tennis star the quality of raw aggressiveness, severity in dealing with opponents and a never-say-die attitude. Yet there was something McEnroe offered that was undesirable. His opponent Borg – offered just the opposite. Sachin left out the undesirable from his hero, and picked up the opposite from Borg – calm in the middle of a storm, a refusal to show the turbulence within. McEnroe often blew his top, shouted and screamed out his anger, frustrations and disappointments. Borg, during the course of their great rivalry, experienced the same emotions ever so often; he never brought them to the surface.

Sachin similarly has always remained poised and seldom made on-or off-field demonstrations of his displeasures and disappointments. There have been several occasions – for instance, the captaincy crisis, when he wasn’t allowed to pick his team, the period after his father’s death, when he returned to cricket immediately, and the ball-tampering controversy in South Africa – when his mental and emotional equilibrium was definitely put to test. There have been innumerable instances of sledging, especially by the Australians, not easy to digest for the most level-headed. But except for the odd encounter with England’s ex-captain, Nasser Hussain, to protest against negative bowling tactics by Ashley Giles, Sachin has matched Borg’s mental make-up all the way. A psychological portrait of Tendulkar must therefore have place not only for John McEnroe but also the Swede, Bjorn Borg.

*

Sachin was soon considered good enough to be part of the Sahwas’ seniors cricket team. The reason: he batted aggressively, almost ferociously, hitting the tennis ball with abandon. Atul Ranade remembers how Sachin’s batting in the colony once gave him two stickers on the left thigh. Both ‘still stink.’

Sachin didn’t talk much with the older boys; he was, like his father, an introvert. But the transformation that took place when he held the bat was like the transformation of a quiet musical score into a savage choreography of hard hitting. Or like the thunderous noise of the crackers that he burst in the company of his siblings and all other Sahitya Sahwas children when Kapil Dev’s team defeated Clive Lloyd’s at Lord’s and lifted the Prudential World Cup in 1983.

With his love for outdoor activity and increasing enjoyment of the game, Sachin became something of a cricket zealot, and, for his family, a boy who showed determined rambunctiousness. He played all day in the colony, and when his mother called out for lunch or a glass of milk, he would go most reluctantly. When Rajni Tendulkar expressed concern over his non-stop cricket session, he would ask: ‘Aai, ugach kashala tension ghetes? (Mother, why are you unnecessarily tense?)’

It is said that Sahitya Sahwas gave Tendulkar just the environment he needed to begin his sporting endeavours. The spacious ground there is said to be crucial especially in view of shortage of playgrounds in a crammed city like Mumbai.

Former India batsman,Tendulkar’s close friend, and now one of India’s best known cricket commentators, Sanjay Manjrekar stresses the importance of galli (street) cricket:

What’s important for a young cricketer is to first enjoy the game a lot before he gets into serious cricket for schools and clubs. What I mean is playing galli cricket, with a soft ball, and playing it competitively. You know, when you are one of the main players. That’s a nice way to start. It’s important to realize you’re enjoying it. Your mother’s shouting from the balcony, asking you to come back, but you’re enjoying yourself. During this time, you’re gaining something valuable, you become street-smart and learn lessons in cricket competition. Your flair as a batsman and bowler develops more with a soft ball at that age than with a proper cricket ball. This is the ideal way to start cricket.

I think this happened to Tendulkar and many other batsmen coming from Mumbai during the 1980s. It doesn’t happen as much any more.

This is true. Good galli cricket gave Tendulkar the right foundations for a cricket career. Yet it could not have constituted the definitive push. There’s a reason for this. Although the privilege of space is not easily had in Mumbai, galli cricket goes on just as vigorously, or even more vigorously, in other parts of Mumbai every day as it does in Sahitya Sahwas. It is played across the city with a passion often unmatched by cricket at a far higher level. So at a very young age, Tendulkar underwent the same experience that anyone anywhere in Mumbai, introduced to the game of cricket early due to the game’s enormous popularity, would undergo.

So what, or who, was it that gave him the push? Tendulkar’s coach, the legendary Ramakant Acharekar, who played a big role in shaping the little cricketer, feels that most of the credit must go to Sachin’s family. Like Acharekar’s assessment of Tendulkar’s talent, this assessment too is correct.

There was room in little Tendulkar’s life for all the things that are part of a child’s world – nastiness, rebellion, a sense of reckless adventure. His what-problem-I-got-no-problem approach got bigger one day when, at age eleven, he thought of scaling a tree in Sahitya Sahwas to pluck mangoes with his friend Sunil Harshe. All the elders in the colony were then busy watching Dev Anand’s hugely successful film Guide on State-run television, so the boys decided to make the most of the opportunity.

As Sachin climbed up, Harshe saw him go dangerously high for comfort. He asked him not to go too far. Tendulkar didn’t listen, and as he tried to reach higher, had a bad fall. There was no major injury, but it hurt badly, and word reached Ajit Tendulkar of this enterprise.

It was at this point that Ajit Tendulkar made a decisive intervention in Sachin’s life. Enough of pointless adventurism; Sachin must now channelize his energies into something worthwhile, Ajit thought aloud. The eleven-year-old was told that since he was fascinated by cricket, it would be better for him to get into organized cricket practice. For this, he was told he would be taken to Shivaji Park, to the nets of noted coach Ramakant Acharekar. Ajit would request Acharekar to accept Sachin for the nets.

Less than a year earlier, Ajit had taken Sachin to the Wankhede to watch Richards. As Sachin walked toward Acharekar’s nets in the company of his brother, the careless beauty of Richards’ batting, and his callous indifference to bowlers, was fresh in his memory.

1 Ekach Shatkar, Sachin Special, 1998.

the city of cricket

History is a social process, in which individuals are engaged as social beings… What seems to me essential is to recognize in the great man an outstanding individual who is at once the representative and the creator of social forces.

– E. H. Carr, What is History?

All things that are now happening have happened in the past, and will happen in the future.

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born.

– W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

Why did Ajit Tendulkar think of cricket as the only possible vehicle for disciplining his younger brother and giving him a sense of direction? Why not any other sport, or any other activity, for that matter? This question isn’t satisfactorily answered by the sole fact that Sachin was showing some promise in colony cricket. To take this view would be gross over-simplification. There were other reasons for his choice. Ajit Tendulkar, in his role as elder brother, wasn’t an isolated individual acting in a vacuum.

Sachin’s brother, I reckon, represented Mumbai’s middle-class Maharashtrian society. It was from this standpoint that he approached Sachin’s problem: of increasing aimless mischief. We must grasp this standpoint and see the social and historical background in which it was rooted.

However, it’s not my purpose to see only why Ajit Tendulkar, in his own view, acted as he did. If I did that, this would be an odd biography that follows the misleading great-man theory of history. Hardly does anyone all the time, or even very often, act from intentions of which s/he’s completely aware, or which s/he’s willing to swear by. Tendulkar’s brother was no exception. He was the vehicle of a social group looking at certain means to improve its place in society. His act of taking his brother to Ramakant Acharekar’s nets was determined not only by his conscious motives, but equally, by outside forces guiding his unconscious will.

These forces took shape as a result of a continuous accumulation of experience. And the experience itself arrived and acquired character as a curious mix of the four Cs: cricket, city, community and (a whole lot of) concern.

In the last two centuries at least, economic sustenance has been the main concern of an average Maharashtrian’s life. In Mumbai in particular, the community’s economic backwardness can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, when Marathi-speaking elite, like the Pathare Prabhus, were displaced by ‘the more enterprising Bhatias and Banias’.¹

Maharashtrians in the city chose early to involve themselves in occupations outside the industrial and commercial sector. Even in the textiles, tobacco and printing industries, which flourished from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century and which had a good degree of Maharashtrian representation, Marathi-speaking people were involved mostly in manual labour. A survey in the early 1950s² shows that Maharashtrians lagged behind other communities staying in Mumbai in terms of occupational status and education. The percentage of Maharashtrians earning a middle to upper middle-class salary (500 to 1000 rupees per month) was conspicuously lower (four per cent) than people from the South Indian (7.9 per cent) and Gujarati (10.2 per cent) communities. As chemicals, pharmaceuticals, banking, insurance and other new service industries emerged after independence, Mumbai’s Maharashtrians came to be employed in proportion to their population percentage (forty-three per cent) only in the lower-income brackets designating manual labour.

This was also the period in which the flow of migrants to Mumbai increased, and the Marathi population took a dip in a city it claimed, along with other competing groups, as its own. Not that Maharashtrians ever had a powerful majority. Even in 1881, they had a thin lead – 50.2 per cent of the city’s total population. This rose, slightly, to 50.9 per cent in 1911. However, by 1931, the percentage had gone down to 47.6, and by 1961 it was 42.8. This decline can’t be called a catastrophe but was enough to alarm a people facing financial anxiety in a booming economy.

On the political front too, Maharashtrians had never played a big role in Mumbai in the nineteenth century, though they were ironically in the forefront of the national movement.

This too was due to commercial backwardness. During the British Raj, voting rights were restricted to tax payers, and wealth, rather than numbers, determined political power. The representation of Maharashtrians in the Bombay Municipal Council of 1875 was a mere twelve per cent, though they constituted fifty per cent of the city’s population.

However after voting rights were given to everybody in 1948, and especially after the creation of Maharashtra state in 1960, the political status of the Marathi-speaking people underwent a sea change. The gaining of political power led them to question their continued economic backwardness and evoked a desire for financial improvement.

It was at this time that cricket patronage came in, to help in more ways than one. But before we examine the nature and scope of that patronage, we must look at the course the game of cricket took in the city since it was introduced by the British.

*

The roots of Indian cricket are undoubtedly in Mumbai. In the eighteenth century, British officials first played the recreational game on a vast stretch of green on the southern tip of the island. This stretch, where the Bombay High Court, the University of Mumbai and the Victoria Terminus stand today, was known to the British as the Esplanade Ground and to locals as the Maidan.

The Parsis of Bombay took up cricket, as an act of imitation, sometime in the 1830s. Official records say that the first Hindu to play the game was a Maharashtrian, one Ramchandra Vishnu Navlekar.³ He entered the cricketing arena in 1861 and played a crucial role in the formation of the Bombay Union Cricket Club in 1866. The Parsis, along with the British [who looked at the sport as a medium for inculcating Victorian values in the locals and thus strengthening the Empire), gradually built a cricketing superstructure in the city. They set up a number of clubs, provided cricketing equipment and encouraged players. In 1877 some Marathi students of the Elphinstone High School started a Hindu Cricket Club. The Gujaratis, a community of traders, stepped in to give the club a sound financial base. From then on, Parsis, Gujaratis and Maharashtrians, in that order, promoted cricket in the city.

So far as the Maharashtrians were concerned, the promotion was helped in good measure by the fact that Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, then one of the most prominent leaders of the Indian National Movement, didn’t look at cricket as an alien sport. Tilak called for a boycott of foreign goods but never of cricket. On the contrary, at a public meeting, he praised Palwankar Baloo, a skilful practitioner of spin bowling, who played from the 1890s to the 1910s and often helped Pune’s Hindus defeat the Pune European team.⁴

Tilak’s praise may have had less to do with Baloo’s cricketing skills and more with the fact that Baloo belonged to the Chamar caste, for the Lokmanya was trying to bridge the caste divide; but it certainly sent a message that cricket, despite its colonial origins, was indeed acceptable to the Indians.

The point was further driven home by the great social reformer and Tilak’s contemporary, Mahadev Govind Ranade. Ranade garlanded Baloo at a public function in Pune after the bowler returned triumphant from Satara, having taken seven wickets against an all-white Satara Gymkhana squad. Then, two of Tilak’s closest aides, Na Chi Kelkar and L. B. Bhopatkar, stepped in to promote cricket in Pune. They were followed by Tilak’s political opponents: the moderate nationalist leaders, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Wrangler R. P. Paranjpe. Gokhale and Paranjpe tried to popularize the game in both Mumbai and Pune.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale, considered the intellectual guru of Mahatma Gandhi, took over as leader of the national movement in the wake of Tilak’s death. Gandhi was not at all fond of cricket. Nevertheless, cricket’s association with nationalism slowly became real for his community, the Gujaratis, too and became evident when Ramesh Divecha, a prominent seam bowler, was arrested for participating in the Quit India Movement of 1942. As a result, legendary cricketer and one of the most prominent Gujarati spokesmen for cricket, Vijay Merchant, not only boycotted the trials for India’s first ever Test tour to England in 1932 to protest British rule in India, he also told MCC’s dignitaries at Lord’s in his capacity as Indian vice-captain in 1946 that England should not believe an exchange of cricketers brought the two countries closer.

Yet, in Mumbai and elsewhere in pre-independent India, the promotion of cricket didn’t quite make the impact it has today. It largely remained either a gentleman’s diversion, a local prince’s peculiar passion that moved him to fits of patronage or, at best, a diplomatic tool for the ruler and the ruled.

Cricket shed its imperial roots in the real sense after 1947, and the place to benefit most from this change, and to emerge as the centre of cricket, was Mumbai.

In India’s financial capital, commercial establishments, big and small, had always keenly followed the Times Shield Cricket Tournament, meant for the working men, since its inception in 1930. With the passing of each year, the tournament attracted large crowds as the participating teams, A to F division, represented not only an impressive pool of talent which provided good entertainment to spectators but also attracted good publicity.

In the 1950s the Tatas, Mahindra and Mahindra and the Associated Cement Corporation (ACC), three of India’s major business players, launched a cricketer recruitment policy, hoping that the involvement of their team in the Times Shield and their association with cricket and cricketers would bring in advertisement for their various companies. With more tournaments getting introduced in the city’s cricket calendar, big banks – like the State Bank of India – and many other companies and firms too joined in the exercise.

This is where Maharashtrian participation in cricket took a turn. With the prospect of emerging economic reward and job security (a peculiar Indian term) cricket permeated deep into the middle, lower-middle and urban working classes. Earlier, players came mainly from south Mumbai: the elegant batsman L.P. Jai lived at Opera House, the Apte brothers were from Girgaum, Rusi Modi stayed close to Bombay Central and Meher-Homji was from Tardeo. Now, a northward shift happened, and Dadar and Shivaji Park, where the Marathi middle and lower-middle classes lived, became the hub of cricketing activity. Clubs like Dadar Union, Shivaji Park Gymkhana and many others gave a fillip to cricketing endeavours and not only began to set standards in cricketing excellence, they also allowed good players to play without paying any fees. This gave the economically deprived an opportunity to show their prowess on the field. And, as history and statistics have indicated, sportspersons from not-so privileged backgrounds demonstrate a bigger drive to succeed than those from affluent backgrounds.

The talents of the technically flawless batsman Vijay Manjrekar, pace bowler Ramakant ‘Tiny’ Desai, and Subhash Gupte, whom Sir Gary Sobers rated as the world’s best leg-spinner, arose in the 1950s out of this approach to cricket – as a means of improving their economic and social status. Their names were held up as examples by thousands of others who began serious pursuit of the game.

Various public and private sector units now employed cricketers in large numbers, and even colleges like Siddharth, St Xavier’s and Elphinstone took in cricketers with offers of freeships and other fringe benefits. As a result of this patronage, at least a few thousand Marathi-speaking cricketers landed jobs. The better cricket they played, the more quickly they were promoted at the workplace.

The statistics of Indian cricket soon recorded significant changes. In the 1930s, the national team had two Marathi-speaking players. In the period between 1946 to 1959, sixty-seven players in all were capped from across the country; out of these, nearly half – twenty-nine – were Maharashtrians.⁵

The competition to recruit established cricketers grew in the 1960s and continued through the Seventies and Eighties. Nationalized banks institutionalized the system of patronage by launching formal and widely publicized cricketer recruitment programmes. In the private sector, new entrants like Mafatlal, Nirlon and J. K. Chemicals came in to expand the network in a big way. The numerous smaller firms and companies that supported cricketers during this period have mostly gone unnamed, but their role was just as crucial, because they employed thousands of club cricketers, gave even the moderately successful player financial rewards, a permanent job and social mobility. Such firms also provided the necessary second rung of patronage, which made it easier for the top firms to hire top-level cricketers.

The question that arises is why, at that time, did such a system not come up in other cities of India. The fact is the process did begin elsewhere too, with the growing popularization of cricket. What made all the difference was that most banks and companies had their headquarters in Mumbai, and firms in other parts of India did not quite operate on the scale of those in the country’s commercial capital. So, despite the Shiv Sena’s fulminations against outsiders that played on the minds of Maharashtrians in the Sixties, the community did benefit from enterprising non-Maharashtrians who had set up base in the city.

The community had by now gained such a foothold in different aspects of the game that it acquired unquestioned dominance in Indian cricket. Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, India’s captain in the 1960s, said most members of his team spoke Mahratti. Pataudi’s successor as captain, Ajit Wadekar, and other members of his 1971 team that brought phenomenal cricketing success to the country, in fact, stood out as fine examples of the fruition of the whole process of patronage.

Wadekar’s father, Lakshman earned a modest income as a supervisor in the railways. He felt he was lucky when all his four children got scholarships for their education. One of his sons, Ajit, was taken in by the State Bank of India as a cricketer: he not only went on to lead the Indian team, but retired as the bank’s executive director.

Even more striking is the story of Wadekar’s teammate Eknath Solkar. Indeed, it is the perfect symbol of the rise of the humble Maharashtrian cricketer from Mumbai.

Solkar’s father hailed from Pavas in Ratnagiri district, where he worked in the fields of a landowner. When the family shifted to Mumbai, it went through considerable economic hardship. The hardship continued even as the father obtained work as a mali (groundsman) at the Hindu Gymkhana, one of five gymkhanas dotting the beautiful Marine Drive. Little ‘Ekki’ soon began operating the scoreboard at the gymkhana and took in his first cricketing lessons. When his playing talent became obvious, the gymkhana’s members gave him cricket clothes and equipment. Solkar didn’t even go to college, but thanks to an institutionalized system of support, played Test cricket. He now lives in Sportsfield, a plush apartment in Worli in South Mumbai built by the government of Maharashtra for eminent sportspersons.

The family of a Wadekar or Solkar didn’t have any cricketing background, but as more and more Marathi-speaking people took to cricket, a cricketing tradition developed, and Sunil Gavaskar, the most illustrious member of Wadekar’s team, came to exemplify that tradition. Gavaskar’s father, Manohar played competitive cricket at the club level in Mumbai and introduced his son to the game. Sunil’s maternal uncle, Madhav Mantri played an even bigger role. Mantri, during his childhood, studied under the streetlights and faced great financial difficulties before going on to represent the Indian team as a wicket-keeper in the 1950s. He set for his nephew an example of what could be achieved. Gavaskar’s long-time batting partner, Ramnath Parkar grew up in the BDD Chawls of Worli, in trying circumstances. His father was a compositor in a press, and Ramnath himself didn’t even get a chance to go to college. Yet, the city’s cricket structure adequately nurtured and highlighted his talents. He eventually played for India. Parkar, significantly, was the first disciple of Sachin Tendulkar’s coach, Ramakant Acharekar.

Billionaire Sachin Tendulkar therefore has the historical background of a Solkar struggling to get two square meals a day, a Madhav Mantri straining his eyes and studying in the light of streetlamps and a Ramnath Parkar going to Acharekar to ask not only for cricketing guidance but also for clothes and equipment. Tendulkar is today credited for bringing big money into cricket. This is true so far as the extent of money is concerned. But the fact is that Tendulkar himself is the product of big money coming into cricket – and vitally, Mumbai cricket – in the middle of the twentieth century. And he is the product of a desperate Maharashtrian’s desire to get rid of economic anxiety. In a strict sociological sense, there would perhaps be no Sachin if Solkar’s father had not taken the train from Ratnagiri to Mumbai and encouraged his son to play cricket.

Tendulkar is well aware that ‘Mumbai has everything that can make a cricketer – a conducive atmosphere for the game, good grounds, talented coaches, seniors always willing to