The Indian team at the Third Test, India vs W. Indies at Georgetown, Guyana, ’71. (Photograph by Getty images, From Outlook, July 04, 2011)

For Joy Alan Knott caught by Solkar off Venkataraghavan, Third Test at the Oval. India had won its first Test in England, and with it, the series.

cricket: 1971

Magnetic Fields

Indian cricket graduated with honours 40 summers ago, in 1971

Rohit Mahajan ,  Sugata Srinivasaraju

In cricket, 2011 mirrors 1971—India toured West Indies and England that year too. There are wild divergences, though. India are the No. 1 Test team now, they were no-hopers then. India are the one-day world champions; 1971 was the year odi cricket was accidentally invented, and it wasn’t until three years later that India played its first international in the short format. But in 1971 India defied wisdom, convention and their own sense of inferiority that had bedevilled them until then. They upset both West Indies and England 1-0, winning series abroad for only the second and third time. Their first triumph was only three years before that, against New Zealand. Beating their old colonial masters, and the West Indians, caused an enduring marriage between Indian fans and hyperbole. They proclaimed India the world champions.
India’s ‘world champions’ of 40 years ago were a bunch of mavericks. The captain, Ajit Wadekar, was shocked at getting the job, through a 3-2 vote of the selectors. The man he replaced, the charismatic M.A.K. Pataudi, declined to be part of the team (he entered politics instead) and Wadekar was left with a young and interesting bunch, most of them still under 30.

Among the seniors was Dilip Sardesai, who ate like a giant and always demanded room No. 8 in hotels; an abrasive and religious S. Venkataraghavan, who mouthed shlokas on the field and did not think twice before declining a gift of cigars from a personage no less than Gary Sobers; Abid Ali, who could bowl all day, bat with determination and gusto, and then ask the debutant to get the winning runs; four different types of spinners—B.S. Bedi, E.A.S. Prasanna, Venkat and B.S. Chandrashekhar—all unbelievably good, a group an English newspaper called “the most dangerous attack in contemporary cricket”; Eknath Solkar, who batted with courage, and fielded with even greater courage at forward short leg, holding 53 catches in 27 Tests, 50 of those coming off the four spinners; the enterprising Farokh Engineer and the magical Salim Durrani; and the hugely promising G. Vishwanath. Then there was Sunil Gavaskar, 21 and unproven, the man who’d set standards for batting for years to come.
Beating West Indies was epochal, for India hadn’t beaten them—or even led in an innings against them—before. But then West Indies were caught between two eras of extreme pace. Hall and Griffith had retired, Holding and Roberts were yet to debut at the top level. Barely freed of colonialism, West Indies were seen as “calypso cricketers”, good entertainers but fragile in the mind. They’d not won a series after December 1966, and had lost twice to England and once to Australia.
Engineer, who missed the West Indies tour because the Indian board made it mandatory for players to have played domestic cricket, says that their attack was laughable. “Holder used to play county cricket, and I used to stand up to him—can’t be all that quick!” he chuckles. “Uton Dowe tried to bowl short all the time. Lloyd asked him why, and Dowe said: ‘I’ve seen a crack in the pitch and I’m trying to hit that crack!’” Their top wicket-taker was Jack Noreiga, who’d not played first-class cricket for eight years before that season. Sobers, who made 597 runs, was the most threatening bowler too, this in the last phase of his great career. No wonder, Bedi believes that with a more daring captain than Wadekar, India would have won at least 2-0. Legendary leg-spinner Chandrashekhar agrees, “He was a good captain, a good thinker, but he was not the attacking type.”