You will recall that we left Indian cricket in 1888, as P.D. Kanga and his side returned from England after an encouraging tour in which they won eight of their matches. The next man to lead an Indian side to England was Maharaja Bhupinder Singh.
Kanga, by all accounts, was a bit of a character, but no one could compare with the Maharaja. He was nineteen when chosen to captain the 1911 Indian side to tour the British Isles; nineteen but already a Sikh prince with a harem that would eventually number 300. It’s amazing that he found time to play any cricket; actually, he didn’t play much on the tour to Europe, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Back to the planning of the tour, which was some eight years in the pipeline. The first attempt to send a team that was ‘perfectly representative of Indian cricket’ to England failed in 1903. Prominent Parsi, Hindu and Muslim members of Bombay’s cricketing community had been unable to agree on the squad’s make-up. So six years later they tried again, the driving force behind the idea one J.M. Framji Patel, Bombay’s most important cricket administrator. Addressing a meeting of the game’s great and good in Bombay in 1909, Patel declared: ‘There are many links that bind us together as citizens of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen, and among those the Imperial game of cricket is not the least… cricket, in the end, will kill racial antagonism.’
Patel was talking not just about religious rivalry within India, but also the increasing tension seeping into Indo-British relations. Nationalism was making the British shift uncomfortably on their colonial seat, so the idea of a cricket tour was seized on by them. Sir George Clarke, the governor of Bombay, thought it ‘would be most beneficial’ to re-establishing ‘happy relations’ between the two countries. The MCC was similarly effusive, secretary Francis Lacey believing that a cricket tour would ‘do much to remove prejudices and promote friendship’.
Then there was the question of what the tour could bring to Indian cricket. One newspaper quoted a ‘native thinker’, who announced: ‘In an eleven consisting of Hindus, Parsis and Moslems, each one will instinctively feel that he is an Indian first, and a member of his own race afterwards.’
A selection committee was formed to pick the squad, the first task being to select a captain, someone who would be acceptable to both Indians and Englishmen. They decided on Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, a ‘flamboyant’ young man, according to Prashant Kidambi, senior lecturer in historical studies at Leicester University. First he played cricket, or at least he knew which end of the bat to hold, but more importantly he was the ruler of Patiala, ‘a state the size of Yorkshire, who had been loyal allies of the British in India ever since they had helped quell the great uprising of 1857’.
The selection of Bhupinder Singh as captain was, says Kidambi, ‘symptomatic of an era when it was taken for granted that the Indian princes were natural leaders of men’. But in the rest of the team’s selection, the committee showed uncommon courage. The final squad selected was a healthy mix of Hindu, Muslim and Parsi. There were even two ‘untouchables’ among the tourists – the great left-arm spinner Baloo Palwankar and his batsman younger brother Shivram.
The tourists arrived in England in May 1911, the Maharaja winning much praise in the British press for his ‘gorgeous costume of rich-flowered silk’; he and his entourage stayed in a London mansion while the rest of the squad made do with the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square.
Not that the players minded. They were there to play cricket, and after a disastrous start, losing all their opening eleven matches, the Indians began to find their form. It may have helped that the Maharaja was no longer part of the squad. Having appeared in the first three matches, the prince spent the rest of the summer rubbing silk shoulders with members of the British aristocracy in an endless succession of balls, dinners and hunting parties.
It was the Palwankar brothers who spearheaded the Indians’ renaissance in the second half of the tour. Victories against Leicestershire and Somerset were followed by wins in Scotland and Ireland.
In all the tourists won six and drew two of their twenty-three matches, with Baloo the undoubted star claiming seventy-five wickets at an average of 20.12.
The squad arrived back in Bombay to a sympathetic welcome. The results could have been better was the general feeling in the press, but what the tour had proved above all else was that a squad representative of Indian cricket could spend several weeks in each other’s company. ‘They have,’ commented the Hindi Punch, ‘established good fellowship all round. They have been on freedom’s soil where caste is powerless.’
For the first time Indians understood that, on a cricket field at least, religion and caste were irrelevant, and the idea that a united India meant a stronger India became accepted.