Portrait of the cricketer as prince

Batting for the Empire: A Political Biography of Ranjitsinjhi (with a foreword by Ramachandra Guha) by Mario Rodrigues; Delhi: Penguin Books; 2003; Rs. 299

On one hand there is 'Ranji,' the man who, in the words of the author, 'stands paramount in the pantheon of India's sporting gods', the cricketing legend who is ranked up there with the game's greatest (during his day effortlessly holding his own with the likes of W.G. Grace and Gilbert Jessop and subsequently among the game's half-dozen all-time greats), the Indian who 'turned out' for Cambridge, Sussex and England, and in whose name the Ranji Trophy was started in 1934 in the British Raj. On the other hand, he was also His Highness Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, Maharaja Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, GCSI, GBE, KCIE, 'pillar of the Empire' and a 'loyal friend of England.' He batted for England in his famed white silk shirts billowing in the wind and met the queen at Buckingham Palace, an Indian ruler of one of the 600-odd 'Native States' of British India, during a time when the nationalist freedom movement was fighting to free India from the colonial yoke. Which led to the central question pursued in the book: how do the two aspects of Ranji match up? What was the dazzling batsman like as a ruler and an Indian?

In the predominant view of Ranji constructed by imperial writers the answer was that the two sides did indeed match up, that the dazzling cricketer was indeed an enlightened prince, the cricketing legend a gentleman on and off the pitch ((P. C. Standing Ranjitsinjhi, Prince of Cricket, 1903; the Parsi biographer Naoraji Dumasia, Jamnagar, A Sketch of its Ruler and Its Administration, 1927; Charles Kincaid, The Land of 'Ranji' and 'Duleep’, 1932; and much to my personal surprise, even Alan Ross, the otherwise estimable late ex-editor of London Magazine, who penned a book that can only be charitably described as hagiography lite, Ranji: Prince of Cricketers, 1983). It was this dominant imperial construction which set Mario Rodrigues, special sports correspondent of The Statesman, off on his four-year quest to answer the question. As he puts it, 'what would be the Indian view of this great historical figure?'

The answer is given in great detail in this book, which is as thorough a deconstruction job as I have read in recent years. And it makes for dismal reading. Not only was the great Ranji a supreme Anglophile whose greatest joy and delight was in playing for England, who forbade his equally famous cricketing nephew Duleepsinjhi from playing for India (then admittedly British India but an 'Indian' team nevertheless), who never lifted a finger, or bat, to help Indian cricket, but he was also a hidebound reactionary who sided (there, regrettably is no other word for it) with the British against the nationalists, who used his cricketing fame to secure his disputed gaddi, was a despot and spendthrift who ruthlessly squeezed money out of his subjects in order to pay for his permanent durbar parties, and an absentee ruler who steamered off to his beloved England on the flimsiest of pretexts. He especially loved to flatter English governor-generals and royals, as witness his welcoming address to the Prince of Wales on the latter's visit to India in 1922, which began:

'Your Royal Highness, the Ruling Princes and Chiefs of India united here, offer you, above all, a welcome of unity--the unity of our Order in deep and enduring loyalty towards His Imperial Majesty the King-Emperor, towards the glorious House of Windsor and towards Your Royal Highness, his beloved and so distinguished heir; nay further, the unity of our Order with the rest of India in the mighty fabric of the British Empire as a true member of that great body politic.’

The book is extraordinary reading on other levels, too. It is replete with scathing, and very funny, use of cricketing lingo, as for example, of Ranji's efforts to promote himself as a true Hindu ruler by virtue of his claim to be a descendent of Krishna, but, notes Rodrigues, 'the Jam Saheb's innate "Hinduness," however, did not prohibit the Nawanagar Royal Band from striking up "The Roast Beef of Old England" on state occasions, which E.H.D. Sewell, cricketer, raconteur and one of the Jam's regular guests, thought as being a little wide of the wicket for the Maharajah of a strict Hindu state.'

The more discerning reader can also take delight in the meticulous research of the author, in his methodological exactness. From the first chapter 'A strange light out of the East' (the phrase taken from Neville Cardus's article on him in the Manchester Guardian), to the last, 'Crumbs for Indian Cricket', the writer slowly unpeels the layers of Ranji's political life like an onion, and builds up an irrefutable case against Ranji.

Finally, since much of Rodrigues's material has been culled from newspapers of the day, it is fascinating to read about the figures in the nationalist (or 'Native') press, an articulate and sometimes fearless group who, at loggerheads with the Jam of Nawanagar for his oppressive ways, thought nothing of taking on the British Raj when circumstances warranted it. In 1931 when Ranji called A.D. Sheth, the crusading editor of the Saurashtra, a 'blackmailer' and The Times of India (then British-owned and the stentorian voice of the Raj Establishment) gleefully reported it, Sheth promptly fired back by writing that 'Only one thing out of two can be true. Either the Jam Saheb is a liar or we are blackmailers. We have often stated that the Jam Saheb is a liar...' and then instituted legal proceedings against The Times. Which later, after an investigation by the authorities, backed down and reached an out-of-court settlement with Sheth for Rs. 10,000.

So where does that leave us, South Asians who are fans of cricket? Do we despise the writer for having written this 'expose' of a cricketing god, or do we despise Ranji the prince and separate the cricket from his politics? In all fairness, it is impossible to fault the writer for writing the book. He wrote the book he had to. And the Anglophile despot cannot be separated from the dazzling cricketer with the steely wrists who invented the leg glance, who was the first batsman 'to top 3000 runs in first-class cricket' (as Sussex captain in 1899), and who, on his Test debut at Old Trafford,'tamed the rampaging Aussie attack with...an unbeaten 154 in 190 minutes…while none of his partners (Englishmen all) could cross 19.' And therefore, at the end one has to accept the whole man, warts and all, consider Ranjitsinjhi in historical context in an explicit acknowledgement of the tangled, complicated and contradictory history of cricket in the subcontinent. The true fan of South Asian cricket should have no problems with this book. South Asian cricket writing, especially the writing of the social/political history associated with sub-continental cricket, emerges the richer for having a more complex and rounded picture of its greatest cricketer.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.