The poet, Dom Moraes (1938-2006), was also a writer of thrilling prose and during his lifetime, he wrote books on subjects as disparate as Indira Gandhi, Madhya Pradesh and, memorably, Sunil Gavaskar. Merely a few words from the preface of Sunil Gavaskar (Macmillan, 1987)—in which Moraes summons up a picture of Gavaskar’s “rolling walk, the floppy white hat, the elephant hair bracelet and the golden necklet” and recalls his drive off the front foot, “body in balance, the long blade drilling the ball to left and right of cover or straight in course as a moonrocket to the boundary”—are evidence enough that Moraes could do for cricketing prose what Gavaskar did for batsmanship.
Moraes walks along the lanes of Chikalwadi in Dadar, where Gavaskar played in his boyhood, and speaks not only to his subject, but also his family and friends. The result is a rounded portrait of not just Gavaskar the cricketer, a master technician who could also explode in attack, but also Gavaskar the man, “a curious mixture of tolerance and touchiness”.
“No cricket one has watched or read about can ultimately be as memorable as the cricket one has played oneself, no matter at what level.” This is the assertion—which anyone who has ever played competitive cricket of any kind knows to be true—made by Sujit Mukherjee (1930-2003) in his Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer (Ravi Dayal, 1996).
Mukherjee, a professor of English and a publisher, played intermittently for Bihar in the Ranji Trophy during the 1950s. In his luminous account, told in graceful and understated prose, Patna becomes the unlikely centre of the cricketing universe, and the joys and travails of the school, college and club cricket scene—travelling long distances in third-class train compartments, sharing out precious Gunn & Moore cricket bats—take on a warming significance. Reading it, I was taken back to the 28 not out I once made in Class 7 during a run-chase on a hot afternoon to win the match for my side—but we’ll leave that story for another day.
And most enjoyable of all, standing tall in the Playing XI of the best cricket books ever written, is historian Ramachandra Guha’s States of Indian Cricket (Permanent Black, 2005). This brings together in updated form two books Guha wrote in the early 1990s: Wickets in the East, which makes up imaginary all-time elevens of the great Indian state sides, retailing superb anecdotes passed down over the decades, and Spin and Other Turns, a set of dazzling essays about the cricketers—Gavaskar, Gundappa Viswanath, Kapil Dev, Bishan Bedi—responsible for Indian cricket’s coming-of-age in the 1970s.
Like the Australian Gideon Haigh, Guha is, in many ways, the ideal cricket writer. In these books, there is an enthusiast’s penchant for reminiscence, generating some dramatic opening lines (“In 1966 I made what turned out to be an incredibly shrewd decision for an eight-year-old”); a historian’s feel for provocative generalization (“Cricket chauvinism runs across two axes, those of nation and generation”); a scholar’s love of ordered argument leavened by trivia (the home of the Maharashtra stalwart D.B. Deodhar “lay on a lane named after himself—surely a unique honour for a cricketer”; the young Bishan Bedi possessed at one time “a collection of 10,000 marbles, won from all the other little boys in Amritsar”); and a great cricket writer’s eye for points of style and technique, as in the masterly discussion of the art of Bedi and Gavaskar.