Of the many legacies in which the British Raj took pride in leaving to India — railways, universities, the English language, the “steel frame” of the administrative system — the one that has most captured the Indian imagination has been the game of cricket. And on any list of the cricketers who have left their stamp on the national psyche, one name is bound to figure at the top: Sunil Gavaskar.
His plethora of records tells one part of the tale. Statistics can be mind-numbing, but one can no more measure the achievements of Gavaskar without figures than one can describe Mount Everest without them. For those who are interested, a devotee has created a Web site (The Gavaskar File) which comprises no fewer than twenty-one tightly packed pages of statistics, figures, and records held by Sunny Gavaskar.
But though statistics, like book jackets, reveal a great deal, they can only hint at the most interesting parts — those parts that live in the imagination long after precise figures and dates have faded from memory.
How can one explain to today's cricket-crazy generation — weaned on India's winning the World Cup in 1983, used to one-day successes and mammoth private sponsorships, habituated by glowing references to Indian players as being among the world's best bats-men, feeling entitled to expect at least a chance of victory every time India takes the field — what Sunil Gavaskar meant to India when he arrived on the Test scene?
Of course, we had talented cricketers, but their weaknesses were legend. Our batsmen were notoriously suspect against pace even on our benign Indian wickets, and when the selectors met to pick the squad to tour the Caribbean in 1970–71, no Indian opening batsman had scored a hundred in India's preceding nineteen Test matches. So the selectors, preferring ability to experience, picked four opening batsmen for the tour: Ashok Mankad, who did not open for Bombay till that season; Syed Abid Ali, who had not opened for Hyderabad at all but had done so for India; K. Jayantilal, who had had one good season for South Zone; and a twenty-one-year-old Bombay prodigy with four Ranji matches behind him, Sunil Gavaskar.
Gavaskar was not a complete unknown to cricket fans. He had made mountains of runs as a schoolboy, including against the touring London Schoolboys team, and stories abounded about his excellence. As a boy playing street cricket in the Bombay suburb of Chikalwadi, his prodigious talent resulted in a special handicap being devised for him: whereas others defended the usual three stumps chalked on the garage door, Gavaskar would be given out if the ball hit the door at all. He was soon starring for Bombay University (a team stronger, in those days, than most Indian first-class sides). In the 1967–68 season he made his debut for Bombay in the Irani Trophy, aged eighteen, in what was virtually a trial match for the Test tour of Australia and New Zealand to follow. I watched that game at the Brabourne Stadium: two attractive opening batsmen, K. R. Rajagopal and P. K. Belliappa, who had been considered near-certainties for the tour, failed to gain selection after being tormented by the pace and swing of Bombay's Ramakant Desai and Umesh Kulkarni. Instead, Desai and Kulkarni got picked instead, even though they had not been in the list of thirty “probables” announced earlier. The match ended the national hopes of Rajagopal and Belliappa, but in all the drama everyone overlooked the failure of the rookie Gavaskar, who made just five and zero and was promptly dropped by Bombay for the next season.
Recalled nearly two years later for the last two Ranji matches of the 1969–70 season, Gavaskar began with a duck and ended with a century. Two centuries followed in three innings in the 1970–71 season, but surprisingly Gavaskar was not picked for West Zone in the Duleep Trophy. Instead, he captained Bombay University in the interuniversity tournament and made successive scores of 226, 99, 327 (a university record), and 124. That was enough for the new Indian captain, Ajit Wadekar, whose own record Gavaskar had broken in the course of his 327, and for the chairman of selectors, Vijay Merchant. Sunil Gavaskar, who had played just five matches for Bombay and had never even represented West Zone, was picked for the West Indies. Merchant publicly praised Gavaskar for never being content with just a hundred; his seniors, the chairman added, could learn from that.
If Gavaskar felt any pressure as a result of Merchant's comments, it did not reveal itself. Instead of a swollen head, though, the young batsman developed an acutely swollen middle finger on his left hand. A New York specialist, consulted en route to Jamaica, decided to operate immediately; one day's delay, he said, and gangrene would have set in, obliging him to amputate the finger. So Gavaskar, his hand swathed in bandages, missed the first Test. But in those more leisurely days there were other first-class matches to play oneself into form, and he proceeded to score 71, 82, 32 not out, 125, and 63 in his first five innings on the tour. Selection for the second Test at Port-of-Spain was assured.
I remember, as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, praying that Gavaskar would score a hundred, and then retracting my prayer because none of the seven Indians who had so far scored a Test century on debut had ever scored another one. (Viswanath, Azharuddin, Sourav Ganguly, and Virender Sehwag would later become exceptions to this jinx, to which Surinder Amarnath and Praveen Amre also succumbed.) As it happened, the young batsman batted with remarkable maturity and composure in his first Test, but did not get to a century. His 65 and 67 not out were, however, stamped with class, and helped steer India to an astonishing victory.
From then on it was magical. A century (116) and 64 not out duly followed in the third Test. In the first innings of the fourth, Gavaskar fell, in atrocious light, for one, and Indians wondered if the fairy tale was over. There was no need to worry: in the second innings he scored 117 not out. National jubilation at the unearthing of this gigantic talent knew few bounds. Exhilaration was everywhere; cricket was page-one news across India. Gavaskar went into the fifth Test with 430 runs to his name at an average of 143.33. No one would have believed that the best was yet to come.
Certainly not Gavaskar himself, since he developed a painful abscess in a tooth on the eve of the Test. Denied painkillers because they might have made him drowsy, unable to eat properly or enjoy a cold drink, sleep deprived from tossing and turning in his pain, Gavaskar batted in excruciating agony throughout the six-day match. Despite each run jarring the infected tooth, he scored 124 out of an Indian total of 360 in the first innings. It was not enough; the West Indians, aided by some dubious umpiring, piled on the runs. Opening the second with India 166 runs behind and after twelve hours fielding in the hot sun, Gavaskar became the first Indian since Hazare in 1948 to complete a century in both innings of a Test, and the first Indian ever to score four centuries in a series. The tooth still ached, but he kept going: India was barely 30 ahead when he crossed that landmark. Sobers, the great West Indies captain, tried seven bowlers, but no one could get a ball past Gavaskar. A Trinidadian calypso was composed on the spot by “Lord Relator”: “It was Gavaskar/The real master/Just like a wall/We couldn't out Gavaskar at all/Not at all.” He finished with 220 in eight hours and twenty-nine minutes. He hadn't given a chance. Most important, he had saved a Test India had looked likely to lose, and helped clinch a series win against the mightiest Test team in the world.
If Gavaskar had done nothing else in his life, that extraordinary series alone would have written his name in the hearts of his compatriots forever. It is impossible to describe the pride he instilled in our hearts. We had got used to losing, to accepting a sort of perpetual second-class status. We were accustomed to rejoicing in great moments rather than great matches. We were reconciled to batsmen producing flashes of brilliance and fading away. We had even learned to celebrate stirring feats of heroic defiance in a losing cause, like Pataudi's 148 at Headingley in 1967 or Jaisimha's 101 in Brisbane in 1967–68, both magnificent efforts ending in the inevitable defeat. But heroic defiance, brilliance, consistency, and victory all together had never been an Indian combination. Gavaskar showed us for the first time that it could be, and so transformed the nation's sporting psyche. By his heroism, he expanded the realm of the possible in Indian cricket. He undid the shackles that had kept us chained to mediocrity; he freed a spirit that soared in countless imaginations across the land.