Chandu Borde, Stalwart of 1960s Cricket Reaches '90 Not Out'

Chandrakant Gulabrao ‘Chandu” Borde turned 90 last Sunday, July 21, with the nimbleness and assurance and that had marked his cricket career in the 1960s.

While at Mid-May, I had met Borde at Sunil Gavaskar’s annual get-together in Mumbai for his friends, colleagues and sundry others associated with the game. He was admirably erect, propped up by sturdy hamstrings and quadriceps which, thanks to a lifelong regimen of walking several kilometres every day, hadn’t atrophied with age.

Borde, a Maharashtrian Roman Catholic like his mentor, the great Vijay Samuel Hazare, is now the fourth living Indian cricketer in the nineties, the others being C.D. Gopinath (94), Chandrakant Patankar (93) and his former captain Nari Contractor, who turned 90 in March this year. 

Wicket-keeper Patankar played a solitary Test match in 1955, batsman Gopinath, career spanning almost a decade between 1951 and 1960, played in eight without quite living up to his potential. But Contractor and Borde were stellar performers. Both came at the cusp of change from the 1950s to the 1960s, and left a strong  imprint on Indian cricket.

Unfortunately I never saw Contractor play. By the time cricket took root in my consciousness, his career faced premature closure following an unfortunate injury when he was captaining India in the West Indies in 1962. Hit on the temple by a vicious bouncer from dreaded pace demon Charlie Griffith, Contractor hovered between life and death for a few days. Providence and timely medical expertise helped him survive, but he never played again for India.

Borde, however, is a pivotal figure in my life getting intertwined with cricket. 

The first Test match I saw was India versus Bob Simpson’s Australia, as a nine-year-old at the Brabourne Stadium in the 1964-65 season. In a pulsating climax, the memory of which sends my heart thudding even now, Borde shepherded the team to a narrow 2-wicket win with a gritty unbeaten 33. Pandemonium erupted when the winning run was scored. I was hooked to cricket for life.

The second Test I watched was also at the Brabourne Stadium, in 1966-67, and Borde again played a major role. India were no match for Gary Sobers’s star-studded West Indies but Borde stood out with his resolve and bravado, making a superb century. By the time the series was completed, he made another century. As I soon discovered, he had also made a century against the West Indies in his debut series in 1958-59! 

Not till Dilip Sardesai and Sunil Gavaskar in 1971 sent records tumbling had an Indian batsman fared so well against hostile fast bowling or scored so heavily against the West Indies.

Borde by this time was the the bulwark of the Indian Test team and second in influence only to Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi who had taken over the captaincy  from injured Nari Contractor mid-way through the series in West Indies in 1961. Pataudi then was aged only 21, the youngest captain in cricket history. He was to be a major agent of change in Indian cricket. 

Of ‘royal’ lineage, and brought up in England, Pataudi was seen by skeptics as a cultural misfit for the largely egalitarian Indian dressing room. Moreover, having lost 95% sight in one eye in a car accident some years earlier, his future in the sport was also uncertain. Surely he couldn’t last long!

As it transpired, Pataudi, popularly known as ‘Tiger’ for his electric-heeled fielding, was to play out an extraordinary saga of personal courage and marvellous achievements. He helped develop a competitive ethos and lifted Indian cricket out of the doldrums. 

Along with a clutch of remarkable players, Pataudi was to make the 1960s a defining decade in Indian cricket.

Bereft of quality fast bowlers, he turned conventional tactic on its head and looked to spin bowling – of which there was abundant quality talent in India – as his attacking option. He pushed hard to smarten up fielding, generally the bane of Indian cricket. The forward short-leg position, now deployed everywhere for spinners, bears Pataudi’s patent, so to speak. Prasanna, Venkataraghavan, Chandrashekhar and Bedi – who now have a pedestal of their own in cricket lore – blossomed under his leadership though their best years were to come in the next decade.

For all his other wonderful attributes, rallying his players to find common cause was Tiger’s signal achievement. Factionalism, favouritism, parochialism and sundry other tugs and pulls had led to the enduring malaise of low morale, insecurity and absence of trust in the dressing room. In his book Tiger’s Tale, Pataudi writes of the challenges of leading an Indian team where “most players don’t even speak the same language.”

Pataudi sought to counter the problem by insulating his players from meddling BCCI officials and selectors and being as upfront as possible with his players to win their trust. Those who thought the young ‘nabob’ was a greenhorn and would be easily pliable, or indifferent because of his elite background, were in for a surprise

Pataudi wasn’t a confrontationist, but had a mind of his own and knew how to stand his ground against authority. It’s probably an apocryphal anecdote, but Pataudi telling a selector that ‘respect has to be earned, not demanded’, presents a fair picture of him as custodian of the dressing room. 

His aim was to make a team of Indian cricketers play as an Indian team, not genuflect before those who had strings to pull. It didn’t play out profitably every time, of course, but during his reign, while Indian cricket didn’t become top of the pops, the dressing room developed a competitive ethos which and gave much-needed stability which helped pull India cricket out of the doldrums.

To put this in perspective, India had nine Test captains between 1950 and 1960, four of them in one 5-Test series alone against West Indies in 1958-59!  Pataudi’s tenure, which began in an emergency because of the injury to Contractor in 1962, continued unbroken till he was removed by Vijay Merchant’s controversial casting vote in 1970.

The only time Pataudi didn’t captain was against Australia in 1967 as he was injured. Borde, his long-standing understudy, finally got the honour. Considering his yeoman service to India cricket, this was mot juste. 

The story of Indian cricket in the 1960s is riveting. Imagine a captain (Pataudi) having just one good eye, and his main bowler (B Bhagwat Chandrashekhar) has a polio-affected bowling arm! It’s impossible for even the most accomplished fiction writer to come up with a plot along these lines.

However, it is not just the incredulous exploits of Pataudi and Chandra that takes makes Indian cricket of the 1960s unforgettable.

Several fascinating and colourful characters teamed up with them to capture the imagination of the country. 

I have dwelt on Borde and his virtuosity at some length. Further name-dropping will provide greater flavour of the talent and personalities that enriched Indian cricket in this era: Nari Contractor and Polly Umrigar continuing the wonderful legacy of Parsis in Indian cricket, but sadly, both retiring all too early. Vijay Manjrekar, Dilip Sardesai, Ajit Wadekar and Asjhok Mankad, all from the renowned Bombay School of batsmanship which gave the team heft and solidity. The erratic, but stunning brilliance of Salim Durani, the rakish swag of M.L. Jaisimha, the suaveness and style of Abbas Ali Baig whose century on Test debut inspired a lady fan to run on to the field and kiss him. The never-say-die robustness of Abid Ali, the flair and flamboyance of Farokh Engineer, he panache of Budhi Kunderan, poise and finesse of Hanumant Singh, the amazingly accurate Bapu Nadkarni who once remarkably bowled 21 maidens on the trot in a Test against England, the captivating magic of the spin quartet who bamboozled opponents everywhere.

The Indian cricket dressing room has always been a microcosm of India, reflecting the mosaic of Indian life, the richness of its tapestry and diversity. 

The 1960s manifest this splendidly. Players of all religious, caste and class denominations found space here to express their talents. 

Oxbridge educated players of royal stock like Pataudi and Baig, engineer-cricketers Prasanna and Venkaraghavan who were to inspire Srinath, Kumble and Ashwin to believe combing passion for cricket with academic pursuit was possible, graduates and post-graduates who held white collared jobs to hold on to in the off-season, a groundsman’s son in Eknath Solkar, all tied to the same umbilical cord.

My apologies to those whose names I’ve missed out.

The 1960s was a tumultuous decade for India. Two wars (1962 with China and 1965 with Pakistan) were fought, two beloved prime ministers (Nehru and Shastri) passed away. language protests and riots haunted the southern states, the Shiv Sena rose to prominence in Mumbai, the monolithic Congress split, all of this giving rise to a new political paradigm that would have deep impact on the years to follow.

By the end of the decade, banks got nationalised, privy purses of erstwhile royal states were abolished but economic growth remained stuck in bottlenecks posed by a mixed economy. The debilitating license Raj stifled enterprise, At the micro level, incomes were meagre, compounded by the fact that purchase of essential food items was controlled by rationing. Overseas travel, given the severe restriction on foreign exchange, was a pipe dream. 

Also read: The Year When Indian Cricket Came Of Age

Relief from hardship, as it had done before and was to do later, came to a large extent through two other national obsessions: cinema and cricket.

The Indian cricket teams of the 1960s were not the best to represent the country. There were some notable wins, the most important perhaps being winning the first one overseas, against New Zealand in 1968, but several better sides and cricketers have played for India – in fact, in every subsequent decade leading to the current one where India has recently won the T20 World Cup.

Indeed, barring a few, the averages and stats of players from the 1960s would seem terribly unimpressive compared to the many stalwarts who came later. With monetary rewards meagre, apart from passion, finding livelihood through cricket, was the major incentive for them. These charismatic players sowed the seeds of excellence from which would sprout rich talent in subsequent decades, making India’s romance of cricket grow into an undying love affair as we know it now.

Post-script: By the end of the decade, both Borde and Pataudi fell out of favour. Borde’s last match was at Bombay. He was dropped against Australia in 1969 to make way for for a young stylist from Karnataka, Gundappa Vishwanth, as part of chief selector Vijay Merchant’s policy of ‘catch ’em young’. Pataudi captained in the entire series against Australia, but was toppled from the captaincy in 1970 by Merchant’s casting vote. 

In a surprising turnaround, Pataudi was recalled to the team in 1972-73 and even reinstated as captain for the series against Clive Lloyd’s West Indies after which he retired. Borde never played again for India, but after retirement, maintained strong connect with Indian cricket as selector, administrator and coach at various times over many years.

Post post-script: At Sunil Gavaskar’s Mid-May get together mentioned at the beginning, Borde made a beeline for fellow nonagenarians, Chandu Patankar and Nari Contractor (Gopinath hadn’t come from Madras) as soon as he spotted them. With his hair dyed jet black and kept immaculately in place way by a dash of oil, Borde didn’t look a day beyond 50. When I paid him the compliment, he quipped, “You make me feel like a senior citizen,’’ which amused Contractor and Patankar no end.

Ayaz Memon has been a journalist for 42 years writing on sports, politics and social issues.