One of India’s greatest cricketers Bishan Singh Bedi (77) breathed his last on Monday, October 23. This is an excerpt from Rajdeep Sardesai’s Democracy’s XI: The Great Indian Cricket Story, published by Juggernaut in 2017.
From 1966, when Bedi first represented India, to the tail end of his career in the late 1970s, India underwent a glorious spin revolution that would change Indian cricket forever. Brahma, the creator God in the Trimurti of Hinduism, has four faces looking in four different directions. But even he would have found it difficult to recreate the magic of India’s spin quartet which dominated the sport for a decade and more. And mirroring the country’s unique notion of unity in diversity, the four Indian spinners were distinctive individuals with sharply contrasting personalities but united in their purpose of taking wickets for India. It was like having four magicians perform in one show, each with a unique bag of tricks, each luring an unsuspecting batsman to his doom with their mastery over flight and turn.
Erapalli Prasanna, who made his debut in 1962, was the oldest of the four. He was a true-blue Kannadiga born in Shimoga, another remote corner in cricket’s metro-centric geography at the time. As an off-spinner, he was almost a right-arm version of Bedi, shorter and stockier but with the same instinct to play mind games with batsmen through his control over the spinning ball. ‘We were like Siamese twins I guess,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘We would share secrets and plot how to get a batsman out. It was almost as if we could read each other’s minds.’ Prasanna was a qualified engineer, even giving up the sport for five years after his first Test series because his father wanted him to complete his engineering degree first. ‘In those days, it was a case of studies first, then cricket. My father, who was a government servant, allowed me to go on my first cricket tour in 1962 only because the Maharaja of Mysore intervened and promised him I would complete my degree on my return,’ he recalls.
Prasanna’s off-spinning rival was Chennai’s Srinivas Venkataraghavan, another engineering graduate. Venkat fitted in with the stereotype of the stoic, unsmiling Tamil Brahmin and was a strict disciplinarian. I once met him at the Madras Cricket Club where he admonished a group of teenagers at the adjoining table for speaking too loudly. ‘He was the professor, the intellectual amongst us bon vivants. We would be having a drink and he would be reading a book,’ says Bedi. Venkat was more than just a spinner, though; unlike the others, he was a decent batsman and a fine close-in fielder who would later even go on to become an international umpire.
The final maestro making up this incredible foursome was also the most enigmatic and fascinating. Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, another Kannadiga, was a truly heroic figure. An attack of polio at a very young age had withered his right arm but that did not stop him from becoming, arguably, the greatest match-winning bowler in Indian cricket history. He was unconventional in every sense; he would take a long run-up for a spinner and bowl leg-spinning deliveries with a pace and variety that foxed the best players. The sight of Chandrasekhar with the ball, marking his run-up, was enough for an entire stadium in Mumbai or Kolkata to shout in unison, ‘Boowwlled’. The sound would echo with a frenzy that would leave overseas batsmen shaken even before they played a ball.
When Chandrasekhar wasn’t playing cricket, he liked to be far away from the action, quietly listening to a song by Mukesh or Saigal. ‘If you wanted to find Chandra before a Test match in Mumbai, he would be in Mukesh’s house for a private music concert,’ recalls Bedi. Even now, Chandrasekhar prefers to be a recluse, refusing to carry a mobile – or at least choosing not to share the number! – and spending a lot of his time with his son in the US.
I ask Syed Kirmani, arguably the finest Indian wicketkeeper who played a fair bit with the four spinners, to compare them. ‘Champions, all of them,’ he says. ‘Chandra was a genius and keeping to him was the biggest challenge. He could bowl leg-spin, googlies and top-spinners with almost the same action. And his faster one had the speed of a fast bowler. I remember he bowled a bouncer to Viv Richards once that went past the great batsman’s nose. Viv turned around and asked me, “Is this guy bowling spin or is he Jeff Thomson [the fastest bowler in the world in the 1970s]!”’
Also read: Bishan Singh Bedi Bowled to Deceive but, Frank and Big-Hearted, Was the Least Deceptive of Men
Continues Kirmani, ‘Prasanna was a wily fox who would defeat you in the air. His loop was such as if he was holding the ball on a string like a puppet-master. Venkat was not in the same league, he was flatter with his deliveries but very exact and determined. And Bedi was simply poetry in action. He could bowl six different deliveries in an over, including an armer, with the most effortless style. When you watched him bowl, you felt as if you were in a museum in the presence of a great artist.’
Rajdeep Sardesai
Democracy’s XI: The Great Indian Cricket Story
Juggernaut, 2017
Why did India become the land of spinners while neighbouring Pakistan produced fast bowlers? The conventional explanation is the differing physical attributes of the two South Asian neighbours. The tall and muscular Pakistanis were seen to possess the physique to bowl fast while the less well-built Indians were more adept at bowling spin. I offer a slight variation to the theory. In India, cricket was an elite and urban middle-class sport till Kapil Dev’s team won the 1983 World Cup and opened up the sport to a new generation. The Indian team was mostly full of players belonging to the Brahminical upper castes who perhaps considered fast bowling hard labour, especially in hot weather with unforgiving pitches. It is no surprise that three of the four spinning greats were urban Brahmins and mostly vegetarian with the Jat Sikh Bedi the only exception. The image of the Brahmin as more learned and less physical fits in with the idea of spin bowling as an art form where mind scores over muscle. When I suggest this to Prasanna, he laughs. ‘We were vegetarian in our food habits, but strictly non-vegetarian when we were gobbling up opposing batsmen!’
Between them, the spin quartet picked up an astonishing 853 Test wickets. By contrast, the great West Indian fast bowling equivalent of Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Michael Holding and Colin Croft put together had 835 wickets. Of the 98 Test matches in which one or more of the spinners played together, India won 23, lost 36 and drew 39 games. If those aren’t striking figures, let’s put them in context – India won only 7 out of 76 Tests till the arrival of the spinners. ‘I think they changed the way we played the game. Until the spinners came, our main aim was not to lose the match. Now we could think of actually trying to win games,’ explains former India captain Ajit Wadekar.
Wadekar should know. He was the captain of the team that scored a hat-trick of victories over the West Indies and England between 1970 and 1973, wins that catapulted Indian cricket on to the world stage. The finest performance was probably at the Oval in London in 1971 when India defeated England on its home turf for the first time. This is how my late father Dilip Sardesai remembers the game. ‘The wicket was turning when Wadekar brought Chandra on to bowl. Chandra and I had gone to the horse races on the rest day of the match. A horse called Mildred won a race. When John Edrich came to bat, I told Chandra: “Isko Mildred daal [bowl him a Mildred].” He bowled the most vicious googly and shattered the stumps. After that, Chandra was unplayable and the English batsmen were psychologically destroyed. When we won the game the next day, it seemed as if every Indian living in England was at the Oval. One of them offered us free food and drink for life in his restaurant and named dishes after us!’
On that August day at the Oval in 1971, Indian cricket had tasted real freedom. Just months later, India would go to war with Pakistan and liberate Bangladesh in a decisive military triumph that renewed the country’s self-confidence, earlier dented by the defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian war. Chandrasekhar picked up 6 wickets, Venkat 2 and Bedi 1. The mantra of non-violence as defined by spin had won the day for the Indians yet again.
The match-winning performances would continue for at least another seven years till the fingers and arms began to tire. The great Indian spin quartet was conquered on the first tour to Pakistan in 1978. The host team’s batting, led by Zaheer Abbas and Javed Miandad, was in prime form on flat batting tracks and the ageing Indian bowling attack just couldn’t match up. The spinners would be quickly pushed into retirement. ‘It happened a little suddenly and was unfortunate but we had a bloody good ride along the way,’ Prasanna reflects on the endgame.
England would be the venue of Bedi’s final series in 1979. He was only thirty-three when he played his last Test, a relatively young age for a spinner. But no one had bowled more overs through the 1970s than the sardar from Amritsar. No one had taken more wickets for India when he retired: 266 wickets in 67 Tests. Only two left-arm spinners, Derek Underwood of England and Daniel Vettori of New Zealand, have taken more Test wickets. But no one has brought more joy to the cricket purist; when Bedi came in to bowl in his resplendent blue or pink patka, you couldn’t help but be transfixed by his action, smooth and rich as the milk in his hometown. The English off-spinner Jim Laker once said that his idea of heaven was ‘sunshine at Lord’s, Ray Lindwall, the Australian fast bowler, bowling from one end, Bedi from the other’.
His critics say Bedi bowled like a millionaire, often giving away too many runs in his search for wickets. This is statistically untrue; Bedi is second best to the West Indian Lance Gibbs in terms of bowling maiden overs per Test match. Bedi explains his approach of clapping after being hit for six. ‘You bowl to get a batsman out. If a Test batsman hits a few fours or sixes but I get him out for 30, isn’t it better than bowling defensively and allowing him to just bat on and on and score a hundred?’ The attacking instinct played a bit part in Bedi’s prominent role in India’s first-ever overseas wins in Australia, West Indies, England and New Zealand.
Sir Don Bradman suggests that Bedi is among the greatest left- arm spinners of all time. In a fitting tribute, Bradman writes, ‘Bedi was a real study for the connoisseur. His ideal well-balanced run-up always brought him into the perfect delivery position. The ball was held well in the tips of long, almost delicate fingers which never seemed to get tired, but always retained great flexibility and control. There were regular but very subtle changes of pace – variations in flight, and always coupled with genuine spin. The end product was a delight to watch and I do not hesitate to rank Bedi among the finest bowlers of his type we have seen.’
No Indian cricketer had received higher praise from cricket’s ultimate icon. But Bedi’s true impact on Indian cricket lies not just in his contribution to the art of left-arm spin bowling but in the way he redefined the idea of leadership in Indian sport by putting player power above personal success.
