Maharaja of Nawanagar Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji - Ranji

N ot many cricketers can be of more than passing interest to the non-cricketer. C.B. Fry, certainly, as a genuine all-rounder in several disciplines; Jardine, perhaps, as a study in obsession which distorted principle; Pelham Warner, as an essay in subtlety, if the truth could ever be dug up about that devious, humbugging man; conceivably Lord Harris, autocrat incarnate. And then there is Ranjitsinhji, on a number of counts. At the same time, not many experts on cricket have been capable of analysing anything else, though the more you think about it, the more you realise that the very finest cricket writers have been men who could turn with equal facility to other things. Among this select band is Alan Ross, with whom Ranji in this book is perfectly matched. Not only did Ross play first-class cricket himself (for Oxford) and subsequently serve on a county committee (Sussex). He is one of the best writers the game has ever attracted, being otherwise a poet and the distinguished editor of the LondonMagazine. He is also one of the few outsiders who knows and comprehends the complexities of India, where he was born, and to which he regularly returns.

Colonel His Highness, Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, Maharaj Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, GBE, KCSI, had three overlapping identities. He was a phenomenal cricketer, one of fewer than a dozen freak performers in the history of the game (Grace, Barnes, Bradman, Sobers, possibly Botham.). He scored centuries for three different teams in one day at the start of his career at Cambridge. Towards the end of it in 1912, when he was 39 years old and hadnt touched a bat for four years, he came sixth in the English county averages and topped the Sussex batting with 50.36, the next best average being 32 from Joe Vine. Thats how measurably good he was. More important was something he contributed that is beyond statistical measurement. Ranji gave the game some strokes it had never seen before, most notably the leg glance and the late cut, which, perfectly executed, is the most beautiful stroke of them all. Why does he ever get out? C.B. Fry asked one day. Perhaps he knows himself. There may be reasons but they are not apparent. The princes nephew Duleepsinhji, himself no mean cricketer, put the glance and the cut into perspective when he remarked that It was Ranji who made the back stroke an attacking stroke. The idea of batting up to then was that the ball must travel back more or less in the same direction from which it came to the bat. He changed this by helping the ball in the same direction, more or less, by slightly deflecting it. Ranji was almost certainly, as well as revolutionary , the most graceful batsman ever seen in one of the most graceful sports.

He became the prince of a minor Indian state only after his reputation had been secured as a major cricketer, for the succession to the gadi the word literally means cushion, in this case on a throne of Nawanagar had been an unusually convoluted one, even for that part of the world. He inherited, in Alan Rosss words, a disease-ridden, squalid and dusty city, and began to transform it into something which today remains a model city of lakes and gardens, of flowering trees and waterways. He stimulated the local economy by building a port, and he attended carefully in other ways to the welfare of his people. This is not to say that his priorities were always as immaculate as his batting. He spent 2,000 on a new hospital, and 40,000 on entertaining the Viceroy when it was opened.

He was a paradigm of loyalty to the Crown, as a man perhaps inevitably will be when he has become famous at Hove and Lords. He regretted that he had not left an arm or leg behind on the Western Front, where he served as ADC to Sir John French, though 1915 did cost him the sight of his right eye when some landed bumpkin shot him accidentally on the Yorkshire grouse moors. His affection for Britain never wavered, though there was some friction in the relationship towards the end. In Ireland he dealt generously with the villagers of Ballynahinch, where he had an estate; and today, coach parties of American tourists, pausing for lunch in the poshed-up hotel that was once his home, peer blankly at pictures of him in plus-fours or fishing gear, which hang around the bar.

The friction arose because Ranjis third persona was that of statesman. He was Indias representative at the League of Nations, almost solely responsible by skilful advocacy for obtaining her place on the governing body of the International Labour Bureau as one of the eight nations of chief industrial importance in the world. At Geneva in 1922 he also made a memorable speech on behalf of the Indian minorities in South Africa, with whom Mahatma Gandhi had made his early political reputation. All well and good as far as the British were concerned; and they were happy enough to see their trusty Ranjitsinhji installed as Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes in Delhi, where he consequently played a part in the slow march of his country towards independence. It wasnt, in fact, an especially wise part. What Ranji was after was the preservation of the old order under new management. This meant that he was alienated from Gandhi who had little time for princes yet increasingly exasperating to the British.

The clearest sign of that exasperation was an action by Lord Willingdon, not the most luminous of the men who ruled India. Came the day in 1933, and Ranji was speaking in the Chamber on the topic of a new Constitution, when he was interrupted by the Viceroy, in his capacity of chairman. A laborious number of exchanges passed between the two, excruciatingly civil but pregnant with disagreement. At the end of them Ranji sat down, the remainder of his speech unsaid. Within a few days he was dead.

The rumour was put out by the MorningPost that the Indian prince had died of a broken heart after being humiliated by the Viceroy; and until Alan Ross undertook his research, this had been the accepted version of Ranjis end. In fact, it was no such thing, as Ross effectively demonstrates. Prince Ranjitsinhji suffered from chronic asthma, and it was that which finished him off; an essentially lonely man whose closest companion was Popsy, the parrot he had acquired from a Cambridge pub when he was an undergraduate. This book is a splendid memorial.

PRINCE OF CRICKETERS

ALAN ROSS