Test Cricket at Brabourne

It is great to see test cricket at Brabourne Stadium in Bombay. Not just because of Sehwag's 293, or India attaining the world #1 ranking, but for its political resonance.

Brabourne stadium represents a part of India's culture and cricketing heritage that deserves to be celebrated and brought back into the mainstream. It was built by the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in 1936, to be "India's Lord's". For my money, it is a more beautiful and charismatic cricket venue than Lord's.

The CCI website tells me of one of the founding myths of Brabourne. The Maharaja of Patiala, one of the great patrons of cricket in pre-independence India, went to the Gymkhana to watch a game. He was not allowed to sit with the white skinned Europeans, and was sent to the native enclosure. Hurt, and perhaps inspired by Jamshetji Tata's hotel that stands half a mile from the Bombay Gymkhana, he swore to create a great cricket club where such segregation did not exist. He went on to build the Cricket Club of India. He saw no contradiction in naming this great new stadium after Lord Brabourne, then the British governor of Bombay Presidency.

At the time, the dominant political forces in Indian cricket were the princelings of the Raj. The Maharaja of Patiala was the first President of the CCI, and sponsored the Patiala Pavilion. The Maharaja of Idar, a Rathore prince from North Gujarat whose clan married into Ranji's Jamnagar family, paid for the Governer's pavilion. One of the great banqueting halls at the CCI is the Cooch Behar Room, presumably sponsored by another cricket loving royal family. A more recent CCI president was Raj Singh, once chairman of the Indian team's selection committee, scion of the royal family of Dungarpur.

The aristocrats of the CCI long had the Bombay Cricket Association (BCA) as tenants on their premises. The culture of the BCA was closer to that of the Marathi speaking middle class families of Dadar, Matunga and Shivaji Park - the culture of Umrigar, Phadkar, Mankad, Wadekar, Gavaskar, Shivalkar, Vengsarkar and Tendulkar - rather than the culture of India's erstwhile royalty. Discomfort between these cultures is easy to imagine, but the relationship stayed on the rails through Jawaharlal Nehru's lifetime, up until the early 70s.

By this time, India itself was changing rapidly. India had defeated Pakistan in war in 1971. East Pakistan had broken away and formed the independent nation of Bangladesh. Also in 1971, the Indian cricket team had defeated England - the old colonial masters - at their own game, in their own country. This team was captained not by a princeling like the Maharajkumar of Vijaynagaram, but by a middle-class Mumbaikar called Ajit Wadekar. A hot-headed, curly-haired, twenty two year old called Sunil Manohar Gavaskar opened India's batting. A new India was taking shape. This India had no time for the niceties of older days. Not coincidentally, 1971 was the year Indira Gandhi's parliment abolished the privy purses that had been paid to the royal families of India since independence. The lineages that had built the CCI were no longer royalty in any meaningful sense.

Relations between the CCI and the BCA came to a head during the England tour of India in 1972. The CCI apparently turned down the BCA's request for more ticket allotments. The BCA under SK Wankhede decided to break away from the CCI and build their own stadium. Wankhede stadium, an unremarkable concrete behemoth that sits a couple of blocks north of Brabourne, was completed in 1975. It has since hosted most important matches in the first city of Indian cricket, while Brabourne lies idle.

The power struggle that led to Brabourne being supplanted by Wankhede is now over. The victors should be secure in their victory. Does that create room to restore Brabourne to some of its former glory as the home of Indian cricket? And hence, can contemporary India recapture some of that spacious, graceful, cosmopolitan spirit that still pervades the CCI?

The betting is that Brabourne will be forgotten and that service as usual will return once the repairs at Wankhede are completed. But, heck, crazier things have happened.