Full Name: Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji
Born: 10 September 1872, Sarodar,
Kathiawar, India
Died: 2 April 1933,
Jamnagar Palace, India
Major Teams: Cambridge University, Sussex, London County, England.
Also Known As: later H. H. Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji,
Jam Sahib of Nawanagar
Batting Style: Right Hand
Bat
Test Debut: England v Australia at Manchester, 2nd
Test, 1896
Last Test: England v Australia at Manchester,
4th Test, 1902
Inherited title of HH Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, Jam
Sahib of Nawanagar in 1907
London County Greats: Ranjitsinhji by Neville Cardus
Cricketers will never see the like of Ranjitsinhji; he was entirely original, and there is nothing in all the history and development of batsmanship with which we can compare him. His style was remarkable instance of the way a man can express personal genius in a game – nay, not only a personal genius but the genius of a whole race. For Ranjitsinji’s cricket was of his own country; when he batted a strange light was seen for the first time on English fields, a light out of the East. It was lovely magic, and not prepared for by anything that had happened in cricket before Ranji came to us.
In the ’nineties the game was absolutely English.: it was even Victorian. WG Grace for years had stamped on cricket the English mark, and the mark of the period. It was the age of simple first principles, of the stout respectability of straight bat and good-length ball; the flavours everywhere were John Bull’s. And then suddenly, this visitation of dusky, supple legerdemain happened; a man was seen playing cricket as a nobody in England could have possibly played it. The honest length ball was not met by the honest straight bat, but there was a flick of the wrist, and lo! The straight ball was charmed away to the leg boundary. And nobody quite saw or understood how it all happened. Bowlers stood transfixed, and possibly they crossed themselves. I once asked Ted Wainwright, the Yorkshire cricketer, what he thought of Ranji, and Wainwright said, ‘Ranji, he never made a Christian stroke in his life’. Why should he have done? The style is the man, and Ranji belonged to the land of Hazlitt’s Indian jugglers, where beauty is subtle and not plain and unambiguous.
Marvellous game of cricket that can give us a WG Grace, English as a Gloucestershire tree, and George Hirst, Yorkshire as a broad moor, and Ranji as true to his racial psychology as any of them!
The game has known no greater spectacle than that of CB Fry and Ranji as they made a great stand for Sussex. I notice that Mr JA Spender has described the Ranji-Fry combination as ‘the perfect display of the first-wicket stand.’ But Ranji never went in first with Fry; he always batted second wicket down, and thereby hangs a tale – and again the teller of it is Ted Wainwright. ‘Ranji and Fry’ he would murmur as memory moved in on him, ‘every year it were the same owd story. We used to go down to Brighton with the sun shining and the ground hard as iron. And Sussex allus won the toss. And we all went on the field and started bowlin’, and sure enough, we’d get Vine out and the score-board would say Sussex 20 for one. And then George Hirst would get Killick out quick, and we all on us said, ‘‘ Come on, Yorkshire, we’re going grand; Sussex 31 for two!’’ ’ Wainwright paused here in his narrative, and after a while he added, ‘But, bless you, we knowed there were nowt in it. Close of play, Sussex three ’undred and ninety for two, and the same owd tale every year.’
Bowlers have never known a problem so heart-breaking as the problem of Fry and Ranji on a perfect Brighton wicket. Happy the man who to-day can close his eyes and see again the vision of Ranji, his rippling shirt of silk, his bat like a yielding cane making swift movements which circled round those incomparable wrists. He saw the ball quicker than any other batsman; he made his strokes later, so late indeed, that Lockwood almost saw his great breakback crashing on the leg stump while Ranji remained there at his crease, apparently immobile. Then, at the last fraction of the last second, Ranji’s body leaned gently over his front leg, the bat glinted in the sun, and we saw Lockwood throw up his hands to heaven as the ball went to the boundary, exquisitely to fine leg, with the speed of thought. This leg glance was Ranji’s own stroke, but it is a mistake to say he could not drive. Usually he was too indolent for forcible methods, but none the less his front-of-the-wicket play could reach unparalleled range and precision; and his cut was a dazzling lance of batsmanship.
He caused a revolution in the game: he demonstrated the folly of the old lunge forward to a ball seductive in length. Ranji’s principle was to play back or to drive, and his many imitators contrived in the course of years to evolve the hateful two-eyed stance from Ranji’s art, which, of course, was not for ordinary mortals to imitate. He is to-day a legend. Modern lovers of the game, jealous of their own heroes, will no doubt tell us that Ranji, like all the old masters, was a creation of our fancy in a world of old-fashioned and young. We who saw will keep silence as the sceptics commit their blasphemy. We have seen what we have seen. We can feel the spell yet, we can go back in our minds to hot days in an England of forgotten peace and plenty, days when Ranji did not so much bat for us as enchant us, bowlers and all, in a way all of his own, so that when at last he got out we were as though suddenly wakened from a dream. It was more than a cricketer and more than a game that did it for us.
* Extract taken from ‘Good Days’ A Book of Cricket by Neville Cardus published 1949.
The light of the East
Ranji opened up the region behind square on the leg side as a legitimate area for making runs |
