By Simon Wilde (1990)
When I buy, what I think, is a really good book; I want it to be a ‘hardcover’. Paperbacks are for reading on a flight or in the toilet and then giving away to a nephew or a friend and then forget to take it back. Alternatively, they can be conveniently put in the guest bedroom toilet. Here is a book I do not want to give away or put anywhere but in my study. Unfortunately, it is today available only as a paperback. There was, I understand, a hardback version in 1990 but now its impossible to find a copy. This is my first big issue with Simon Wilde’s biography of Ranji. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I have any other issues with it.
Tony Lewis’s claim on the book's back-cover, calling it “riveting stuff” is totally apt. Here is a cricket book, which is very difficult to put down. I have read all the major works on Ranji and both his “Jubilee Book of Cricket” and “With Stoddart’s Team In Australia”. Yet, here was another biography of the man, written almost a century after the first one and it held my attention so completely from the moment I read the first chapter till I had gone through its 250 odd pages..
Actually in those 250 pages, it is really two books in one. There is the book that deals with Ranji the cricketer and does a pretty good job of it but this is something that has been done before and some of it by those who saw him in flesh and blood lending a greater authenticity to those accounts. I am never very comfortable with accounts of the cricketing skills expounded by writers, howsoever great as wielders of the pen, if the accounts are second third or fourth hand as they often are. So this ‘first book’ within the book, doesn’t do a great deal for me, although it Wilde does a more than decent job of it. It’s the second book in the life-story of the cricketer ‘prince’ that one finds so very absorbing, compelling, sometimes stunning and mostly shocking.
David Frith wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote in the Wisden Cricket Monthly that
“There will be polite coughing and embarrassed shuffling of feet as the reality of the book drifts down the cricketing corridors of Hove and Melbourne.”
If anything he was gently preparing the unsuspecting reader for the startling experience of the skeletons tumbling out in quick succession from rickety old cupboards and the stink of stuff being brought out from under faded carpets where older writers seem to have swept it more by design and sometimes by laziness. Through meticulous research, Wilde thoroughly exposes the works, particularly of Percy Standing (Ranjitsinhji Prince of Cricket – 1903), Charles Kincaid (The Land of Ranji and Duleep - 1931) and Roland Wild (The biography of Colonel His Highness Shri Sir Ranjeet Sinhji – 1934), who are shown as sycophants at best and purveyors of half-truths and complete fabrications at worst. The latter day biography by Alan Ross (Ranji : Prince of Cricketers - 1983) is guilty in this regard of accepting the works of the earlier writers as fact without trying to cross-verify as Wilde himself has done with such startling results.
After the first chapter where you see Ranji with the bat as his paint brush or magic wand, depending upon whether you consider him a mere artist or an Oriental conjurer, Wilde plunges head-on into the palace intrigues and the political skullduggery of a small princely state in Kathiawar. What you learn in that amazing second chapter of the book has you hooked to the story and you cant wait for more of the same to be unraveled.
Chapters on Ranji’s cricket in England that follow are interspersed with the story of his naked personal ambition, his personality traits, his character, his human frailties and the financial mess into which he almost compulsively pushed himself all his life. You come to understand his constant need for acceptance by the British (an inferiority complex without a shred of doubt), his use of his cricketing accomplishments to network himself into a sphere of influence which he then tries to use to achieve his political objectives back home in India.
Its not as if Wilde is unrelentingly critical of Ranji because he is unreserved in his praise of his cricketing skills. Ranji, the legendary cricketer, comes out of it with his awesome reputation completely intact – in fact enhanced in my opinion. Although Wilde does deal bluntly with some of the myths that have been built around a few of Ranji’s achievements, which, frankly, his cricketing legacy could do without and at no adverse impact to it. His cricketing feats were truly awesome in themselves and need no fabricated ‘props’ like the story of three separate centuries on a single day shown to be completely false.
Ranji the cricketer comes out of this book standing in the bright sunshine of the deserts of the Rann of Kutch. It is Ranjitsinhji the man who was never the prince he led everyone to believe he was, the ‘son-who-wasn’t’ since he was never adopted by the former Jamsaheb Vibhaji, the ‘rich’ Indian ‘prince’ who borrowed money left right and centre with apparently no means or any apparent concern for having to return it, the pupil who borrowed the sum of thirty pounds from his mentor (who did more for him than probably anyone else) and then ignored the entreaties of the latter’s widow to let he have the money when she needed it, who is shown in very murky light. This shows up our 'hero' in darker hues as an unappetising version of a cricketer Jekyll and ‘Prince’ Hyde.
It is this personal aspect of the man and those who wrote about him, taking extraordinary liberties with their obligations as responsible scribes and chroniclers of cricket’s history, that Wilde’s book shows up in very negative light indeed. Surprisingly, however, in doing so, he manages to enhance the magic of Ranji’s incomparable genius on the cricket fields of England and of the fascination that his life and times continue to hold for the cricket lovers around the world.
Riveting stuff indeed.
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