In extended celebration of its 377th birthday, the city has been putting up some salubrious weather in the mornings. Hot Chennai, considered a ‘cool’ city nowadays in the groovy sense of the word, is seeing another set of aural and visual treats put together by a dedicated team headed by the eminent historian S. Muthiah. To contribute to this calendar of celebrations that stretches into a fortnight these days, I led a bit of a walk down cricket’s memory lane.
What comes most naturally to Indians is intrigue is the crux of a theory propounded by historians. Consider the traits of the founder, Francis Day, described by the city’s chronicler to be “a hard drinking, enthusiastic gambler and lusty womaniser.” Well, that did not stop him from dreaming of a fort for a city on which he set the ball rolling by buying a sliver of sand near the Marina, which in history has grown to gain world fame as an urban expanse of sand on which no one who has lived in Madras-Chennai would have failed to stepon in its 377 years.
Given such a background to the founding of the city, there was bound to be plenty of intrigue. And cricket had plenty of it too, which is what the interesting history of the first two men from Madras to play for India in Tests. The first of them was Morapakkam Josyam Gopalan, who played in the 1933-34 Test against Douglas Jardine’s England team at the Eden Gardens. The pace bowler, who may have begun his early life with a tuft, did not set the Hooghly on fire and was never to play another Test again. The intriguing part came to him a couple of years later when he was chosen to tour England with the Maharajah of Vizianagaram’s Indian team in 1936.
The hockey-cricket international, Gopalan may have been picked to represent India in the Berlin Olympics in the same year and it would have been so easy to choose hockey as in those days India was assured of a medal in what was then considered the national game. The lure of cricket was such the Triplicane resident chose to go to England rather than Nazi Germany and he suffered what was a painful cricket tour full of intrigues and he did not even get to play a Test.
Such were the selection foibles of those days when Indian cricket board votes counted that there was no guarantee a player could enjoy touring England, considered the ultimate experience in the game then.
On the same boat was Cotah Ramaswami, a second double international from Madras who was picked for his elegant left-handed batsmanship, but at the age of 40-plus when he himself thought and wrote in his book too that he believed he “was chosen for reasons other than cricket.” But, mind you, he did not do too badly, scoring 40, 60, 29 and 41* in his two Tests. That gave him a Test batting average of 56.66 not to be spoilt by any later exploits as he was never picked again and in any case the next Test India played was in 1946. Incidentally, that Test average is better than two batsmen named Sachin Tendulkar (53.86) and Rahul Dravid (52.31) who amassed the most ever Test runs for India. Such are the delightful ironies of history.
Ramaswami had a most colourful history. He was the son of Buchi Babu Naidu, the pioneering cricket nationalist who wished Indians would excel the English at cricket and marshalled operations in this direction from his Luz House and the Madras United Club opposite the Fort Station. Given away in adoption to his maternal grandmother due to a tragedy in the family, Ramaswami was to go by the first name of Cota or Cotah rather than the family name of Buchi. As fate would have it, Cotah Ramaswami, who played Davis Cup for India in the 1920s amnd once reached the second round at Wimbledon, was to live a full life and become the world’s oldest living Test cricketer sometime around 1990 when he disappeared and was never spotted again.
Stories have swirled about how and why Ramaswami left home – some said he didn’t want to burden the family - and the fact remains that he was declared officially ‘dead’ later according to law. It is interesting that both the pioneers of Madras cricket who got into the Test side first from the city should suffer from the intrigues. But, as is customary in a city with many a cricketer living a long life after giving up a life of play on turf, they set records in longevity that got them into a memorable section of the cricket almanacs too.
