Robert Hardman:Ranji legacy is rediscovered (15 Oct 1997)

15 October 1997

Ranji legacy is rediscovered

By Robert Hardman

IN a week dominated by much heated talk of British supremacy in India, it is only right that some attention should be paid to a spectacular Indian conquest of Britain. Today, when the Queen opens a huge Indo-British trade exhibition in New Delhi, she will be reminded of a pretty useful piece of trade in the form of Ranji.

Ranjitsinhji, Jama Saheb of Nawanagar, to give him his correct title, was the gifted prince who gave cricket the leg glance.

Sent to Britain in the 1890s to avoid a bloody feud at home, he won a Blue at Cambridge and went on to play for Sussex and England (India had no team then), scoring a century in his first Test at Old Trafford in 1896.

Every cricketing bookworm will be familiar with his feats but the fact that his legacy lives on in India is less well-known. Earlier this year, Mark Williams, a Delhi-based British diplomat and cricket authority, decided to pay a pilgrimage to Ranji's home and found that little has changed.

Not only are his bats still in his bedroom at the Jam Palace in Gujarat but his bed is still as it was when he died in it in 1933. Born relatively poor, Ranji succeeded to his title via a distant uncle but still had little wealth.

His cricketing exploits in England won him such respect that when he returned to India to run his fiefdom, the Empire was glad to do him a few favours on the excise front. As a result, he turned Nawanagar into a prosperous state and much of his building work is thriving today.

Whatever he had is clearly still in the Jam genes because the vice-captain of today's Indian team, Ajay Jadeja, is his great, great nephew and only just missed out on a maiden Test century in Antigua this year.

And now history may be about to repeat itself. The present Jam Saheb, once a useful player in the Malvern First XI and Sussex Second XI, has no son and may leave the Ranji estate, plus the title, to Adeja.

One family heirloom will greet the Queen today, an oil painting of the young Ranji with W G Grace, which has just been unearthed at the Jam Palace. The family has generously lent it to Williams for the Anglo-Indian cricket exhibition he has put together alongside the trade fair.

It is a telling reminder of the Indian contribution to the game with photographs of those as well-known in Britain as in India, among them Kapil Dev, whose 434 Test wickets are unbeaten.

My favourite is a picture of the younger Nawab of Pataudi. Known as "Tiger", he lost the sight of his right eye in 1961 in a car accident but carried on playing regardless. When asked by Gubby Allen, a former England captain, when he overcame his disability, the Nawab replied: "When I first saw the English bowling."

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)