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Journeys |
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Journeys |
This Game’s for the Birds
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| Behind Jamnagar’s reputation as an oil town, there are its bird sanctuaries. Behind its bird sanctuaries, stands Ranji—its 20th century cricket star Maharaja |
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Published : 1 November 2010 |
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DILIP D’SOUZA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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| Lakhota Fort, now a museum, in the middle of Lakhota Lake in Jamnagar.
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EAR LAKHOTA LAKE in the centre of Jamnagar, gulls screeching
behind us, we finally find a statue of Ranji. He’s dressed as
his pedigree demands: turban and floor-length cape, red garland
around his shoulders, and the whole statue is gold–plated. He was
a Maharajah, after all. He looks about as un-cricketer-like as it is
possible to look, which
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for any other Maharajah would not be a point of discussion. Yet it is as a cricketer, and an English cricketer, that Ranji is most fondly remembered.
Though there is a famous photograph from his last full year playing cricket for
Sussex in 1912, taken as he strides out to bat at the age of 40, and he looks pretty
un-cricketer-like there too. The years have left their mark: this is not the slim and
elegant figure of his glory days. Ranji has, you can tell, ingested a few too many
dhoklas. And it’s those same dimensions he sports as he stands in princely finery
on this pedestal, reclining lions on either side of him.
After a legendary cricket career in England, Prince Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, Ranji
to fans everywhere, returned home to rule the small princely state of Jamnagar
in Gujarat. He became a wise and generally loved Maharajah, but he took no interest
in Indian cricket. As Anthony de Mello, one of the founders of the Board
of Control for Cricket in India, once wrote: “It is my understanding of this great and strange man that his heart was in England.” Ask Ranji
to help the sport in his own land and he would reply: “I am
an English cricketer.”
So in front of this gleaming but uninspiring statue, I wondered
if that’s why there’s no sign here in Jamnagar of Ranji
playing the game he so enriched. I hadn’t come here in
search of Ranji either, so it didn’t even register that we were
visiting Ranji country until after we got to the city. Oh yes, I
thought as we drove past a cricket ground on the way to our
hotel, Ranji was the Maharajah of Jamnagar, and here we
are in Jamnagar. What’s for dinner, then?
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ROWING UP, I was an irredeemable cricket nut. There
was a spell when I read nothing but stuff about the
game. I buzzed through books about great matches,
savoured swashbuckling innings and irresistible spells of
bowling, wished I had been at the famous tied Australia-
West Indies Test of 1960–61, and couldn’t get enough of
Ranji and
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many other charismatic cricketers. This cricket reading seared into my brain two numbers.
| DILIP D’SOUZA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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Statue of the cricket legend, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinghji in Jamnagar. Ranji never played in India: “I am an English cricketer,” he said. |
The first: 796.358—which is not some hapless sod’s bowling
average. In the Dewey Decimal Classification system
for library books, this number represents books on cricket.
Now there is no other Dewey number, for any subject that
interests me or otherwise, that I can quote to you. But this
one, I can rattle off in my sleep. Even today, when I walk
into a new library, I will follow the signs to where 796.358
is shelved, to gaze at its collection of cricketana.
The second: 47. Also not some hapless sod’s bowling average.
This is a number I will forever associate with a prince:
Ranji himself. Accounts of his batting, plenty of which
I read in one or another 796.358 book, are rapturous to a
degree I’ve not seen with any other batsman. They made
him a silent hero to me, elegantly cutting and leg-glancing
forever in my mind. Not for him the language from today’s
T20 reports: ‘mow’ and ‘hoick,’ ‘biff’ and ‘bludgeon.’ Ranji would instead caress the ball, seeming only to help it along
on its inexorable course—inexorable while he batted, anyway—
to the boundary where it belonged. The distinguished
cricket writer Neville Cardus was enchanted: “[Ranji’s] bat
made its beautiful pass, a wizard’s wand [and] the ball was
spirited away to the leg-side boundary.”
And there was his little masterpiece in the 1896 Gentlemen
versus Players match. It lasted exactly 13 balls. The first
11, Ranji put away for fours. The 12th, he ran three. The 13th,
he was out. He had scored 47 runs. He had done it in a way
that must have left spectators gasping in admiration. (“One
of the most brilliant and delightful pieces of batting seen at
Lord’s,” wrote Wisden.) He had done it at a strike rate, 362,
that puts today’s T20 biffers and hoickers to shame.
I still remember my goofy smile as I put down the long–
forgotten 796.358 book where I first read this. To me, this
was the perfect cricket performance: a virtuoso waving his
‘wizard’s wand’ just enough to persuade you of his magic.
No need for bushels of runs (though Ranji had those too).
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HAT TOOK MY FAMILY and me to Jamnagar was
something that interests me a great deal more,
these days, than cricket: birds. I owe this to my
mother, a tireless and passionate birdwatcher who points
out bulbuls and hoopoes and barbets wherever we stroll.
I mean, I never imagined spending 20 minutes in one of
Mumbai’s busiest areas,
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Kala Ghoda, watching a hardworking barbet contort his body over and over to produce his metallic ‘tonk.’ But one afternoon with Ma, that’s just what we did. The surprising thing is, it remains a favourite memory from my city. I may not know their Dewey numbers, but I know (some of) my birds. And in and around Jamnagar are a number of spots where you can watch feathered beauties all day.
Though I had better get this out of the way: It’s true,
these days Jamnagar is also known as an oil town. Reliance has built the world’s largest refinery not far away—this
is a virtue, apparently, going by the number of people who
mentioned it—and Essar has another whose size ranking I
don’t know. It’s also true that because these establishments
have hordes of employees with disposable incomes, there’s
a gigantic new mall, also mentioned by several folks, on the
highway west of Jamnagar. It’s called Reliance Mart, and
it comes complete with a sandwich place named ‘Jozz n
Quezz The Sizzling.’
| DILIP D’SOUZA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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Lakhota Lake in the Khijadiya Bird Sanctuary at Jamnagar, where fried snacks are all too often part of the birds’ diet. |
But to me, oil refineries and malls—even malls blessed
with an overabundance of the letter ‘z’—are about as fascinating
as watching grass grow. So I stayed with the birds.
On our first evening, our energetic and enthusiastic host,
Mustak Mepani, drove us to the Khijadiya Bird Sanctuary,
a grid of trails that run between marshland and salt pans.
We stopped where one trail left the road at a right angle,
taking a few moments to get used to the quiet. Above our
craning heads, flocks of egrets and cormorants flapped silently
homeward. A pair of black-necked storks stalked the
tall grass on the far side of a shallow pond. A lone drongo,
forked tail twitching, swayed on a thorny bush. Through
binoculars, we hunted hunched herons, silhouetted against the brilliant orange of the setting sun. Then my five-yearold
bounded up the stairs of a watchtower and nearly stumbled
over a family at the top, several members present, who
were not bird-watching and looked bewildered when she
pointed to the egrets. Even though a huge board nearby announced
the ‘Khijadiya Bird Sanctuary,’ it hadn’t occurred
to them that they were in one. For they were seated in a
large circle up on the watchtower, eating dhokla and roti.
| HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION / CORBIS |
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Ranji in the crease during his time as a club cricketer in England. |
The theme was repeated. Where least expected, we’d find
families who had driven up in Maruti vans and Scorpios,
laid large sheets on the ground and were eating, oblivious
to surrounding flora and fauna. And why not? Who’s to say
that sanctuaries are only for oohing at birds? They make
good picnic spots too.
Another day, we strolled from our hotel to Lakhota Lake,
which is dotted with hundreds, maybe thousands of water-
birds: cormorants, ducks, but particularly snow-white
gulls. From one particular overlook, people flung farsan
and Marie biscuits into the water—the nearby corner had
several vendors who did steady business in these snacks—
and the gulls squawked and shoved and flapped to get at
little yellow bits of ganthia raining from overhead. When
we stopped to gaze, they looked unusually plump, of course.
Still, we worried about what a steady diet of fried savouries
could do to bird innards and to their life expectancies.
Walking around the lake, we arrived at another of Jamnagar’s
claims to fame, the Bal Hanuman temple. This is a
popular and revered spot, not for any particular architectural
feat or the magnificence of the idol, but because the
mantra ‘Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram’ has been recited
here continuously since 1 August 1964. Forty-five-plus years
of chanting that has, naturally, found space in the Guinness
Book of World Records. This is a record, I got the feeling
as I listened, which not only will never be broken, but can
never be broken. Because who will ever stop the chanting
here so that aspirants elsewhere can hope to catch up?
Under a tree in the corner, oblivious to the chanting, a
family was settled on a sheet, eating.
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