He was the Nawab of all he surveyed

THE 2000 C. K. Nayudu Award to Subhash Gupte and The 2001 to Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi - a reminder of the Pearson Surita punchline: "Should we not be calling him The Nawab of Padaudi?" Tiger Pataudi, the way he confronted quality spin (pads on with his cap tilted at a rakish Nawabi angle) always made you wonder what would have happened if B.S. Chandrasekhar had not been bowling for his own South Zone and India. Still India's gut problem then was tackling pace. And, here, no Indian of his era was quite Tiger Pataudi's match in meeting fire with fire. As the first one to bring `style' to Indian batsmanship and captaincy alike, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi was the Nawab of all he surveyed. Beauty Queen Naseem's daughter, Saira Banu (I noticed when on my studio beat), came to be rather fancied by Tiger. But the Tagore in Sharmila had other ideas. The seven letters of Pataudi just dovetailed into the seven letters of Glamour. And the Sharmila Tagore connection imparted further charisma to the Pataudi aura.

As a swinging pair the two, to this day, come across among India's glitterati. How does the C. K. Nayudu Award, then, enhance Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi's stature? It burnishes his image in the sense that it fleshes out the Junior Pataudi as a cricketperson first and a social celebrity after. Tiger it was who brought the Indian cricket team out of its slavish British fixation, a fixation abiding in the 1960s. Tiger inspirationally let it be known that each member of the Indian team simply had to learn to stand shoulder to shoulder when face to face with the white man on the field of play. Tiger's being in no way awed by the white-skinned opponent helped cut the Gordian knot of the Indian team's facing the `Englishman to man".

Maybe it was under Nari Contractor that India won its maiden Test series (1961-62) against England (led by Ted Dexter). But it was Tiger Pataudi's 64 and 32 in the December-January 1961-62 Eden Gardens Test, followed by his classic 103 (just 155 minutes) on the opening day of the Corporation Stadium Test, that helped India clinch that breakthrough series 2-0. As we won the final Madras Test by 128 runs, AIR, startlingly, departed from norm to lead its 2.00 p.m. national news bulletin with India's 2-0 victory feat! That 103 signalled Tiger's best as yet to come. The discerning, since, must find it difficult to envision, as Tiger's career best, anything but Pataudi's December-January 1967-68 Melbourne Test 75 and 85 (on one leg with one eye in his very first appearance for India in Australia).

That 75 and 85 underscored the fact that Tiger reserved his finest, for India, on the more testing pitches abroad. Indeed, that Melbourne star-turn came close on the heels of Tiger's rousingly striking 64 and 148 in the June 1967 Leeds Test, after Brian Close's England had run up a total of 550 for 4 (decl). Actually, Tiger valued the runs he hit on sleeping-beauty Indian pitches so much and no more. This should be manifest from his written noting: "I got 200-odd (against Mike Smith's team) in the (February 1964) fourth Test at Delhi, which wasn't a great innings. My first 90-odd runs were helpful, because they came at a time when India was trying to save the match. The remainder (up to 203 not out) had no bearing on the result."

From Prasanna to Bedi to Chandra, each one of our spin trio felt comfortable only in the captaincy custody of Pataudi. Prasanna talks eloquently of times when, after bowling his first ball, he would turn to Tiger for a field-placement change. Only to discover Pat to be, already, in the process of moving the man to the exact position he wanted! Yet the Vijay Merchant die-casting vote, lop-sidedly, turned the spotlight on India's 17 Test losses rather than 7 wins (up to 1969-70) under Tiger Pataudi. After Merchant moved on, upon Pataudi's comeback as India's captain for the 1974-75 series at home, our spin trio's viewpoint came into perspective. In an incredible rearguard, India (after being beaten black and blue in the first two Tests by the West Indies), turned the tables on Clive Lloyd and his men with a vengeance by spinning back the series 2-2.

The tragedy of being Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi is that, even as these his Eden-Chepauk Sourav-vein Test wins softened the blow of that no-confidence motion carried against him by Vijay Merchant, Tiger himself was no longer up to it with the bat. Scores of 22 at Bangalore; 36 and 8 at Calcutta; 6 and 4 at Madras; 9 (at no.9) and 9 at Mumbai certainly dimmed Tiger Pataudi's lustre as India's welcome-back captain. Whereupon Tiger opted out of the game itself without fuss or fanfare. Tiger's pithy point - if he was no longer good enough to address the thunderbolts of Andy Roberts on Indian wickets, there was no sense in lingering for the tour of the West Indies on the anvil. If only - after having condescended to play under Ajit Wadekar starting with the January 1973 third Test at Chepauk in which he hit that super 73 - Tiger Pataudi had chosen to tour England in 1974! But it was one thing, I suppose, for Pataudi to play under commoner Wadekar in India, another in England. Remember, in Britain, `The Noob" was still viewed as a ruling prince!

Where Papa Pataudi came to captain India only when past his prime, the Tiger cub took charge in the shadow cast, across the Caribbean playing arena, by Nari Contractor's traumatising head injury. Maybe it still needed Chairman M.Dutta-Ray's casting vote (midway through the 1963-64 series at home against Mike Smith's England) for Tiger Pataudi to seize the reins for keeps. For certain other selectors, while confirming Pataudi as ad-hoc captain up to the third Test at Calcutta (after his scores, for India, of 0 and 18; 10 and 0, at Madras and Bombay), had counselled: "Will you have your eye checked, because we are not sure you can see so well!" Five-and-a-half years after that, as Tiger was viewed to be slow to sight two possible catches in his pet cover-point region (during the September 1969 first Test at the Brabourne Stadium vs Graham Dowling's New Zealand), similar doubts were re-raised about the man's vision. But the Dilip Vengsarkar manner in which Tiger proceeded to `fix" two skyscraper catches (Ken Wadsworth and Dayle Hadlee), on the long- on boundary-line right under Vijay Merchant's chairmanly nose, laid that bogey momentarily to rest.

Indeed the same Vijay Merchant had, at one time, sought to focus on how much Tiger could have accomplished with both eyes! Chandu Borde (Tiger's peer in playing pace until the 1967 tour of England) came up with something `revealing', in this light, the other day. "Raju," said Chandu, "do you really believe that the Nawab couldn't see at all with his right eye? I say he could see just enough with it to get to terms with John Snow at his sharpest! Ask me who faced Roy Gilchrist and Wesley Hall at their fastest. I say it's impossible to bat without any vision at all in your right eye. The Nawab was a great one for pulling wool over our eyes. He could see the movement of the ball just enough, with his right eye, to fix it with his left!" Well, Tiger himself looks the problem in the eye as he writes: "So we batted and, for my own moment of trial, I decided to wear a contact lens in my right eye. To my discomfort, I found I was seeing two balls - six to seven inches apart. By picking the inner one, I managed to score 35 runs before tea. Then I removed the contact lens and, keeping the bad eye closed, completed a top score of 70. (Soon) I found that the best way to play was to pull the peak of my cap right over my right eye - to eliminate the blurred double image I otherwise saw. I did consider wearing a pirate's patch to cut out the right eye altogether. But this would have stopped all light from coming in - and a little light is helpful to my good eye.

"There you have the angle from which freshly to view Chandu Borde's rider to Vijay Merchant's theory on Tiger's range of vision! If, given such limited vision, Tiger Pataudi could score 2793 runs in 46 Tests from 83 innings (ave.34.91 - 6 hundreds, 16 fifties), would he not have hit many, many more runs for India minus his right-eye blockade? I wouldn't know, for I found our Tiger skipper to be a `visionary' at all times. Who knows, maybe Tiger emerged as the extraordinary batsman he did only because he developed that ball-sighting problem. With both eyes open, Tiger could well have been the kind of laidback performer easily bored by the runs he was slamming.

Short point - the Junior Nawab of Pataudi lives for the day, not the morrow. And that is where Tiger Pataudi and Vijay Merchant failed to see eye to eye. Tiger liked to see the ball land on the sightscreen no less than he loved to watch Sharmila play-act on the silver screen. The romantic Sharmila link, is that what has seen Tiger's magnetism endure? The fact that Vijay Merchant's soft-spoken wife, Prabha, did not talk to the Chairman of Selectors for a week after the casting vote (seeing how, overnight, it had snapped her Sharmila line) is a pointer to how Tiger chose the right girl (as the right ball) to hook. C. K. Nayudu it was who had backed the Senior Nawab of Pataudi (as captain for India's 1946 tour of England) against Vijay Merchant! Now the C. K. Nayudu Award to the Junior Nawab of Pataudi sets the seal on Tiger as one who, in his own words, always wanted to win "within the written laws of the game and the unwritten laws of sportsmanship". As the Junior Nawab tellingly observed: "Cricket is a hard game - to be played by men using a hard ball. But it is only a game, not war."

It is war today and that is why you no longer see the peaceable Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi in the commentators' box.

Tiger belongs to the `amateur" tradition symbolised by C. K. Nayudu. Yet this C. K. award is but another passing happening in Pat's life and times. "I have," as Tiger underlines, "always made it a point never to betray emotion on the cricket field, nor in public life." Philosophically therefore did Tiger accept the fact that he lost his stranglehold on the Indian captaincy in the very glamour hour in which Sharmila Tagore went upstage to receive her Filmfare Best Actress award for `Aradhana'.

RAJU BHARATAN

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