Great Indian Cricket Circus (63 of 2024)

 Mukherjee, who won the Anandji Dossa Award for the Cricket Statistician of the Year in 2019/20, is the content head at Wisden India. Bhattacharjya, who was ESPN Star Sports’ first Indian head of production, and has been the team director for the Kolkata Knight Riders, is a cricket analyst with the online platform Cricbuzz. They have combined their experiences and networks to write a memorable book aptly named 'Great Indian Cricket Circus'.

A book that promises to be “an unabashed celebration of this incredible sport” is a smart idea because success in cricket as well as publishing often depends on good timing. It has 52 short, crisp chapters. Each one can be read in a few minutes. The emphasis here is on supplying readers with trivia that is humorous, astonishing, and sometimes even bizarre.

Did you know that ...

Chandu Sarwate, Indian Test cricketer, was also a fingerprint expert?

Sania Mirza is related to four Test captains, two of them Indian.

In addition to roads and neighbourhoods, Sachin Tendulkar also has a racehorse, a variety of mango and a species of spider named after him?

The Great Indian Cricket Circus takes a rollicking journey through more than a century of Indian cricketing history. It tells the stories of not just the matches and the players, but also of crazy fans, mind-boggling endorsements, memorable scores, eccentric commentators, iconic stadiums and much more.

Supremely entertaining, and full of bewildering events, surprising anecdotes and cool facts compiled together in wacky, interesting ways, this is the perfect book for fans of the sport, trivia lovers or anyone looking for entertainment!

Not simply a compendium of information, this is a chronicle of memories around the game that evokes joy, sadness, longing, anger, despair, and hope.

“Where does cricket end and the rest of life begin? In India, you never know,” writes Indian cricketer R Ashwin in his foreword to The Great Indian Cricket Circus. People who do not follow cricket might think that he is exaggerating but those who have been ardently following would fully agree. 

The book opens with a chapter that is ideal for people who are equally devoted to fiction and cricket. Following the format of a listicle, it spots references to real-life cricketers in book such as RK Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935), Jeffrey Archer’s A Quiver Full of Arrows (1980), Ruskin Bond’s Cricket for the Crocodile (1986), Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), Chetan Bhagat’s The 3 Mistakes of My Life (2008) and Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor (2008), among others.

Another endearing chapter tracks down things and places named after Indian cricketers. Sachin Tendulkar has a hybrid mango variety – “a cross between gudshah and chausa” named after him thanks to horticulturist Haji Kaleemullah Khan of Malihabad in Uttar Pradesh. A cricket stadium in Zanzibar (Tanzania), a ground in Leicester (England), and a cricket field in Louisville (Kentucky, USA) are named after Sunil Gavaskar. The Tihar Jail in Delhi used to have a block named after Manoj Prabhakar but “the authorities changed the name of the block in 2001 after Prabhakar was named in the match-fixing scandals the year before”.

The writing seems effortless but it must have taken a lot of research and fact-checking. The chapter on religion and Indian cricket is a case in point. It throws light on the history of a less known interfaith cricket tournament called the Bombay Pentangular that was played between the Parsees-only Zoroastrian Gymkhana, the Europeans-only Bombay Gymkhana, the Hindu Gymkhana, the Mohammedan Gymkhana, and fifth team added later to include “Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Indian Christians, other Indian communities and even the Ceylonese”. Unfortunately, this tournament was discontinued in 1945/46 because of communal riots.

One of the chapters in the book focuses on cricketers who were forced to leave their birthplaces and ancestral homes at Partition or just before. The authors note, “Of the 31 Pakistan Test cricketers born in what became India after Partition, most were – not surprisingly – from Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat, all of which share borders with Pakistan.”