Who was India’s first great cricketer?

Nayudu’s claim is more well-founded. He was certainly the first Indian star of the game, drawing crowds wherever he went. He was a home-grown athlete at a time when the game was still in its infancy in India. His sixes, moreover, were “interpreted as a nationalist answer to the British Raj”, historian Ramachandra Guha writes, in A Corner of a Foreign Field, his sweeping book on the early years of cricket in India.

It is this book, published in 2002, that provides the real answer to that opening question. Decades before Nayudu, there was Palwankar Baloo, a Dalit cricketer who rose from a groundskeeper at a Europeans-only club to a world-class bowler with a prodigious appetite for wickets.

He was the game’s first Dalit icon, and its only prominent one to date.

BR Ambedkar, 15 years his junior, called Baloo a hero of the Dalit and an inspiration. He and Ambedkar would become friends. Baloo would venture into politics (though he never won an election) and work for caste reform.

“He is at the centre of my book,” Guha says. “The human core of the book. Our very first cricketing star, and a completely forgotten hero.”

If Guha’s work unearthed the forgotten pioneer, Baloo’s story is now set for a second resurrection, in the form of a feature film based on the book, co-produced by actor Ajay Devgn, filmmaker Tigmanshu Dhulia and Priti Sinha of Reel Life Entertainment.

Dhulia will likely be involved in the writing and mounting of the film. “A very fine director, Pa Ranjith, may helm the project,” Guha says.

It was Dhulia who first approached the historian for permission to adapt the book, about 10 years ago. He was struck by the incredible story and by this unusual career that dovetailed with the high noon of Empire in India and unfolded through the gathering surge for independence, then Partition and the early years of a free India.

“My elder brother (Sudhanshu Dhulia, a Supreme Court judge) brought the book to my attention. I read it, and I immediately thought it needed to be a film,” he says.

Field of dreams

Baloo’s introduction to cricket can be traced to 1892, when, as groundskeeper at the recently formed Poona Club, he was sometimes asked by members to bowl.

He would later say that “although he had bowled for hundreds of hours at the Poona Club, not once was he given a chance to bat,” Guha writes. “In India, as in England, batting was the preserve of the aristocratic elite.” Baloo capitalised on the experience nonetheless. He became a cricketer with great variety in his arsenal, and the ability to bowl long spells.

At the time, the game in India was organised strictly by community. The first non-European cricket clubs, in the late 1800s, were the Parsi, Hindu and Muslim clubs. They played each other in tournaments, but did not swap members.

The early Hindu clubs hesitated to admit Baloo. “Should they call upon the services of the Chamaar bowler? The question divided the Hindu cricketers,” Guha writes.

Eventually, a “compromise” was arrived at: On the field, the upper-caste cricketers would touch the same ball, but off it, all the ritual taboos would be observed. Baloo was not allowed to eat, snack or drink water with the team; he was not allowed inside the pavilion. Yet, his bowling was welcomed, and brought great success.

Baloo had his biggest breakthrough in that first All India Team tour of England, in 1911.

“Here he took 114 wickets at an average just below 19,” Guha says. “In a tournament that pitted India against the best sides in England then, he was the only success story, an exceptional bowler, as good as the best in England or Australia.”

By the time he returned, he was a public figure. His younger brothers Shivram Baloo and Vithal Baloo played with distinction too. Vithal would eventually break through the caste barrier, to captain Indian-only teams before Independence.

Why were they all forgotten? Caste oppression certainly has a role to play, Guha says. But there is also “the tendency to locate the beginnings of Indian cricket at a point after Independence, when the national team came into existence, and when we started playing Test matches.”

The film will lay out the odds that Baloo overcame to become a great cricketer, says co-producer Sinha. “It will tell a spirited, powerful story.”

She and Dhulia have tracked down descendants, to add to the repertoire of stories in Guha’s book. Guha hopes this will all serve to take the story forward, but accurately.

As a cricket-mad nation, he adds, “we need to remember, celebrate and acknowledge our first cricketing star, a man who came from nowhere, was denied his human rights at every turn, and still broke through every barrier.”