Geoff Boycott travelled to India in 1981-82 needing 230 runs to equal Garry Sobers’s record for the highest aggregate in Test cricket. A fortnight after he crossed that mark, he went missing from a Test, choosing to play golf instead, and was sent back home. He was probably relieved.
I had just started out as a reporter then as a second to the main cricket writer, doing features, interviews, profiles. Boycott’s attitude didn’t surprise anyone in the press box— then rows of wooden benches with desks for the endlessly rattling typewriters and where everybody smoked incessantly (it didn’t matter because it was open on three sides).
The received wisdom was that India was a terrible place to tour—the heat, the dust, the spin-friendly pitches, the traffic, the accommodation, food, poor umpiring—there was a long laundry list any player could reel off, and usually did, unprovoked. Only six countries played Test cricket, and India hadn’t played Pakistan since I had learnt the alphabet.
Done the Elephants, Done the Poverty”: When India Was the Worst Place to Tour
India’s infamy had been built over decades. England’s Phil Tufnell once said he had “done the elephants, done the poverty,” and was ready to return. The Australian opener Gavin Stevens had nearly died in Chennai after an attack of hepatitis. His biography was titled Near Death on the Sub-Continent.
Before the dawn of flush toilets in every dressing room and the comfort of chain hotels, cricketers arrived with anti-diarrhoeal pills, mosquito nets, and their own supply of beer.
For visiting teams before the 1990s, a tour of India was less a sporting event than a spiritual test. Before the dawn of flush toilets in every dressing room and the comfort of chain hotels, cricketers arrived armed with anti-diarrhoeal pills, mosquito nets, and their own supply of beer. In Kanpur, you could lose your off-stump and your luggage within five overs.
The pitches spun, but the people smiled, yet most visitors didn’t take the trouble to engage—they met more cockroaches in their rooms than people across the country.
The transformation of India from cricketing curiosity to superpower wasn’t sudden. It took victory (1983 World Cup), economic liberalisation (which helped convert many of the much-ridiculed conditions into something approaching the contemporary), a world-class team (with Sachin Tendulkar) and a more enlightened bunch of administrators who saw cricket not just as a colonial inheritance, but a cultural imperative.
In 2008, the IPL was born, and suddenly Indian cricket had enough money to make everything appear beautiful and desirable. The IPL married Bollywood’s glamour with cricket’s drama, making millionaires of teenagers and fans of cynics (and vice versa). But beneath the spectacle was something more permanent: infrastructure, scouting, fitness, and strategy. Every aspect was professionalised.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), once a bumbling bureaucratic dinosaur, evolved into a financial behemoth. Television, capitalism’s favourite accomplice, played its part. Satellite dishes sprouted across rooftops like monsoon mushrooms, and with them came the rise of a middle class that demanded its myths—and found them in cricketers.
Many of the players of the past who had refused to tour—including Boycott—found lucrative employment as commentators, coaches and experts. From being the second-worst cricketing destination (Pakistan was always the worst, where, according to Ian Botham, you sent your mother-in-law), India had become the finest, wooed by the high and mighty everywhere, listened to with awe and respect. The 180-degree turn was complete. Now even the worst of wickets, or crowd behaviour or food or heat was praised for all manner of imaginative reasons.
This worshipful treatment extended to journalists accompanying the Indian team too. One had heard stories from the handful who had toured in the 1960s and 70s, tales of a ‘lack of cooperation’, to put it mildly, in various centres. In this century, on an England tour, when I called up Lord’s to collect my media pass, I was greeted with such friendliness and charm, I thought I had the wrong number. The lady offered to take me around Lord’s on a sightseeing tour. I was so startled, metaphors clashed in my head to produce: the worm is on the other foot.
The change isn’t all about how the world reacted to India; it is as much about internal transformations too. Tendulkar wasn’t the first superstar of the game, but he was the first to enjoy the advantages of the media explosion, from the number of television channels to the Internet. Television coverage became professional and huge amounts were pumped into the game. When he started out, the BCCI was paying for television coverage—something impossible to believe today when what the governing body receives from television amounts to billions of dollars.
A crucial fallout was the democratisation of excellence. No longer did India’s cricketing elite emerge only from metros or privileged schools. The small-town revolution was here. From Ranchi came Mahendra Singh Dhoni, a captain with the detachment of a Zen monk and the finishing power of a demolition expert. From Vadodara, Ifran Pathan. From Meerut, Praveen Kumar. From Palarivattom, S Sreesanth. From Jalandhar, Harbhajan Singh. Now cricket wasn’t aspirational; it was accessible. Four first-timers have won the Ranji Trophy in the last decade.
What brought India to the top was talent, time, timing, temperament—and yes, television. India changed, and cricket—faithful mirror that it is—changed with it.
From Tendulkar to Bumrah: How India Rewired Its Cricketing DNA
By the time India lifted the 2011 World Cup at home and under Dhoni’s calm captaincy, the country had transformed from supplicant to sovereign. Virat Kohli’s era brought new standards of fitness, aggression, and global consistency. India no longer just competed abroad; they dominated. Fast bowling, once their Achilles heel, became the spearhead. Pitches at home that once broke down into dust bowls by lunch on the second day now offered bounce and carry. The No. 1-ranked Test bowler is Jasprit Bumrah, by most reckoning the greatest contemporary bowler.
What brought India to the top was talent, time, timing, temperament—and yes, television. From Kapil to Kohli, from Doordarshan to Disney+, the journey has been both epic and intimate. India changed, and cricket—faithful mirror that it is—changed with it. In cricket, as in life, nations find their voice. And India’s, after forty years, now roars.
They are the World T20 champions, the World Cup (50-overs) runners-up and were the finalists at the first two World Test Championships finals. They missed out this year; the road to redemption begins on June 20 with the first of five Tests in England in the new cycle. A generational change has placed Shubman Gill at the head of a team which will be without three stalwarts: Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Ravichandran Ashwin.
In the 1950s and 60s, it was almost part of the Indian captain’s job description to say, upon landing in England, that India had come just for the experience and to learn from the masters. Now the Indian team arrives to conquer; anything less than a series win will be seen as failure by the fans and the media (often indistinguishable). Over the years, every ground around the world has become India’s home ground, with the diaspora cheering for them.
The Indianisation of a colonial sport is only a part of it. There has been a takeover of the sport’s administration too, with India the sole superpower, although it graciously allows England and Australia to pretend there is a ‘Big Three’ that rules the game. When the West Indies had the finest teams in the world, they didn’t have the administration to match; when in the middle of the last century, England’s administrators ruled the roost, they lacked the team. India has both the team and the administration; the combination is rich and irresistible.
At the helm of the International Cricket Council (ICC) is Jay Shah, son of the Home Minister. The next CEO is likely to be Sanjog Gupta, the head of live sport at JioStar. Franchise teams across the world are owned by Indian companies. The Hundred in England—cricket’s strangest tournament—has been given a breath of life by Indian owners. Overall, India’s influence on world cricket is set to continue even if the powerful BCCI is gradually pushed into the background by corporates that own multiple teams.
From the inaugural tour in 1932, there were just 13 tours to England for 64 years. Since 2002, this is the ninth tour. This is as much a tribute to India’s cricket as to television money—the two are, of course, related. England’s best play at home or in India, where sometimes English teams were led by men who had not played Test cricket before, and the feel of a ‘B’ team could not be shaken away.
Kohli, on the verge of personal landmarks, decides to call it a day ahead of the England tour, and there’s disappointment in England too. Unlike Boycott, he doesn’t think statistics and averages are important. If he has taught his colleagues—and some of the fans—anything, it is that personal records mean nothing, the team cause is all. None of his predecessors who carried Indian cricket on their shoulders thought like that. Figures mattered to them.
As a new-look team under a young captain prepares to write the next chapter in the Indian story, they will be attempting to give breath to the Ashis Nandy quote: Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English. A point of view both amusing and profound.
Suresh Menon is an author, most recently of Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
This article appears in 해외카지노 Magazine’s June 21, 2025 issue, Innings/Outings, which captures a turning point in Indian cricket —from retiring legends to small-town stars reshaping the game’s power map. It appeared in print as 'Days Of Diamonds, And Rust.'
