How a Gujarati dance drama recreated the first-known game of cricket on Indian soil in 1721

Sixty years ago, I watched the First Test between India and England in Chennai, constantly stopped by cut kites falling out of the sky and flowers piling up from the garlands fans had flung round the necks of their heroes. Of the batting and bowling I remember nothing.

As a Commonwealth Scholar from Britain, I had been sent round India (third class) by my teacher at Baroda’s Maharaja Sayajirao University, playwright and all-round man of letters, Chanchi Mehta, to look at different forms of theatre. We had met up at the house of the Bharatnatyam dancer Chandralekha, who had sent me off with a visiting niece of hers to watch the cricket.

In the evening, since Mehta was heading to Bengal the next day and I to Bengaluru, Chandralekha, after waxing eloquent about the vad trees of her native Gujarat, honoured us with a private dance recital. Cricket and traditional dance: what a strange and wonderful combination.

Who would have thought that six decades later I would see such a combination realised? On January 2, on the campus of a school in Vadodara, a company of a dozen actors, directed by Panisai Chari of the local Triveni Theatre, used traditional Gujarati dance forms to recreate the story of the first-known game of cricket on Indian soil – in 1721.

I had had a hand in this. Long ago, Chanchi Mehta, had handed me a copy of the Râs Mâlâ, a historical work from 1856 by the administrator Alexander Forbes, and he told me that the earliest known cricketing in the subcontinent had taken place somewhere on the Gulf of Cambay near his native Surat. When I took up an interest in cricket again after more than 50 years out of it, I looked up old shipping records in London to see if I could make sense out of the fascinating but garbled narrative of the East India Company sailor, Clement Downing, who was on the spot and tells us about it.

From my researches, I could determine almost exactly where the cricket was played: this was on the banks of the River Dhardhar for nearly a fortnight in the run-up to Christmas, 1721. The East India Company was all at sea on the west coast of India at this time, barely hanging on to pestilential Bombay, the crews of their country-built crafts overwhelmingly Indian, individual Brits only too happy to get employ with one or other of the contending Indian powers, Mughals or Mahrattas.

Little interest was shown in this story when it was published and eventually, as a personal tribute to my old teacher Chanchi, I worked up a dance drama out of the story, using the dandiya râs. Local historian Sandhya Gajjar, of both the Baroda Cricket and Heritage Associations, tried hard for several years to promote interest in both history and play. The tercentenary of the cricket match passed, Covid struck, and then, with last year’s ODI World Cup approaching, director Panisai Chari workshopped a Gujarati version of the play.

Chari sent me a couple of brief video clips of the version he was working up. He had transformed my script out of all recognition, its choreography utterly enchanting. Since I was hoping to make a final family visit to India over the New Year, he promised to show me a scene or two, dispiriting as it was that the World Cup had passed without any interest being shown in backing his play for a run.

To my delight and surprise, when we came to see the re-enactment of the play on the lawns of the Navrachana School in Vadodara, it was performed not, as expected, in Gujarati but in English. Wearing diversely coloured hats, the actors represented in turn the different communities struggling to claim the cotton fields around Jambusar in the early 18th century.

The dances dramatised how the Mughal satrap Rustam Ali Khan was being put on the back foot by the rising power of the Marathas and how both took over the fields actually cultivated by the maligned Kolis.

The play, ingeniously using a long sheet for river and cricket pitch alike, shows the crews of a couple of Company ships docking beside the mango and tamarind groves on the Dhardar River. The largely Bombay Koli crews expect to be attacked by marauding Kolis from the River Mahi district but are surprised to find that when they land to play some cricket and keep themselves in shape, the local people come to watch them, curious to work out what sort of military exercise cricket is.

This unexpectedly peaceful response leads to a comic scene where a couple of Company sailors try to trade for Christmas provisions with a local sarpanch. After much confusion and haggling via two translators, they are so fleeced in paying Rs 20 each for bullocks and Rs 2 each for sheep that the headman kindly gives them a dozen chicken for free.

The play ends with the ship’s tindal or bosun running, to the applause of the audience, 13 runs – there were no boundaries in those days – and the actors donning masks of contemporary Indian cricketers to remind us how far the game has come since its hitherto overlooked origins 300 years ago.

The role of the play’s narrator Chanda Mama, acted by two young women, was a covert reference and so tribute to Chandravadan Mehta – my teacher, Chari’s examiner and Sandhya Gajjar’s friend alike. As Sandhya commented. “While we all honour Virat, there is far too little interest in our local history of the earlier cricketing Kolis.”

John Drew is a poet and author of India and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford India). Bangla File, a collection of essays, is being published this month by ULAB Press, Dhaka. He plays cricket for Clare Hall, Cambridge.