With the onset of the Second World War, international cricket came to a standstill. India’s forthcoming international ventures – MCC’s tour of India in 1939-40 and India’s scheduled tour of England in 1940 – got cancelled as a result. However, domestic cricket including the Pentangular and the Ranji Trophy “continued to be played in right royal earnestness.” The staging of the Pentangular, in that context, was to excite vehement debates about the advisability of organising the tournament in such a tense socio-political situation. Thus, as the Pentangular season was approaching in 1940, debates on whether to hold it or not were on top.

Arguments in favour and against the Pentangular poured in and flooded the newspapers. The Muslim captain, Wazir Ali, supporting the Pentangular, declared: “I fully believe that the Pentangular is not in the least anti-national and will, and must, go on in the interests of Indian cricket...every match that I have played in or watched has been played in an atmosphere of perfect sportsmanship and amity.” KS Duleepsinhji, on the other hand, considered “inter-communal cricket an unfavourable influence on the whole” and “asked cricket fans to follow and support the Ranji Trophy. The Bombay Sentinel, in its column “What the People Say”, brought out the contrasting views nicely. The view to stop the Pentangular for the year offered by CK Nayudu and 21 others emphasised:

“The country is in a turmoil today. Every one of our trusted leaders is being clapped behind prison bars. Prime Ministers, ministers and members of Legislature, representatives of the electorates are courting imprisonment and ere long we will all be leaderless.

At a juncture like this, when all of us are thinking in terms of communal harmony and freedom for the country, it is but natural that many young men, some of them leading sportsmen, should feel that we should not indulge in the Pentangular cricket this year. How can we think of sports and play cricket when our trusted are being thrust into prisons to rot behind bars.”

The Pentangular debate reached a point of crisis in the first week of December 1940. The top brass of the Hindu Gymkhana knew that its emergency meeting would not resolve the matter easily with so much of divergence and bitterness already rampant in the rank and file of the Gymkhana. Hence, they preferred to seek the counsel of Mahatma Gandhi on the matter to resolve the impasse. A three-member delegation of the Hindu Gymkhana comprising its president SA Shete, vice-president MM Amersey, and one member of the managing committee, Jamnadas Pitambar, met Gandhi at his Wardha ashram on 6 December 1940 and sought his advice.

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Once the ball was in the court of Gandhi, the Mahatma had to either play it or duck it.

Being an astute politician, the Mahatma decided to play the ball with a straight bat and tried to produce a politically correct straight drive. His verdict on the Pentangular cricket, aptly described as “his most direct, considerate and consequential intervention in the world of 
cricket”, deserves reproduction in full:

“Numerous inquiries have been made as to my opinion on the proposed Pentangular Cricket Match in Bombay advertised to be played on the 14th. I have just been made aware of the movement to withdraw from the match, I understand, as a mark of grief over the arrests and imprisonment of satyagrahis, more especially, the recent arrests of leaders. A deputation of three representatives of the Hindu Gymkhana have also just been consulting me as to what their attitude should be. I must confess ignorance of these matches and of the ‘etiquette’ governing them. My opinion must, therefore, be taken as of a layman knowing nothing of such sports and special rules governing them.

But I must confess my sympathies wholly with those who would like to see these matches stopped. I express this opinion not merely as a satyagrahi desirous of getting public support in some way or other for the movement. I must say at once that the present movement is wholly independent of such demonstrations or adventitious support. But I would discountenance such amusements at a time when the whole of the thinking world should be mourning over a war that is threatening the stable life of Europe and its civilisation and which bids fare to overwhelm Asia. 

I would rather that all those who are blessed with intelligence and opportunity devoted both to devising means of stopping what appears to be senseless slaughter. It is like an ill wind which blows nobody any good. And holding this view I naturally welcome the movement for stopping the forthcoming match from the narrow standpoint I have mentioned above.

Incidentally I would like the public of Bombay to revise their sporting code and erase from it communal matches. I can understand matches between colleges and institutions, but I never understood reasons for having Hindu, Parsi, Muslim and other communal Elevens. I should have thought that such unsportsmanlike divisions would be considered taboos in sporting language and sporting manners. Can we not have some field of life which cannot be touched by the communal spirit? 

I should like, therefore, those who have anything to do with this movement to stop the match, broaden the issue and take the opportunity of considering it from the highest standpoint and decide once for all upon banishing communal taints from the sporting world and also deciding upon banishing these sports from our life whilst the blood-bath is going on.

I say this in fear and trembling and with apologies to Mr Bernard Shaw and others who think that a nation’s amusements must not be interrupted even while its flower of manhood is being done to death and is engaged in doing others to death and in destroying the noblest monuments of human effort. 

This statement was followed by another small dictum when Bhalerao, the secretary of the Bombay Hindu Cricket Club, in a telegram dated 11 December 1940, asked Gandhi ‘whether he wanted only Hindus to boycott the Pentangular cricket matches’. Gandhi replied categorically: ‘ALL WHO HOLD MY OPINION MUST REFRAIN WHETHER FEW OR MANY.’

Even before Gandhi met the Hindu Gymkhana representatives, one BPCC member, who seemed to be in touch with Wardha regarding the matter, understood that Gandhi was “acquainted with the nature of public feeling in the city regarding the tournament”. It was therefore predicted, “The news from Wardha is likely to lead to sensational developments. It is probable that the Hindu Gymkhana will withdraw their team from the Pentangular, which means Bombay’s annual cricket festival will be shorn of all its glory.” Gandhi sounded categorical in his support to shun the Pentangular at a politically turbulent time affecting public life in India and the whole world. This was in line with what Gandhi suggested in Hind Swaraj more than three decades earlier.

An Indian of real strength, he argued, “will understand that at the time of mourning, there can be no indulgence”. But his incidental comment on erasing the communal code from cricket alias sport was a reflection of his uncompromising stand on the question of communal amity in India. Gandhi’s political stroke thus amply reflected the politicisation of sport as well. [Ramchandra] Guha aptly remarks:

“The Mahatma’s credo was Hindu-Muslim unity: he had fought for it, and he was to die for it. Hindu-Muslim unity necessarily meant the unity of India. Did not the existence of a tournament on lines of community then undermine the idea of an inclusive nationalism? For if the Muslims were allowed a separate cricket team, what was to stop them demanding a separate nation?”

Excerpted with permission from Mahatma on the Pitch, Kausik Bandyopadhyay, Rupa Publications.