“Aloof yet witty, plain but direct, regal yet casual. MAK
Pataudi was so many contradictory things that eventually you stopped trying to
classify him.”
(Mudar Patherya)
The first Indian to captain the Oxford University cricket team; a member of the first Indian team to win a series against England; captain of India at the age of 21; leader of the first Indian team to win a Test series abroad. “Tiger” Pataudi was quite literally a Prince of the game, always immaculately dressed off the field as befitted the ninth Nawab of Pataudi, son of the Begum of Bhopal. He inherited the title on his eleventh birthday, when his father - a Test cricketer who played for England as well as India - died playing polo in Delhi. When royal entitlements were abolished by constitutional amendment in 1971, a certain MAK Pataudi stood for political office in protest.
Known for his
batting, he scored 2, 793 Test runs, including six centuries. This was all the more
remarkable because he had lost an eye in a car accident in Hove in July 1961
and thus had no binocular vision to focus on a fast cricket ball hurtling
towards him. Tiger Pataudi liked to say that he always saw two balls, and hit the inside one. He usually pulled his cap down
over his right eye to avoid the distraction of a blurred double image. He made his Indian Test debut less than six
months after his injury: in the third Test of that series, he scored 103. He also played for the Sussex country side,
which he captained in 1966. Had it not
been for his impairment, he might have been one of the game’s truly exceptional
players, instead of simply a very good one.
Oddly, the Indian team which he was instrumental in building and leading
to world status contained at least one other disabled person – Bhagwat
Chandrasekhar, the famous leg spinner, who had a withered right wrist as a
result of polio contracted in childhood.
Pataudi was the
Muslim captain of Hindu India, who
welded all the regional cricketing stars into one cohesive and venerated national unit. With his film star wife and his aristocratic
poise, he brought glamour to the game, and it was in his day that the
idolization of India’s cricket team really took off. In later life, he was on the council of the
Indian Premier League, but as Mukul Kesavan wrote:
“He remained
untouched by the squabbles and sleaze that attended cricket’s transformation
into big business in India. As a
consequence, death finds him happily embalmed in fond radio memories: still
tigerish in the covers, still a prince among men.”
Perhaps typically
for a man who grew up in a 150 room palace with over 100 servants, his only
recorded brush with the law was when he was arrested for shooting a protected
species of deer in 2005.
