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'Ranji' – Part 1 – with Simon Wilde
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Cricket correspondent for The Sunday Times, Simon Wilde, joins the podcast to discuss the life and career of the so-called 'Father of Indian Cricket' – K.S. Ranjitsinhji. Born in India in 1872, 'Ranji' – as he was universally known – arrived in England in 1888 to further his education, but took the cricket world by storm with his unorthodox but highly effective batting style. At the height of his success, he was as famous as W.G. Grace. But despite his 'magical' ability in the eyes of the British, he was plagued by many off-field issues throughout his cricket career, including financial complications and fighting for his right to become the princely ruler of a state in India.
ABOUT SIMON WILDE:
Simon Wilde has covered five cricket World Cups and more than 250 England Test matches as the cricket correspondent of The Sunday Times. He has written 12 books, including the bestselling England: The Biography, which chronicles the story of the men’s national team since 1877, and his latest publication is The Tour: The Story of the England Cricket Team Overseas 1877-2022. His biography Ranji: The Strange Genius of Ranjitsinhji was shortlisted for The William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.
CREDITS:
Presenter & Producer: Tom Ford
All music used in podcast comes from the University of California Santa Barbara’s remarkable collection of wax cylinder’s from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which are free to download and use. You can donate to the upkeep of these recordings via their website.
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Transcript
Introduction to Golden Age of Cricket Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Golden Age of Cricket podcast, a program which attempts to keep alive the characters, matches and tales of that beloved cricket period immediately preceding the First World War.
Introducing K.S. Ranjit Singhji
00:00:21
Speaker
My name is Tom Ford.
00:00:23
Speaker
A hundred and twenty years since he last played a test match, few cricketers continue to be clouded in as much mystery and intrigue as the great Indian player K.S. Ranjit Singhji. As the first non-white sportsman to win international fame, Ranjit Singhji's popularity at the height of his playing career was matched only by the great W.G. Grace. He battered with effortless style and is attributed with having invented the leg glance.
Guest Simon Wilde's Insights
00:00:51
Speaker
but he was plagued with many off-field issues throughout his cricket career, including maintaining a lavish lifestyle well beyond his means, and fighting for his right to become the princely ruler of a state in India. My guest today is Simon Wilde, who has covered 5 Cricket World Cups and more than 250 England Test Matches as the Cricket Correspondent of the Sunday Times.
00:01:15
Speaker
He has written 12 books, including the best-selling England, The Biography, which chronicles the story of the men's national team since 1877. And his latest publication is The Tour, the story of the England cricket team overseas. But it's one of his earlier books which concerns us today, Ranji, the strange genius of Ranjit Singhji. Simon, welcome to the podcast. I don't.
00:01:41
Speaker
Simon, there have been many previous biographies on Ranjit Singhji, including some that were written during his lifetime or thereafter, shortly thereafter, including an authorised one. What compelled you to write your biography on him? Well, I was, like a lot of people, intrigued by Ranji. He was such an exotic figure at a time when cricket was essentially played by
00:02:10
Speaker
white people, there were no Asians playing cricket really at the highest level. And this guy, Ranji, was not only playing, but was extremely good. He was as good as anyone around. So he was a fascinating character to me, as he was to a lot of people, because where did he
Researching Ranji's Life
00:02:33
Speaker
come from? How did he make the journey?
00:02:37
Speaker
And I looked at some of the other biographies that you mentioned of Ranji, and they didn't really shed an awful lot of light on what had gone on. Some of the couple of sort of authorized books about him, which he'd assisted with, were quite clearly quite partisan and light on detail. And then Alan Ross had written one in the early 1980s, which was
00:03:04
Speaker
It was a stylish, elegant tribute to Ranja, but again, it wasn't really a case of doing any historical research as such. It was more of an essay, if you like, of appreciation. So I sort of felt there was
00:03:20
Speaker
There was something to be done to be dug a little deeper and I suppose what really gave me a breakthrough was that I went to the India Office Library in London where a lot of documents were brought back after Britain
00:03:37
Speaker
gave India its independence in the late 1940s and all the British officers, civil servants who had been working there for generations. They came home and they brought all the papers back with them and they were there in this depository in London and it's the India office library. I went there and clearly nobody had been there before really looking for Ranji anyway and I found several files on him and it was immediate obvious to me then that there was a lot more to the Ranji story than we knew.
00:04:04
Speaker
Now you touched on materials due to his dual life. I suppose you could say Indian born and raised and then lived in and educated in England and then traveled between the two frequently. What sort of challenges did that place in front of your research in terms of regarding or accessing materials or were there any language barriers?
00:04:32
Speaker
There weren't any language barriers. The documents that I talked about that I found were almost entirely in English. There were some that weren't, but really very few. And I think, as I remember, they were possibly translated as well anyway. So there was sort of two versions. So that wasn't really an issue. Obviously,
00:04:54
Speaker
I felt I needed to go to India, which I did in sort of, I mean, my book came out in I think 1990, I went over in about 1987, the Cricut World Cup was going on actually a time in India when I went. Because I felt I needed to do a bit of on the ground research. That wasn't so much a case of documents as just trying to meet people and go to the places that Ranji had gone to. And so I went to Jamnagar, which is the capital of
00:05:20
Speaker
and no one ago was, which is the state we're talking about, that he ruled. And I met the then President Jamsa, the title still exists, although he doesn't really have any power. And I met him and he was very helpful and he told me what he knew. And he introduced me to a couple of old people who had known Ranji, one guy particularly, very interesting. And he gave me a driver and the driver took me to
00:05:49
Speaker
around the state and hunting lodges and things like that. He was quite keen on hunting, shooting and fishing and all that sort of stuff. So that was really useful to get a feel of the place.
Ranji's Financial Challenges
00:06:02
Speaker
But as I say, it wasn't really about documents that part, that was just about getting a feel for the area and it was very useful research. So yeah, writing a book about someone whose life is based in two places that presents his problems, but I think I sort of got around that in the end.
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah, was there anything that particularly surprised you in your research or anything that you uncovered that you didn't know previously? Well, the extent to which he ran up debts, I suppose, was the most striking thing. And some of the stories I uncovered about his
00:06:43
Speaker
his basically brazen disregard really for the creditors was pretty surprising and also some of the people that were involved apart from Ranji like AC McLaren who was the England captain for a number of years, captain against Australia in several series and he was a close friend of Ranji's and Ranji employed him as a sort of personal secretary at one point and McLaren was as
00:07:07
Speaker
was as unreliable with money as Ranji was it seemed so there was that stuff really surprised me because you know you read about the golden age and you think these these these players who are you know wonderful cricketers are there for wonderful people and actually find out that they've got feet of clay um even so and so that was quite shocking really and jarred with what we knew about them um we you know we we'd heard
00:07:33
Speaker
It's incidental stuff about them, maybe not having much money. Amateur creepers in those days, they weren't super wealthy, a lot of them, but they took the amateur status for a class reason, really. If you were the type of social class, you were expected to play as an amateur, even if you didn't have much cash.
00:07:50
Speaker
So it could be hard for some of them to actually fund their cricketing careers and McLaren certainly fell into that category and so did Ranji. I have to say that the reading your book, the connection with A.C. McLaren completely floored me as well. I had no idea about that, that he took on this role as
00:08:12
Speaker
Ranji's private secretary for a number of years and it was I think you portray that following his time as his secretary, McLaren's form never really got back to where it was. I think all the traveling and probably responsibility of looking after Ranji's finances really took it out of McLaren and he
00:08:37
Speaker
He was never the same cricketer again. It was really interesting to read.
00:08:47
Speaker
his last sort of big season in terms of the amount of cricket players in 1909 and remarkably even though he wasn't making endurance he averaged less than 20 in that season he still kept in England against Australia in the Ashes in England that summer and it was that England's performance was a shambles really Australia won the series but England kept picking the wrong team and the tactics were all over the place and it was a bit of a shambles and McLaren was the man who was running the team really and he'd been working for Ranji
00:09:17
Speaker
for at least a year, maybe two before then. And spending a lot of time going to India and with Ranji and all this sort of stuff. And you do wonder how he managed to sort of juggle the two careers or what he didn't really manage it. It was a failure, but it was it was very interesting. I mean, there's a great I mean, there's one very typical story really of just how
00:09:42
Speaker
factors they were earlier, which I'll tell you about, which was a woman called Mary Taylor, who was a portraitist. She was well known for painting small pictures of Europe's aristocracy. And in 1908, when Ranji, he was behind this point now, the ruling prince in his state,
00:10:01
Speaker
But I'd come over to England for the summer and did play some cricket for Sussex. She went and saw him. He sat for over two hours. She spent the next two weeks completing the portrait. Then when he was finished, showed it around, he rejected it. Through McLaren, McLaren said, sorry, it's not good enough.
00:10:17
Speaker
We don't like it. We're not paying you. So, so she was most upset and in fact she bumped into you the way you do. She bumped into Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, and she said it was a marvelous likeness of Ranji and she said, you know, it's splendid, you know, she knew who he was, but Ranji was apparently claiming he wasn't good enough.
00:10:38
Speaker
So Mary Taylor took Ranji to court in Brighton and then when she did so she found out that the courts were actually quite familiar with Ranji that he was all he was exceedingly well known as she put it in the courts in Brighton. So you know he was letting down a lot of people with over money and actually when this case sort of came to court Ranji dropped out of playing cricket for about a month this is 1908 August and McLaren the same he hardly appeared either so they sort of went to ground
00:11:09
Speaker
In the end, she went to an MP, and they went to the Secretary of State for India, and he tried to lean on Ranjan. In the end, he agreed to pay a sort of £75 when they originally agreed, so he was 180 or something. So in the end, he paid up. He had to go to the highest level of government almost to get him to pay. And there were other cases involving actually far larger sums than that that Ranjan didn't pay.
00:11:38
Speaker
But that was a sort of typical case, really, of him just giving someone the run around, trying to get something for free, really. And if they protested, he would claim that he had diplomatic immunity as a sovereign of an independent state, which the Indian rather sort of complex sort of way they were, the Indian states within India were not run by the British, the British ran part of India, the other part, the Indian princes ran, and they worked in cooperation with the British. So
00:12:05
Speaker
the British like Ranji because they understood him and he played cricket. You know, they thought he was a jolly good chap. So they sort of rubbed along with him. But he was independent. So strictly speaking, I think he he was able to get away with some of these financial cases that came up against him.
Ranji's Royal Ambitions
00:12:20
Speaker
But it wasn't a great look early when it when it came to public life.
00:12:43
Speaker
Simon, so much of this I suppose confusion relating to Ranji's heritage, certainly from the British perspective when he first arrived,
00:12:55
Speaker
you know, people thought he was a prince and he was happy to go along with that, but it all comes back to what happened early in his life and the so-called Nohannagar succession, because he certainly wasn't born a prince. So how did he even come to be considered for the Nohannagar throne?
00:13:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was a complicated situation. The ruler of the state had a son who sort of slightly went off the rails, and he sort of disbarred him from the succession. So he was looking for another son. He'd had some daughters. So there was a period of about five years where he hadn't actually got a male heir, and Ranj's grandfather was a cousin of his.
00:13:48
Speaker
The ruler went to him and said, can I take one of your young relatives as an heir until such time as I have an heir? Or if I don't have one, then he remains my successor. So this arrangement was sort of this deal was struck, but
00:14:09
Speaker
Ranji was never formally adopted. That had to be another sort of ceremony. It never happened. Partly because Ranji's family, well, particularly his father, was a family of stripper's character. He was described as a drunkard by the British. So the ruler actually went off the idea. And then when Ranji was about 10, the ruler did in fact have a son and heir. And so he
00:14:36
Speaker
So Ranji's sort of direct involvement with the succession sort of ended when he was about 10. And there is actually a letter which still exists when he was 12, written by the ruler, telling him, spelling out to him exactly what was happening, which was that, you know, you are not my heir. The succession ceremony was never carried out. But as a token of sort of respect to you and loyalty to you, I'm going to send you to a college in Rajkumma, Rajkumma College in Rajkot.
00:15:05
Speaker
which is a sort of, it's almost like a school along English public school lines and was for sort of developing ruling princes. So Remji, although he wasn't officially a prince and wasn't likely to become one, was educated as such and his education sort of took off at this college and he was a bright boy, he was quite good at school, good at tennis particularly, academically good. And so he had an advantageous education but was not
00:15:33
Speaker
strictly in the succession at all, but he had been briefly considered for it. And that's sort of how he grew up with this consciousness that he had a near miss really, he'd almost had a life changing decision in his favor, but he'd been denied it. So I suspect that this probably covered his view in later life, that he was entitled to something that had been taken away from him. And
00:15:59
Speaker
that stayed with him. And he never quite gave up on the succession. He felt like it'd been unfairly treated. So that was sort of what drove him on, I think, in later years. Yes, which is partly understandable, I suppose. And it leads me to my next question, because it's regarding his name, what we should actually call him. I mean, we universally know him as Ranji or Ranji short, affectionately. And it was what people called him in England.
00:16:26
Speaker
during his career. But I mean, as I described in my introduction, he's usually referred to as KS Ranjit Singh Ji. And the KS usually stands for Kumar Shree, which I believe stands for honorable prince. So was he himself trying to project this image that he was indeed a prince?
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. And the college had been, as I say, the college you went to in Rajkot was called the Rajkumar College. The Kumar bit of the name is there. It was a college for princes. So that title, he sort of kept with him from the college, if you like. He thought, well, you know, I went to this school, everyone else is called Kumar, so am I.
00:17:19
Speaker
And then when he went to England, after he'd finished his education there, one of the sort of principal of that college was an Englishman. And he'd been to Cambridge himself and he, I think, took the attitude that the brightest boys in that college could go to Cambridge.
00:17:36
Speaker
as a way of finishing their education if they were bright enough and you know talented enough to do it and and it fitted and in and Ranji was one of three boys he took over to England in 1888 when Ranji was 16 so he was by his own you know by his own sort of abilities he was taken to Cambridge and it's when he went to England that
00:17:59
Speaker
Ranji started describing himself as more than just Ranji Sinji, which is his name. He called himself, well, in some of the early newspapers, where he's playing cricket or tennis or whatever, and he gets a mention in the newspaper. He's often referred to things like Prince Ranjit or Kumar, Ranji Sinji, things like that, or Prince Kumar. So there's various sort of titles he seems to be using, presumably someone asked him, you know, what's your name sort of thing. And that's what he says. So it must come from him. And I think also with
00:18:33
Speaker
down so he might want to give himself some initials if he's playing a cricket match and then he goes down as KS so that sort of stuck really but it did I think there was an element of him wanting to project himself as a as a prince and who knew you know who knew otherwise nobody in England had fenced his idea really so yes he could he could he could do what he liked do what he liked and he did
00:18:58
Speaker
You're
Ranji's Cricket Journey in England
00:18:59
Speaker
right. The days before the internet where we could all do our own background checks, I suppose. And you mentioned him arriving in England in 1888. You tell the wonderful story in your book. He literally gets off the ship and is taken straight away.
00:19:17
Speaker
to see the touring Australians play, I think at the Oval or Lords, one of them, and he's apparently just mesmerised by what he sees. Charlie Turner for the Australian team, I think, is actually normally a bowler, but I think he has a wonderful
00:19:38
Speaker
innings as a batsman and it just captivates Ranji and he sort of decides then that this is the game for him and he as you say ends up at Cambridge. What's interesting about his trajectory I suppose as a cricketer is that it is at Cambridge that he really forms his the
00:20:01
Speaker
ability as a batsman that he was to later become famous for but he had a tough time getting the establishment at Cambridge to notice him which is possibly because of his skin colour and in particular he struggled to get the attention of Stanley Jackson, is that right?
00:20:22
Speaker
Yes, Stanley Jackson was the captain at Cambridge and would become, well in fact he played for England in the early 1890s and would play alongside Orangie, very great quickener in his own right and future captain of England.
00:20:37
Speaker
He was at Cambridge at that time and yeah he didn't, he saw around you bat in the nets and the like and on Parker's piece which is a sort of piece of common land in the middle of Cambridge where lots of cricket matches, sports matches of all sorts would go on endlessly really and you could walk across there in the summer and there'd be half a dozen games of cricket going on.
00:20:59
Speaker
And he saw Ranji batting in one of those games and it's quite a big crowd watching and, you know, what's all the fuss about sort of thing. And then he watches him bat, but he thinks, although he's this guy, this Indian chap who's scoring runs, he doesn't think much to his technique. So the thing was that Ranji played in a different way from most conventional cricketers. And so at first glance, you might think, well, you know, he's not doing it right, sort of thing.
00:21:27
Speaker
But of course, the results were justification in themselves. And so it took time for Ranji's methods to be accepted. And he had to formulate a game. He didn't really have a game at all. But at Cambridge, you could have, I mean, there was, you know, you'd be in a particular college, and each college would have a cricket coach, some of the professionals who would bolt you in the net. So if you wanted to practice, you could practice, and Ranji did. And he was helped by a couple of
00:21:56
Speaker
professional cricketers who used to play for Cambridge or even Surrey. I mean, the Haywood family was a famous Surrey and Cambridge family. And Tom Haywood, the greatest of all, scored 100, first-class 100s. He was as good as W.G. Grace and as Ranjie in his way. Not pretty much glamorous, but extremely good. Dan Haywood was a relative of his. He coached Ranjie a lot. And there's this famous story of Ranjie's.
00:22:21
Speaker
right foot being pegged down to the crease because he kept sort of shifting away from the ball because he probably thought it was hard and didn't want to be hit by it like we all do over your first play cricket it's quite hard ball and he pegged his back foot down and told him to keep still and this led to Renji learning to stay in line with the ball but also just sort of take a step over to the right side of the wicket with his left leg in the sort of
00:22:47
Speaker
I suppose still started sort of trying to get out of the way of it, but then flicking it down to find legs. So he developed this sort of unusual legside game, because in those days, public school way of leg cricket was that you always hit the ball through the offside. That was regarded as the gentle way of doing it and the properly stylish way of doing it. Hitting to leg was a bit unseemly really, but Ranji developed a really strong legside game as a result of this rather unusual coaching method that was used when he was probably 20.
00:23:17
Speaker
19 or 20. And you can see the consequence of that change quite quickly, because he scored a lot of runs in club cricket and games. So he wasn't really doing it at the university, he was doing it in play for local club sites. And he scored 100 after 100, he scored 2000 of the scorecards that survived in 1892, he scored over 2000 runs, probably plenty of other games as well. So he suddenly became very good at scoring runs.
00:23:47
Speaker
but this was all happening away from the, you know, the sort of established way of breaking through. So Stanley Jackson, someone like Stanley Jackson wasn't convinced by this stuff or if he knew much about it, but eventually it was persuaded by some of the professional coaches that actually Ranji was better than lots of people he was picking in the Cambridge team. So eventually Ranji got his chance. Yes. And just on that, I mean you,
00:24:14
Speaker
You described it very well just then, but I just want to touch on it a bit further about these unorthodox strokes that Ranji starts to introduce to cricket. As you say, it wasn't the
00:24:29
Speaker
uh the gentlemanly way to often bat hitting balls onto the leg side um it was more certainly for an amateur the offside was where they were expected to make their strokes and it wasn't so much how many runs they made it was how they made them
00:24:46
Speaker
Do you think, in a sense, it took someone like Ranji, who wasn't of the British establishment, I suppose, to introduce these strokes, almost as if he didn't know any other way? Yeah, I think that's true. I think he could
00:25:07
Speaker
get away with it to an extent. Also, he didn't have the same background. He came up to England from India, aged 16, 17. So he'd never really been exposed to the sort of traditions that the other young cricketers might have been exposed to. So he came, he was coming at it with a different mindset, different eye. And people would say, well, he doesn't know any better, if you like.
00:25:34
Speaker
But eventually, the justification is in the runs he scores. Interestingly, I mean, F.S. Jackson, Stanley Jackson, who eventually picks him for Cambridge, actually went to India in the winter of 1892-3, which is the winter before Ranji was picked. And he went on an amateur cricket tour to India, and he saw other Indian players playing the game.
00:26:00
Speaker
However, they played it probably in quite rudimentary fashion, but or in a different way. I'm coached away. And so I think he came back from that tool with perhaps a more open mind to actually the fact that they might they might be doing it differently, but it actually still works. And so he was maybe a little bit more tolerant. So I mean, Jackson still deserves some credit, I guess, for picking him. It would have been easy for someone just to say, I'm still not picking this chap. He's not.
00:26:27
Speaker
playing the way we were expected to play but he gave him his chance and although Ranji didn't score very big runs for Cambridge he didn't do badly either and eventually this sort of led to a couple of years later Sussex
00:26:45
Speaker
then signing him up to play for them there's no particular connection with Sussex really other than I think he knew he was friendly with a couple of their players in fact including Billy Murdoch who's in the famous Australian cricket who was already playing for Sussex and I think he'd got to know
00:27:00
Speaker
Ranji. So there was a connection there and I think about it. I encouraged him to join Sussex and he had to sort of live in residence in a county for two years to be eligible for, to play for them. I'm pretty sure that Ranji never lived in Sussex for two years before 1855 when he made his debut. But again, it's an amateur. Sometimes they bend the rules a little bit. So yes, he ended up at Sussex and he scored, he scored a big hundred on his debut and never looked back.
Ranji's Cricket Legacy
00:27:29
Speaker
there were some I think you wrote in your book there was some I think his debut for Sussex was only revealed the day before or something so if anyone objected it was too late anyway so Billy Murdoch and the Sussex team I think just knew how to get or knew the loopholes and they sort of slid him in and he
00:27:52
Speaker
And the rest is history as they say. And he had this seemingly to us this meteoric rise in terms of success. So 1893 is when he debuts for Sussex and within three years he's playing for England against the visiting Australians of their 1896 tour. And he hits what is still regarded today as one of the most legendary
00:28:22
Speaker
uh innings uh certainly on debut he hits 154 not out um in the second innings um to save the match i think i think the match is a draw um the old traffic test um but this this seemingly rapid rise
00:28:41
Speaker
to the top and the fame that came with that. Do you think that added to the public's mystique surrounding Ranji? Yeah, I do, yes. He hadn't done much at Cambridge. He played a few matches
00:29:03
Speaker
Before he joined Sussex, he also played a few matches for sort of MCC and a few club size, things like this. Again, didn't really do that. I'm doing my first class again. It didn't really do much. And then he scores 100 on his debut for Sussex, 150.
00:29:19
Speaker
and a big place to do it. And scores a lot of runs in his first full season, 1700 runs, that's a lot in those days. And then in the next year, 1896 is when the Australians come over, he scores 2,780 runs, which was a record for a season at that point. So within two years, he's become in a way that the best basketball has ever been. He scores 10 hundred, again, a lot from that time.
00:29:50
Speaker
He's batting on a level which, you know, even W.G. Grace was perhaps didn't quite achieve. He was certainly comparable with Grace. This happened so quickly. And so people would be going, oh, you know, where's this guy come from, sort of thing, you know? How's he done this? You know, not only is he Indian, they come from a country that we didn't know played much cricket, but he's come into English conditions and he's doing better than the best English batsmen who've been
00:30:19
Speaker
learning the game here forever. So I think that does create a sense of astonishment and wonder really that he's a bit of a magician, you know, there's quite a, there's quite a lot of the language used to describe him in newspaper reports and the right way to play other players talking about him. You know, they talked about a conjurer and a magician and things like this. It was magical, you know, what he was doing was considered as magical. But in fact, as we've already said,
00:30:46
Speaker
A lot of hard work got into the development of his game, but it was away from the public eye. They didn't know that had been happening, but he'd done a lot of hard work in the nets in Cambridge. And so it wasn't really an overnight thing at all, but that's how it appeared to the wider public and that certainly added to the aura of magic about him.
00:31:09
Speaker
But again, Ranji seemed to play up to it a bit, didn't he? I mean, I think he mentioned how he and I think he grouped all Indians into this example had better eyes or that they could see the ball quicker or something. So, you know, he's not, you know, he's not standing away from these, the names that they're using to describe, you know, this magic, as you say, I mean, he's sort of,
00:31:38
Speaker
I feel like he's living up to it or that he's trying to almost take advantage of it, that he is different. And that was working to his advantage. Yeah, I think so. I think it was as we're saying the this business of what was happening back in India with with his place in the succession or rather he's lost the loss of his place in the succession would have would have been would have rankled with him and he would have
00:32:06
Speaker
I think he quite quickly saw that cricket was a way of burnishing his reputation and giving him fresh standing. And this might open doors to him, as indeed it did, so that he could lobby the British to give him some status back in India. The British were quite, the British Civil Service in India were quite active in
00:32:33
Speaker
helping the princes as I've said they were the political independent really but the British did deal quite closely with them and I think he may have realised that the British could help him with his with his hopes of getting back the throne that had been taken from him so I think he used cricket as a vehicle
00:32:51
Speaker
to achieve his political aims, but also just to achieve, he didn't have any money. He just had an allowance from the state, from India, not much, but he needed some means of achieving something when his cricket stopped. So I think he saw the long, he was playing the long game.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:33:12
Speaker
Thanks for listening to part one of this episode on the life and career of the great Indian batsman, K.S. Ranjit Singhi, with my guest, Simon Wilde. If you're a fan of the podcast, remember to subscribe on your preferred platform, leave a review, and follow the podcast on social media. I'd love to hear from you. My name is Tom Ford. Bye for now.