SUSAN RAM

The Pig and the Skyscraper - Chicago: A History of our Future by Marco d'Eramo; Verso, London and New York, 2002; pages 472, &pound20 (hardback)

FIRST published (in Italian) in 1999, two years before four hijacked planes shattered American illusions of invulnerability and changed the world, this book explores capitalism in America - the land where it stands exposed in "all its naked force". The author, an Italian journalist and writer, uses Chicago as a prism through which to track, analyse and comment on the history of U.S. capitalism in all its complexity.

Chicago, argues the author, lies at the epicentre of America's supersonic, "red in tooth and claw" capitalist development. In the 19th century the city came roaring into existence across the span of just 30 years. Built on the grain trade, railroads, lumber and the mass slaughter of animals, it forced forward the frontiers of production for profit, achieving in its early 20th century stockyards the "acme of centralisation and capitalist-style rationalisation" (not a scrap of pig or cow was wasted). This city not only invented futures trading but also began "buying and selling the future before it existed". Aided by a trolley-car system whose growth was more rapid and capitalistic than that of any other American city, Chicago's better placed residents moved out to the suburbs, seeking the quintessential American capitalist ideal: the single family dwelling, set among lawns and trees yet never too far from urban amenities.

In Chicago's centre, skyscrapers soared upwards, "costly monuments to the overinflated egos of their patrons". Into its maelstrom of industrial turmoil poured wave upon wave of immigrant labour: the Irish, the Germans, the Poles, later great inflows of blacks from the post-Civil War south, fuelled by hope while frequently deployed as scab labour in the Chicago bosses' savage all-out war on the unions. For this city, too, was the crucible of the U.S. labour movement - the place where the battle for the eight-hour working day was waged with spectacular bloodshed in the 1880s, where the Haymarket massacre of May 4, 1886 became the impulse for establishing May Day as a holiday for workers around the globe. (Today, ironically, American workers are perhaps the only category in the 'developed' world to be denied this entitlement.)

The challenge before the author lies not only in capturing the dense texture of this story but also in relating it to his central theme: Chicago as a metaphor for American capitalism, as an unrivalled distillation of a larger experience, as a 'reality check' on the present and a window on the future. There is, d'Eramo argues, something about this megalopolis, unstoppably spreading on the banks of Lake Michigan, that reaches to the core of capitalism understood as a system:

In the falling to ruins of entire quarters, in the bankruptcy of once-potent financial dynasties, in the brutal contrasts between luxury and misery, stunning beauty and appalling squalor, Chicago is living proof that there is no such thing, nor has there ever been such a thing, as a design of capital. There is only a logic of capital, a logic that is highly singular, illogical to the end, and yet at the same time solid as iron.

It was in response to the dictates of this 'iron logic' that Chicago rose with such prodigious speed as the railroad companies, funded by East Coast robber barons and London bankers, propelled their way across America in the 19th century. Faced with the 'tyranny of fixed costs' (roughly two-thirds of a railroad line's expenses went to cover running costs and to pay back loans), companies sought to cut the throats of rivals using every weapon at hand: embezzlement, fraud, price-fixing, monopoly agreement. And nowhere was this war waged with greater ferocity than in Chicago, the terminus for the Eastern railroads and the departure point for the Western lines. As a result of fixed costs, d'Eramo argues, the city became the 'natural gateway' to a market reaching from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, from Canada to the Caribbean: "the logic of capital was to transform the whole geography of the Midwest, natural and human".

The 'iron logic' was also merciless: today, Chicago's glory seems built upon ghosts, "the long-abandoned stockyards, the railroads whose tracks lie eaten away by rust, and the boundless woods of the Great Lakes, now deforested". Yet the ruthlessness coexisted with human vibrancy; in the midst of the dog-eat-dog competition, the squalor and deprivation that characterised Chicago in its 'glory' days there was experimentation, cultural vitality, hope, celebration of life.

In order to convey something of this richness, the book makes deliberate use of contrast and variety: descriptive passages that carry the reader into the physical reality of the city are juxtaposed with philosophical musings; economic analysis yields to explorations of music or architecture. The author's playfulness and love of wordplay are evident in his chapter titles: 'Class Struggle in the Sleeping Car' tells how George Mortimer Pullman, sleeper car pioneer, became one of those "rare capitalists who made their fortune selling a more costly product"; 'Sky Grazing' takes an irreverent look at Chicago as the city that invented the skyscraper, "a levity funded by the world's biggest butchers and sausage manufacturers". In 'Bronzeville: the End of Hope', d'Eramo ponders the time when Chicago was the 'Land of Hope' for black working people in the south about to migrate northward, when its celebrated Bronzeville neighbourhood pulsated with music, night-life and the expectation that prospects would improve. Such hopes, the author concludes, "have now vanished into a grey fog of fatalism. It seems today as though the nation's racial problem is felt as a burden, an inescapable national misery, a chronic bitterness and hostility that is neither peace nor war".

At times, such discursiveness, and the author's readiness to head down any interesting by-way, seem to threaten the overall purpose. But just when you think everything might be unravelling, d'Eramo gives a tug and pulls the threads taut to his central theme. In his introduction to the book, the Marxist political ecologist Mike Davis salutes the ambition and audacity of this attempt to "grasp the whole in world historical perspective". Occasionally, the author appears to overreach his material to draw premature conclusions; an example is his statement that "the union movement in Europe appears to be in its death throes", a view challenged by the 2002 experience of ascendant union militancy and mass strikes across the continent. Overall, however, this kaleidoscope of a book, with its ability to surprise at every turn of the page, to excite the reader with a fresh insight, a new way of seeing, is to be strongly recommended. For anyone concerned to understand the rapacity of American capitalism, to gain a full-frontal view of capitalism without a g-string", this is compelling reading.

K.M. SHRIMALI

D.D. Kosambi: Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings; compiled, edited and introduced by Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya; Oxford University Press, 2002; pages xxxvii+832; Rs.995.

WITHIN the first decade of India's Independence, studies on early Indian history moved away from the humdrum style of documenting political and dynastic events. Interest in the routine melange of dates and events, wars and conquests, and the "achievements and failures" of individual potentates started dwindling when two very significant works came out in the 1950s. A.L. Basham's The Wonder That Was India (1954) and D.D. Kosambi's An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956) epitomised this shift. The first one is the work of a professional historian and the second is from an "amateur Indologist".

A doyen among Indologists, Basham romanticised the vast sweep of India's history. He pleaded for a new emphasis on the cultural history of India. The Wonder... was written to interpret ancient Indian civilisation to the ordinary Western reader who had little knowledge but some interest in the subject. This kaleidoscope of early India's social structure, cults and doctrines, and arts and languages was such an engrossing venture that it won for Basham the love and appreciation of scholars and laymen alike, both in India and outside. It is regrettable, however, that his fascination for the inclusive aspects of Hinduism has been completely distorted and turned upside down to read like an account of "glorious Hindu India" by some self-appointed guardians of Indian cultural traditions.

Kosambi's Introduction is an iconoclastic Marxist critique of the undulating path of historical change. For him "the subtle mystic philosophies, tortuous religions, ornate literature, monuments teeming with intricate sculpture, and delicate music of India all derive from the same historical process that produced the famished apathy of the villager, senseless opportunism and termite greed of the 'cultured' strata, sullen un-coordinated discontent among the workers, the general demoralisation, misery, squalor, and degrading superstition. The one is the result of the other, the one is the expression of the other." Such an understanding not only enabled Kosambi to question the stereotypes of the colonialist-imperialist and the so-called "nationalist" historiography but also focus on a more positive and constructive approach to comprehend the prime movers of history.

Since society is held together by bonds of production, answers to the following questions become rather crucial. Who gathers or produces things and by what implements? Who lives off the production of others, and by what right, divine or legal? Who owns the tools, the land, sometimes the body and soul of the producer? Who were the Aryans - if any? Why did India never have large-scale chattel slavery as in classical Greece and Rome? When did regular coinage appear? Why do Buddhism, Jainism, and so many other contemporary religious sects of the type arise in Magadha and become prominent at roughly the same time? Why did the Gupta empire produce great Sanskrit literature when the Maurya empire did not? Such searching questions had set the agenda for a new kind of history writing.

It is perhaps not a mere coincidence that two of the most renowned living historians of early India, Professors R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar, received their doctoral blessings from Basham (who had guided a generation of historians from India at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in the 1950s and the 1960s) and were either closely associated with or inspired by Kosambi.

Known among professionals for his pioneering mathematical research (his formula for chromosome distance occupies a central place in classical genetics), Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi had developed serious interests in Indology, history, archaeology, anthropology and several other disciplines rather early in his life. He also had an amazing skill in languages. A polyglot, he knew well more than a dozen languages, both Indian and foreign, modern and classical. He died rather young, not quite 60. It is a measure of his intellectual impact that three commemorative volumes were issued within 10 years of his death.

While Marxism of all varieties has been marginalised from the historian's intellectual context, the political context in which the historian of India finds himself today is dominated by the advance of the Hindu Right and 'global' capitalism. The reappearance of 52 major contributions of Kosambi, many of which have been quite inaccessible for decades, in the form of the volume under review, therefore, could not have been more timely.

Barring three posthumous publications (Nos 2, 5 and 13) of 1967 and of the late 1970s, the remaining 49 essays in this anthology were written between the late 1930s and early 1960s. It seems that Kosambi was extremely prolific during the 1950s, which account for as many as 22 contributions. Essays have rightly been arranged thematically in five sections, chronology by and large being retained within themes.

From mathematics to Indology may have been an obstinate transgression. In his Indological studies, however, Kosambi developed his trademark methodology through an extremely creative transgression whereby frontiers of narrow academic disciplines got blurred. His mathematical precision and training in statistics enlivened literary criticism and notions of textual transmission and opened phenomenal vistas for understanding the dynamics of the monetary economy.

When the "Baba", as he was affectionately called by his friend and critic Basham, went out to trek the Buddhist caves in western India; collected, identified and explained the functioning of microliths from the Deccan plateau; explored prehistoric rock engravings and megaliths in Pune district; looked for historical roots of bloody rites connected with the cult of Mhatoba (at Pandharpur, the great pilgrimage centre of Maharashtra); and determined the irrationality of any links between shape and size of nose and racial hierarchisation - one sees the archaeologist, the sociologist, the anthropologist, the historian and other social scientists. He passionately pleaded for field work even for literary criticism. His writings on Brahmins and Brahmanism and gotras-pravaras (Nos 6-9) and the critique of John Brough's translation of the gotra-pravara-manjari underscores this. This indeed was Kosambi's case for "Combined Methods in Archaeology" - long before "multi-disciplinary studies" came into vogue in India.

Kosambi dedicated, in 1948, when it was politically risky to do so, his critical edition of the Shatakas of Bhartrihari to Marx, Engels and Lenin, "the vanguards of the new human society", in pure Sanskrit. Although he adopted the Marxist approach to history, he did not accept the conclusions of Marx himself, not to speak of the views of the official Marxists in the erstwhile Soviet Union and Indian theologians of Marxism. Kosambi strongly denied the presence of the "slave mode of production" in ancient India and was not fully convinced about the validity of the Marxian characterisation of the "Asiatic mode of production" being a specificity of "Oriental Societies". He characterised S.A. Dange's India from Primitive Communism to Slavery (first published in 1949, reviewed in No.48 in this volume) as a "painfully disappointing book". And in his critique of another Marxist formulation, namely, Antonova's writing on the development of feudalism in India, Kosambi argued that her understanding about "caste (being) of no importance to the serious materialist historian" is indeed throwing away what little remains to us of source material in Indian history.

Given the phenomenal diversity of India, Kosambi completely rejected any unilinear sequence of "modes of production" and argued for the simultaneous presence of several modes of production at any given time in India's long history. This comes out strongly when he questioned (No.3) D.A. Suleikin's note on periodisation of Indian history and admonished him thus: "India is not a mathematical point... Neither in the means of production nor in the stages of social development was there overall homogeneity in the oldest times." Kosambi's famous dictum has been: "Marxism is not a substitute for thinking, but a tool of analysis which must be used, with a certain minimum of skill and understanding, upon the proper material." No wonder, he was sceptical about orthodox Marxist Indologists' willingness to accept his approach; he was apprehensive of the kind of reception his The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline (1965) would receive because he made "no mention of the great authorities on Indian history (or anything else), namely Marx, Engels, Lenin"!

WHILE Kosambi is famous for defining history as the "presentation in chronological order of successive changes in the means and relations of production", he was also candid in saying: "Our position has also to be very far from a mechanical determinism, particularly in dealing with India, where form is given the utmost importance while content is ignored. Economic determinism will not do." To him, "the complete historical process" was a uniquely Indian process, to be explained by the logic of Indian societal developments and in terms of Indian cultural elements, culture being understood "in the sense of the ethnographer, to describe the essential way of life of the whole people".

As early as 1951, when the talk of "Colonial Indology" was not fashionable, Kosambi wrote: "Indian archaeology is still at the bourgeois-colonial stage of digging for museum exhibits that look impressive to foreigners." Similarly, long before professional archaeologists made a fetish of ethno-archaeology, this "amateur indologist" was working on ''Living Prehistory in India'' (No.2) and could venture to suggest the need to distinguish between "field archaeology" and "site archaeology" even to a reputed archaeologist of the stature of F.R. Allchin of Cambridge. That he had the phenomenal foresight to recognise cautiously the technical requirements of archaeological training is evident in this advice to a young fieldworker who had been associated with him. "By all means concentrate upon new techniques like soil analysis. Pollen does very well in Denmark, with peat bogs for example; but what will work in India I don't know.... If these could be used in some way for dating, all the better."

Critics of the so-called "Marxist historians" accuse them of being insensitive to India's "glorious cultural tradition embodied in the holy Vedas and Puranas". Only a certain gross insensitivity to the methods introduced by Kosambi would sustain this attitude. Yes, Kosambi was disdainful of the "ludicrous 'Indian history' that (was) still being written, with the Puranas as gospel, dating the Vedas back several million years, crediting our mythical sages with every modern scientific discovery down to the electron and the bacteriophage" (page 793). But he also wrote: 'The apparently senseless myths so illogically put together in our Puranas have a peculiar basis in reality." He illustrates this by making a case for correlation between literary works and archaeology: "for the pre-literate period there is no other source of information (other than archaeology); but it is not generally recognised that even written records gain their full meaning only if material objects to which they refer can be examined..." (No.22)

Kosambi's method in reconstructing early India's history on the basis of epic-puranic literature casts its lengthy shadow on such burning issues as the historicity of Ayodhya. The logic of his method (a combined invocation of literature and archaeology) demanded the prior presence of settlements before states and empires such as those of Kosalan kings (supposedly the ancestors of 'Lord' Rama) could emerge. As is well established, archaeological evidence of settlement at Ayodhya does not go beyond 800 B.C. This evidently does not suit the present-day champions of rewriting history.

Kosambi steadfastly argued against all racist constructions of early India: "I have never believed in an Aryan race, having found considerable evidence for progressive Aryanisation of people, whose beliefs were penetrated by Brahmin ritual, with reciprocal influence upon Brahmanism." (No.8, page 172). And all those who established links between nose indices, language and health immunity with the hierarchy of races (white man vs local population, Aryan vs the aboriginal) were brutally and convincingly put down by Kosambi (No.34 and 45).

Kosambi's numerous writings on textual transmissions and textual fluidity (mostly written in the 1940s) reflected in his analyses of the Mahabharata, Vatsyayana's Kamasutra, Kautilya's Arthashastra, Bhartrihari's three Shatakas, an 11th century astronomical work Chintamanisaranika (Section IV) have been trendsetters and his editing of the oldest known Sanskrit anthology (Subhashitaratnakosha) is acknowledged as a landmark in Indian text-criticism. "Clearly, the Mahabharata 'war' - as distinct from some stages of the redaction - cannot represent 'Aryan' or 'Hindu' expansion, a supposedly universal 'epic period' between the 'Vedic' and the 'Buddhist' periods which appear in our textbooks" (No.19, 1964), he said. Commenting upon Geldner's German translation of the Rigvedic hymn X.108, Kosambi refuses to accept that there was any reference to Indra's cows stolen by the Panis and underlines: "The hymn derives from an earlier period when the aggressive demand for wealth... had come down to a ritual, somewhat like the simollanghana and 'looting of gold' at Dasaraa commemorating the fortunately brief period of Maratha robbery" (No.47, 1949-50). Surely, the 'Hindu' Right today will treat such writings as blasphemous.

Kosambi does occasionally and loosely use such terms as "Muslim period", but in his long-distance vision of Indian history, there were only "main advances", not the replacement of one period of Indian history by another. In "What Constitutes Indian History" (No.49) he reviewed the first three volumes of The History and Culture of Indian People, published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and made this perceptive comment: "In the preliminary remarks to the first volume, both K.M. Munshi (who wrote the foreword to each volume) and R.C. Majumdar (the chief editor) dismiss with contempt the nomenclature of the 'so-called Muslim period'; it may be correct to eliminate the term altogether from Indian histories, but the proposal is surprisingly incongruous when made by two Hindus with good Muslim professional names, Munshi and Majumdar."

Kosambi made the first serious attempt to apply the theory of the mode of production to the study of social, economic and other processes in ancient Indian history. The ideas and insights generated by him are still being pursued by a host of researchers not only in India but also in other countries. There is no doubt that the pioneering and perceptive contribution of Kosambi to early Indian history has stood the test of time and continues to inspire historians. Hopefully, Chattopadhyaya's compilation would help the cause of constituting an authentic history of India.

K.M. Shrimali is Professor of History, Delhi University.

A.K. DAMODARAN

E.M. Forster: A Tribute, edited and with an introduction by K. Natwar Singh; Rupa and Co., New Delhi, 2002; pages 169, Rs.150.

THIS is a new edition of a book of tributes to E.M. Forster, supplemented by a very small selection of his own writings in the Indian context, originally published with Forster's satisfied approval in 1964. The book was edited by K. Natwar Singh, a very young Indian diplomat, who had established a unique relationship with the great man during his student days in Cambridge. It will be recalled that Forster spent two-thirds of the latter part of his life as a Fellow in King's College, Cambridge. The new edition contains a little additional material, primarily in the form of Forster's brief business-like but highly evocative letters to Natwar Singh during the 10 years from 1954 to 1964.

The book has been structured in three sections. The first division contains tributes to Forster by six of his Indian friends. This is followed by a brief anthology of small pieces on India written by Forster over the decades. A contemporary effect is produced by the editor's introduction, which incorporates a brief record of a conversation he had with Forster in 1962.

Among the Indian admirers of Forster who expressed their appreciation of his genius, V.K. Narayana Menon, Ahmed Ali and Mulk Raj Anand write about their impressions of a very distinguished man who knew them, appreciated their abilities and helped them, if necessary. Mulk Raj Anand's novel The Untouchable written in the 1930s, had been rejected by many publishers until Forster stepped in. Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi was also rejected by British publishers, again in the 1930s, because of its "tactless" references to the Mutiny. Here again, Forster was able to make a difference. Narayana Menon met him during his BBC days in London during the War along with George Orwell. Like many other contributors to this compilation, Menon quotes Forster's celebrated statement just before the War that he would, given the option, choose to betray his country rather than his friend. This passage has been sometimes misinterpreted. It was not an anxious desire to commit treason. It is an assertion of the individual's right of moral choice at a moment when the state is aggressive in its attempt to control its subjects. It reflects the attitude of the anguished intellectual at a time of invasive authoritarianism. We can see the same approach in Bertrand Russell's Reith Lectures - The Authority and the Individual - published about 10 years later, after the War. Narayana Menon also recollects Forster's reference to the Bible when the anguished father of a sick boy cries out to Jesus: "Help Thou my unbelief." It is these passages which made Forster's essay on 'What I Believe' nothing less than an individual's liberal manifesto. On a very personal note this reviewer recalls with some nostalgia teaching this essay to his college students in Delhi University in 1949. Narayana Menon has a delightful passage about Forster's interest in music. He has a long quotation from Howard's End which brings out the novelist's excitement about Beethoven.

Ahmed Ali's essay contains insights into Forster as a personal friend. Forster took a great deal of interest in the situation of his young friend after Partition when his family went to Pakistan. He was particularly interested in the loneliness of the young author's mother in Karachi.

SANTHA RAMA RAU is a late-comer into the scene like Natwar Singh. In the early 1960s she wanted to write a play based on A Passage to India. She explains the problems she had in trying to persuade Forster to agree to the proposal. The author of Aspects of the Novel was sceptical about merging narrative fiction with drama. He was finally persuaded, and the play was produced in New York and became a success. This was the beginning of the series of plays and films based on the Forster opus with which Rau was involved years after Forster passed away in 1970.

It would be interesting to know what Forster's real views were as a confirmed purist in novel writing, about John Galsworthy's plays and Thomas Hardy's poetry!

The Raja Rao piece is sui generis. Their relationship also has its beginnings in the 1930s. It is a dense rich piece of writing bringing in Hindu spiritual writings and the Russian classics into the discussion. It also has a charming interlude about his attempts to persuade Forster to visit him in Trivandrum in south India. Forster was too tired by then to make long journeys.

The selection from Forster's own writings with an Indian interest has been carefully made by Natwar Singh. Two pieces are of special interest. There is a charming description of his last visit to India in 1945, just after the War was over, to attend the PEN conference in Jaipur. (PEN denotes (the International Association of) Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists). There is an essay on the native states and their policies written during the 1920s based on his experience as an insider of the Royal Court in the princely state of Dewas Senior. This contains delightful vignettes of the experimental constitutions launched by rulers of various native states in the period immediately after the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms.

This leads to an interesting discussion of the new chamber of princes also. The vital fact about these comments upon the Indian princely world is their startling relevance even today, decades after the institutions disappeared. There is also a charming little tribute to Gandhi after his death - sincere, unpretentious and useful even today. Forster notes that Gandhi "was accustomed to regard an interruption as an instrument" and saw death, which had come to him so suddenly and interrupted his activities, as "the supreme interruption as an instrument and, perhaps, the supreme one". This shows remarkable insight on the part of someone who was certainly not overly interested in the Mahatma. Perhaps Gandhiji saw Chauri Chaura as an interruption which became an instrument in the development of satyagraha.

Both in his original and effective decision to persuade Forster to accept this tribute and his selection of the contributors to this anthology, Natwar Singh has shown a delicate sensibility. That is why the book reads as fresh today as it was when first released to the reading public in 1964. This book projects the Forster of the novels and the Forster of the essays as one of the central figures of the 20th century. In a well-known passage Rose Macaulay wrote that Forster's books "project an exquisite and animated crowd of beings... all set in the silver-point world of their creator's civilised irony". This succeeds in conveying an impression of the artistic quality of Forster's writings which can only be described as literary pointillism.

Natwar Singh's collection, in the easiest and most pleasant manner possible, has been able to illustrate the central quality of Forster's genius as a novelist and as a friend of India.

There is, of course, much more to Forster than the Indian connection - his great and continuing interest in Italy and France, his fascination with the beauty of the English landscape. He loved India and Indians, reciprocated their admiration in good measure. But unlike Rudyard Kipling, he was interested in many matters other than India's politics, culture and unique social fabric.

Little separates Kapil Dev, Sachin Tendulkar and Sunil Gavaskar in terms of record. Despite this, a persuasive argument can be made in favour of Gavaskar as India's greatest cricketer.

IT was a little over a year ago that the online offshoot of the reputed cricket publication, Wisden, came up with a controversial and much hyped list of the top 100 batting and bowling performances in Test cricket. Using a combination of factors such as the quality of the opposition, the state of the pitch, the state of the match and the context of the player's performance in the match and the series, Wisden Online tried to infuse a sense of scientific methodology into the evaluation of contests that are complicated by a great many variables.

Needless to say, there were notable omissions in the ratings. No Test innings of Sachin Tendulkar merited a mention in the top 100 batting performances. Four of Harbhajan Singh's efforts in the 2001 home series against Australia were included, yet B.S. Chandra-sekhar's memorable match-winning spell of 6 for 38 at the Oval in 1971, which sealed India's first series victory in England, was deemed unfit for inclusion in the bowling selections.

Despite all the shortcomings of such rankings, Wisden chose to undertake a similar type of evaluation in its recent selection of Kapil Dev as the 'Indian Cricketer of the Century'. The frailty and subjectivity of such a ratings procedure was further exposed when that very same bowling performance of Chandra's was accorded the accolade 'Indian Bowling Performance of the Century'.

Comparing sportspersons across eras and across playing roles is bound to be an imperfect exercise. The validity of comparing a wicket-keeper with an opening batsman or a middle-order batsman with a fast bowler is dubious. The sole exception to this would be the choice of Sir Don Bradman as the greatest cricketer in history. Arguably, no individual sportsperson has dominated any sport to the degree that Bradman did. There probably has never been as big a gap between the best and the next best in any sport as there was during the Bradman era. He ended his career with a mind-boggling batting average of 99.94 runs per innings and 29 Test centuries. Of these 29 tons, he converted two into triple centuries and 12 into double hundreds. All these milestones were achieved in a mere 52 Tests, in which he batted in only 80 innings. He averaged a century for every 2.8 visits to the crease. The enormity of his accomplishment is highlighted by the fact that the next highest batting average in the history of Test cricket, among those who have played twenty Test innings or more, is Greame Pollock's 60.97.

Finding a consistent yardstick to evaluate the 'Indian Cricketer of the Century' must have been a daunting task for Wisden's panel of cricketers and journalists. It has been pointed out that the core of such a procedure is heavily dependent on the statistical record of a player. It is also strongly biased towards players of the current era, a period that has seen an explosion in the media exposure that players receive. Moreover, the number of matches that cricketers, since the 1970s, have played has grown exponentially. Can we then objectively compare the contributions of pioneers such as C.K. Nayudu, Vinoo Mankad, Vijay Merchant and Vijay Hazare with those of Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar and Kapil Dev?

However strong the reliance of this type of selection procedure on statistics and whatever the shortcomings of this exercise, the Wisden award was always likely to come down to this shortlist of three. Their outstanding records have stood and will stand the test of time. The final choice among these three great cricketers was bound to be immensely challenging. Despite this, a persuasive argument can be made in favour of Sunil Gavaskar as India's greatest cricketer.

CRICKET has seen vast changes since the early part of the century. One-day cricket has added a very different facet to the game. The quality of one-day cricket has improved by leaps and bounds since its introduction into the international schedule. Comparisons of players across time, in the limited overs game, may be naive. On the other hand, the quality of Test cricket has remained more constant and is more amenable to such assessments. As the limited overs game has evolved, many of the skills required to excel in the two forms of cricket have been shown at times to be very different.

Virtually all cricketers will tell you that they value Test cricket more. Despite the excitement and fast pace of a limited overs game, the true beauty of cricket lies in its chess-like nature and the constant battle of wits and skills of the bowling team against the batsmen. This can be seen mainly in Test cricket, which is not limited by fielding or bowling restrictions. It can be easily shown that Test cricket demands a higher level of mental fortitude and technical skill.

The great Australian cricketer, Greg Chappell, eloquently endorsed this view in an interview given to Frontline in 2000 (issue of August 4, 2000): "I think to some degree the administrators of the game have denigrated Test cricket by pushing it into the background and concentrating on one-day events. I think that's a dangerous path to go down because cricket really is about the skills that are required for Test match cricket - the physical skills, the mental skills, the temperament, all of those things that separate the exceptional performer from the good performer. One-day cricket doesn't, to the same degree, draw on those strengths of the individual, nor does it draw on the strengths of the game." Chappell went on to note: "I think there's still a recognition within the Australian players that Test cricket is what it's all about. And that, even now, 20-odd years down the track, nearly 30 years down the track (since one-day cricket became part of the international programme), a player is judged on his Test match career, not his one-day career." Gavaskar was a master of the longer version of the game, perfecting the skills that were essential for greatness in contests akin to wars of attrition.

Since its first tour of England in 1932, the Indian cricket team has featured outstandingly talented individuals. Yet it was not until Gavaskar arrived on the Test scene in 1971 that India had truly found a player who could take on the best the world had to offer and come out on top. He single-handedly elevated the status of Indian cricket. It was definitely no coincidence that India achieved its first two Test series wins abroad after Gavaskar came into the side.

Gavaskar was the first sportsperson that India had produced who had the confidence, patience, tenacity and technical capability to dominate the rest of the world in their own domain. In a sense, he was the first person to break the shackles of a post-colonial inferiority complex that afflicted many of India's early sportspersons. It was once said of Gavaskar that he played cricket as if he were an Englishman, born and brought up in the home of cricket. His temperament and technical excellence supposedly belied the dusty maidans of Mumbai's Shivaji Park, where he spent his formative cricketing years. It is another matter that Gavaskar, who has little patience for anything smacking of Anglo-Australian condescension in the cricket world, would not be flattered by such accolades.

In that dominating 1971 debut series in the West Indies, the 21 year old technician shattered the notion that Indians were incapable of succeeding against high quality fast bowling. Gavaskar's scores in that magical first series read 65 and 67, 116 and 64, 1 and 117, 124 and 220. Prior to that Test series in the West Indies, we were used to witnessing constant batting collapses and defeats associated with these abroad. This is a phenomenon that plagues Indian Test teams even today. To even think in 1971 that an Indian team could dominate the mighty Windies in their own turf was inconceivable. It is a testament to Gavaskar's skill that 31 years after his phenomenal debut, in the second Test at Port of Spain, Trinidad, India has produced only a handful of batsmen who have been truly adroit against pace bowling. Gavaskar, through his remarkably gritty, consistent and intelligent performances, was the first to instil a sense of belief in Indian cricket. Every successful Indian cricketer who played with or followed Gavaskar will be indebted to him for leading the way.

Gavaskar's career spanned, arguably, the two strongest decades of Test cricket. Comparing across time requires us to make definitive judgments about the quality of opposition that each of the short-listed three faced. A useful yardstick when anointing the 'Cricketer of the Century' might be to consider their individual performances against the best teams of their time. The West Indies was, by far, the strongest team during Gavaskar's era as well as through most of Kapil's career. The Australians have occupied that position in Sachin's years.

In his Test career, Gavaskar played 125 matches and scored 10,122 runs, including 34 centuries and 45 fifties, at an average of 51.12. In his One Day International (ODI) career, he played 108 matches and scored 3,092 runs at an average of 35.13 and a strike rate of 62.26. Tendulkar has (up to August 12, 2002) played 98 Tests and scored 8,158 runs, including 29 Test centuries and 33 fifties, at an average of 57.04. In his unsurpassed ODI career, Tendulkar has thus far played 295 matches and scored 11,505 runs, including 33 centuries and 56 fifties, at an average of 44.42 and a strike rate of 86.83.

Both Gavaskar and Sachin have performed superlatively against the best of their time. Gavaskar averaged 65.45 runs per innings against the West Indies and, remarkably, achieved an average of 70.20 in the Caribbean alone. No other cricketer of the 1970s and 1980s can claim such command over the West Indies bowlers. No wonder, then, that Gavaskar became the first man from any country to score three double centuries against the West Indies. One of those double centuries, 236 not out at Madras in 1983, was the highest individual score by an Indian for almost 18 years - until V.V.S Laxman broke the record with his legendary effort of 281 against the Australians in Kolkata last year. Sachin, too, has an outstanding Test average of 54.07 against the Australians and his ruthless demolition of Shane Warne, possibly the greatest leg spinner in history, has been awe-inspiring. Unlike Sachin, Gavaskar averaged more abroad than at home. Gavaskar has also not had the opportunity to enhance his Test average by playing the Zimbabwes and the Bangladeshs of world cricket. Only Sri Lanka during Gavaskar's time even comes close to being considered the doormat of world cricket.

Kapil, too, produced Test performances of sheer brilliance against opposition of the highest quality. These include, among several others, his innings of 119 in the tied Test against Australia in Madras in 1987 (which prevented India from following on), his match-winning performances throughout the six-Test home series against Pakistan in 1979-80, his 5 for 28 in the second innings of the Melbourne Test in 1981 (which allowed India to level the three Test series) and his 9 for 83 against the West Indies in Ahmedabad in 1983.

WHILE it is extraordinarily difficult to discount the performances of any one of these three great cricketers with any authority whatsoever, Gavaskar's complete domination of the best bowlers of his time gives him an edge over the others. Gavaskar's achievements are brought more into perspective if the difficulty of an opener's role is considered. As an opener he was in the firing line from the start and performed remarkably consistently on different types of wicket and against different types of bowling. While India can claim greatness in the bastmanship of Vijay Merchant and Vinoo Mankad prior to Gavaskar, it has not since produced another Test opener with a fraction of Gavaskar's capability. The dearth of quality openers has been a bane of Indian Test cricket. Few other Indian players, openers or otherwise, can boast of Gavaskar's concentration skills, discipline, tenacity, patience and confidence. He was a professional in every sense of the word. Certainly no other Indian has possessed his technical ability. There is little doubt that his performances and skills made him the best opener of his time. He will, in all probability, fill one of the two opening spots in most selections of an all time Test World XI.

Sachin's Bradmanesque talent and a somewhat more down to earth record than the Don place him in the highest echelon of cricketers of all time. As Shane Warne remarked of Sachin, "There is Sachin and then there is daylight." The term "genius" is hardly wasted on him. Sachin will walk into any all time World XI and is easily the best batsman at the present time in both forms of the game.

Such encomium is not obvious in Kapil's case. It is unlikely that Kapil was the best all-rounder of his time, much less the greatest all-rounder of all time. His Test record of 5,248 runs and eight centuries (at an average of 31.05) and 434 Test wickets in 131 matches (at an average of 29.64) must be compared with the feats of some of his peers. In fact, Kapil only averaged a little over three wickets per Test match. Among the all-rounders of Kapil's time, one is inclined towards ranking Richard Hadlee, Imran Khan and Ian Botham higher than Kapil. As for the greatest all-rounder of all time, Sir Garfield Sobers has an indisputable claim to that title. He ended his Test career with an enviable record of 8,032 runs (at an average of 57.78), 26 Test centuries and 235 Test wickets in 93 matches.

It has often been remarked that India's Test record in Sachin's time is an indication of the quality of the other batsman on the team. It is easy to overlook the fact that apart from G.R. Viswanath and, a little later, Dilip Vengsarkar and Mohinder Amarnath, Gavaskar had little batting help of world quality. Sachin has played a fair number of matches with the supporting cast of Mohammed Azharuddin, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly and more recently with V.V.S Laxman. The bowling of Indian teams during Sachin's time, however, is not a patch on the famed quartet of Bishen Singh Bedi, B.S.Chandrasekhar, Erapalli Prasanna and S. Venkataraghvan. Yet these masters of spin made for a long tail and without Gavaskar's run support at the top, their performances would mostly have been in vain. Kapil, for the major portion of his career, played with a more solid and balanced Indian team. Many of Kapil's long-time teammates were part of Wisden's 'Indian Team of the Century' (the 1985 team that won the World Championship of Cricket).

Gavaskar's average record in ODIs has frequently been held up as a major strike against him. There is no doubt that Sachin and Kapil have a superior one-day record. Gavaskar's innings of 36 not out (in 60 overs) at the 1975 World Cup drew a lot of flak and is sometimes cited as evidence of his 'selfishness'. In retrospect, Gavaskar was perhaps being true to his batting talent, one that was exemplified by his immaculate defence, infinite patience and an attitude that required him to be 'selfish' in accumulating runs. If only Sachin Tendulkar had been endowed with Gavaskar's mental faculty and his supposed 'selfishness' for runs!

Gavaskar played the way he knew best. While that 1975 ODI innings cannot be condoned, Gavaskar was merely demonstrating the respect that limited overs cricket was accorded by most of the players of his time. Instead of magnifying the significance of that innings or Gavaskar's measured approach, it would be worthwhile to focus on the fact that he did finally adapt to one-day cricket. He ended his ODI career with a respectable batting average of 35.13 and one memorable century against New Zealand in the 1987 World Cup. Kapil and Sachin may have been more pleasing to watch thanks to their uninhibited stroke play and their endless reservoir of natural talent.

Gavaskar's efficiency very often achieved more important results in Test cricket. He was superlatively talented but his technical genius and enormous mental courage were highlighted in the longer version of the game. It is a pity that the average cricket fan these days tends to devalue Test cricket when comparing it with the one-day game. Sachin and Kapil are outright match winners but neither is particularly known for his ability to save Test matches. Gavaskar has not only won several Test matches for India but also saved a great many. His magnificent innings of 221 in the Oval Test in 1979 particularly comes to mind. Chasing a total of 437 runs in the fourth innings of that Test, India fell short of the target by eight runs and drew the match. In his mammoth contribution of 221 (out of a total of 429), he scored 179 on the last day. His ability to save matches is precisely where he scores over Sachin Tendulkar in Test cricket.

Whatever one's preferences regarding the form of cricket, there can be little disagreement that the quality of one-day cricket has improved by leaps and bounds since its inception in the mid-1970s. India's win at the 1983 World Cup was a truly amazing feat. Kapil was primarily, if not solely, responsible for it. His catch of Vivian Richards in the final and his innings of 175 against Zimbabwe in Tunbridge Wells are now the stuff of legend. It seems almost unbelievable that any team could defeat the likes of Vivian Richards, Clive Lloyd, Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall. Certainly not one with a bowling attack that consisted, Kapil apart, of Balwinder Singh Sandhu, Madan Lal, Mohinder Amarnath and Roger Binny.

Kapil played 225 ODIs and scored 3,783 runs at an average of 23.79 and a strike rate of 95.07. He also took 253 ODI wickets at an average of 27.45 and an economy rate of 3.71.

Yet the quality of one-day cricket in 1983 pales in comparison with that of the present day. While this cannot be held against Kapil, one cannot help feel that we in India place an inflated value on that World Cup triumph.

Kapil's great asset was his longevity. The sheer fact that he played 66 Test matches without missing a single contest on account of injury showed cricketing intelligence as well as fitness of the highest calibre. Kapil would have played 131 Test matches on the trot if he had not been unceremoniously dropped for the third Test against England in Calcutta in 1984. Yet a closer examination will reveal that Kapil's efficiency severely declined towards the end of his career. Perhaps he overstayed his natural tenure in the Indian team in a bid to overhaul Hadlee's world record of 431 Test wickets. His performances in his last 30 or so Tests reminded one of a weary veteran past his prime and not of the enthusiastic Haryanvi who came in like a breath of fresh air and took the 'never say die' attitude to new heights through most of his career. It was a poignant experience to watch him trudge through 16 Test matches to win those last 34 wickets. Kapil's form in those last years of Test cricket would not have won him a place in the top three sides at that time.

Gavaskar, on the other hand, retired while he was at the top of the game. In fact, many consider his second innings knock of 96 on a vicious turner in his last Test (against Pakistan in Bangalore in 1987) to be one of his finest innings. All sportspersons, particularly the great ones, have a right to choose when to retire but there was perfect judgment as well as grace in the way Gavaskar retired.

Sachin may yet become the Indian Cricketer of All Time but, looking at his performances till date, one cannot help feel that for all his infinite talent, he does not have the mental strength of a Sunil Gavaskar. The Americans reserve the term 'clutch' for the select few sportspersons who have the ability to bring out their best during times of adversity. Gavaskar was the epitome of a 'clutch' performer. The Indian team during Sachin's career is yet to have series wins such as the triumphs of 1971 and 1986 in England, 1981 in Australia and 1971 in the West Indies. Nor has India in this era come close to winning the World Cup or even a tournament as important as the 1985 World Championship of Cricket. One thing, however, stands out. Neither Gavaskar nor Kapil faced as large a burden of expectation as Sachin has throughout his career. Sachin's wisdom and humility are unbelievable in view of his ability, achievement and the fact that he made his Test debut at the age of 16. Tendulkar is still a great work in progress but a work that owes much to Gavaskar.

Sunil Manohar Gavaskar was arguably the greatest opener in the history of Test cricket. He transformed the status of Indian cricket. While relatively little may separate the three best Indian cricketers in terms of record, Gavaskar was the first to trail clouds of glory on the world stage. He showed that Indian cricketers could master the world's best bowlers. He was the first to make us believe in Indian cricket. For that reason alone, he deserves to be named the 'Indian Cricketer of the Century'.