A Very Very Special Indian batsman

V.V.S. Laxman’s retirement from international cricket is remarkable not just because it ends an individual career or takes us one step closer to the final flourish of Indian cricket’s “Greatest Generation”, but more so because it signals the finishing line for the last lot of Indians who exclusively valued Test cricket.

Laxman was born in 1974. Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid are only about a year or so older. Anil Kumble, born in 1970, completed the quintet. This bunch grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s, learning to love cricket before the limited-overs game had become dominant. True, the 1983 Prudential Cup victory was an inspiration for them — Tendulkar has often said so — but it is a safe bet that they had already been converted to the game by then.
When this band of brothers came together in 2000, in the aftermath of the match-fixing scandal and of India’s disastrous tour of Australia — it lost all three Test matches and won only a single ODI, against Pakistan — they resolved to build a team in their image: ethical, purposeful and determined. The next decade proved Indian cricket’s most satisfying epoch. It ended in England in the summer of 2011 and then in Australia later in the year, with a run of eight successive defeats. This was India’s worst Test performance since that 1999-2000 tour down under. The Cinderella hour was over.
Kumble and Ganguly had already gone. Within months of that disastrous Australian tour, Dravid and Laxman have also announced their retirement. Now only the master remains, but Tendulkar’s ageing body can pace itself only that much. He can skip the odd tournament, junk the pointless one-day series and preserve himself for the better contests. Yet, within a year perhaps, the great man, too, will return to the pavilion.
The dazzling decade began of course in March 2001, with Laxman’s 281 against Steve Waugh’s Australia, and India’s unbelievable victory in Kolkata despite having followed on. This only whetted the appetite, not satisfied the hunger. Finally, India had a team and a generation that didn’t want only the odd bauble and statistical trivia — it wanted to win, and win abroad. It wanted to change the profile of Indian cricket from a staccato performer to a virtuoso professional, capable of sustained excellence against any opposition, anywhere, and over five days.
India became the rare team that made it to the top in Test cricket not because it had any army of penetrative bowlers, but on the strength of an astonishingly talented middle order. True, Kumble and later Zaheer Khan won matches; even humble Ajit Agarkar bowled a winning spell in Adelaide in 2003. Even so it was the batting line-up that was the team’s Rock of Gibraltar. Dravid, Ganguly, Laxman and Tendulkar comprised Test history’s finest middle-order bar none.
Even the “three Ws” — Weekes, Worrell and Walcott — would have to take second place. Take other examples. In the 1960s, the West Indies had Rohan Kanhai and Gary Sobers, but the next best would be someone like Seymour Nurse, good but not great. Don Bradman’s 1948 team would be comparable, but it had Keith Miller batting at number five. To have not two, not three but four batsmen of such accomplishment coming one after the other was not cricket. It was magic.
Laxman is part of another quartet — that of the best batsmen who’ve played for Hyderabad: Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi (technically not a Hyderabadi, but with family links to the city), M.L. Jaisimha, Mohammed Azharuddin and of course VVS himself. Pataudi and Jaisimha were before this writer’s time, but Laxman was often reminiscent of Azharuddin — the wrists, the lazy elegance, the ability to play the ball late. There was one difference, though, and a compelling one.
In the mid 1980s and 1990s, Azharuddin was simply the batting equivalent of silken grace, his ease of stroke-making matched only by David Gower. By the turn of the millennium, he was Indian cricket’s fallen angel, the captain whose implication in the fixing scandal broke a billion hearts. Laxman, on the other hand, was famous as the man who refused an endorsement contract because he did not want to go in with the pressure of a manufacturer’s logo on his bat. Just for that, he will always be greater.
Human endeavour is relentless. Cricket will survive and thrive; who knows, a succeeding generation may remember Cheteshwar Pujara and Virat Kohli with the wide-eyed romanticism that today’s middle-aged fans accord to their once-and-forever middle order. Nevertheless this is a melancholy moment. The passing of the Laxman-Tendulkar age signals the evolution of Indian cricket from a monotheistic religion to a polytheistic cult.
Test cricket has ceased to be the jealous god. Given the achievements of 2001-11, younger cricketers don’t have chips on their shoulders about being poor travellers. There is no sense that Test cricket is the ultimate frontier to conquer. Having grown up with multiple formats of the sport, tomorrow’s Indian cricketer may appreciate a 281 at Eden Gardens as much as a match-winning century in a Twenty20 World Cup semi-final. No doubt, both represent skill — and yet for some of us nostalgia may never permit a moral equivalence.
My favourite Laxman story goes back to 2004. Visiting Australia, I did the touristy thing and climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Well into the journey, our guide turned and asked the group of strangers, all in single file, to identify our countries. When I said “India”, he stopped. The words wafted out: “India… Laxman… V.V.S. Laxman… Very Very Special Laxman. I saw him hit a Very Very Special hundred at the Sydney Cricket Ground earlier this year…” There was silence. We looked at each other, fellow worshippers of an exotic art. The Chinese and the Italian and the American behind me fidgeted impatiently.
Then we laughed, that cricket-loving guide and me, and moved on. We were on a bridge above Sydney. It took V.V.S. Laxman to put us on top of the world.