On September 15, 1911, large crowds gathered in Bombay to cheer the SS Salsette that was bringing home a special group of men—the very first all-India cricket team. Prashant Kidambi, an academician and author, writes in Cricket Country that the tour was the vision of “an unlikely coalition of imperial and Indian elites”. According to him, it had taken 12 years and three failed attempts before an “Indian” cricket team could make “its debut on the playing fields of imperial Britain”.
The star of the hour was a left-arm bowler from Maharashtra, Palwankar Baloo, a Dalit ‘untouchable’. He had performed better than his teammates, who were members of the upper castes, higher classes, and other religions. It was a moment of justifiable pride for the country—and Baloo’s community.
“From what I have read, it seems that Palwankar Baloo was a spinner of great skill and subtlety, a worthy forerunner of such world-class Indian slow, left-arm bowlers as Vinoo Mankad and Bishan Bedi,” author, historian and cricket buff Ramachandra Guha writes in his book, A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport.
Guha writes that a felicitation ceremony was held for Baloo by the Depressed Classes of Bombay. The welcome address at the event was delivered by a smart, young college student who, at the time, was still unknown: Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.
“This, according to the doyenne of historians of Untouchability, Eleanor Zelliot, was the first public appearance of the man who was to become the greatest of all lower-caste politicians and reformers, and a figure of surpassing importance in modern Indian history. By virtue solely of his deeds on the cricket field, Baloo had become a hero and inspiration to countless Untouchables. And the young BR Ambedkar was one of them,” writes Guha.
Today, Indians seem to have forgotten Baloo, remembering only that he was a legend from the lower rungs of the caste ladder.
A family makes its mark in the gentleman’s game
Baloo was born, the eldest of four sons, in July 1875 to a family of chamars (a Dalit community associated with leather work) in Dharwad. Two other brothers, Shivram and Vithal, were legends in their own right. The youngest Palwankar brother, Ganpat, impressed all who saw him play, but his life was cut short at 27.
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Baloo would stand tallest as a patriarch. His life in cricket started in Poona, where his father worked for the army either in the ammunition factory in Kirkee or in the 112th Infantry Regiment as a sepoy. This was where Baloo and Shivram picked up the gentleman’s game with equipment that the army officers had discarded.
“Baloo’s own first job was at a cricket club run by Parsis. Here he swept and rolled the pitch, and occasionally bowled to the members at the nets. For this work he took home Rs 3 a month,” writes Guha.
An important step in Baloo’s career was at Poona Club, which paid him Rs 4 to roll and mark the pitch, erect the nets and, crucially, bowl to members, among whom was one of the top English cricketers of the time, Captain J G Greig. Over many hours, as Greig improved his technique, Baloo strengthened his bowling.
The bowler began to get noticed, including by a Hindu club in Poona that was striving to challenge and defeat the Europeans in cricket. Of course, the question of including a chamar in the team divided the Hindu cricketers. It was Greig who said that the Hindus would be foolish if they did not include Baloo.
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“It was not that Greig had the instincts of a social reformer—his commitment to his race was scarcely less strict than the Poona Brahmin’s commitment to his caste—but, rather, that he wished to test his skills against his net bowler in the fierce heat of match competition,” writes Guha.
Baloo was included in the Poona Hindus team, winning difficult matches, but he was still reminded of his caste status. “At the tea interval, that ceremony sacred to cricket, Baloo was served the liquid outside the pavilion, and in a disposable clay matka, while his colleagues drank in white porcelain cups. inside. If he wished to wash his hands and face, an Untouchable servant of the club took a kettle out into a corner of the field and poured water from it. Baloo also ate his lunch off a separate plate, and on a separate table. But he took plenty of wickets all the same. Due chiefly to Baloo’s bowling the Poona Hindus defeated the Poona Europeans and other local sides as well,” says Guha.
Cast as a reformer
After an important victory, scholar and reformer Mahadev Govind Ranade garlanded Baloo at a public function in Poona; Bal Gangadhar Tilak heaped him with praise. The caste divide, whose cracks run through Indian society even now, would stalk the Palwankars all their lives, but the orthodox population of Poona did warm up to them, if only for their skills.
As the years passed, reform movements strengthened in India, with Mahatma Gandhi vocal against untouchability. In 1923, Vithal would become the first Dalit captain of the Hindus cricket team in the prestigious Bombay Quadrangular cricket championship. He would lead the Hindus to three victories.
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“Baloo was never allowed to enter the pavilion of the Poona Club, but it was in that pavilion that Vithal received the Quadrangular trophy. At the ground and afterwards, he received tributes aplenty. He and his men were fêted with At Homes and pan suparis, and even congratulated by the now conservative Mahratta for coming out ‘with flying colours against the Europeans in a game native to them’,” writes Guha.
Gandhian to the core
Baloo was a loyal supporter of Gandhi’s vision, even when it pitched him against Ambedkar. The cricketer believed that Gandhi’s call to the upper castes to treat the Depressed Classes more fairly would pave the way to a solution. “Ambedkar, on the other hand, was convinced that they would get a fair deal only outside the rubric of Hinduism,” writes Guha.
When Gandhi went on a fast-unto-death in Yerawada Jail against the Communal Award of August 4, 1932, a proposal by the British government to allow ‘untouchables’ to become an electorate separate from the main Hindu community, which Ambedkar supported, Baloo was among those who went to speak to the Dalit leader to change his mind. Ambedkar relented, leading to the signing of the Poona Pact on electoral representation of the ‘Depressed Classes’.
By 1935, Ambedkar had disavowed the Poona Pact. After brutal attacks on ‘untouchables’ in Gujarat, Ambedkar said that there was no future for the lower castes in Hinduism and he and his supporters would convert to another religion.
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Baloo, however, remained steadfast in his belief that India had begun to change and there was little discrimination, at least in cities. In 1937, the Congress selected Baloo to fight Ambedkar in the Bombay Legislative Assembly elections. When the ballot was counted, Baloo had received 11,225 votes, 2,200 fewer than Ambedkar’s.
“Baloo’s decision to stand for election seems to have been a ‘world first’ as far as the professional cricketer was concerned, anticipating, by many years, the move into politics of such men as Pakistan’s Imran Khan and Guyana’s Roy Fredericks,” writes Guha.
The cricketing legend died in July 1955, and the sports world paid homage not only to the bowler but also to the person who changed who could play the game.
