That Prodigious Proclivity for Trickery

When one comes to write a book on a specialist subject within a specialist subject—and I think we can safely describe spin bowling as just that—there might be a reasonable expectation that a general audience wouldn’t know what to expect from it. In fact, with Twirlymen, the opposite proved to be the case. One particular expectation popped up clearly and consistently. Every time I spoke to a cricket fan about the project, they alighted on the same question. And in each and every interview I did with former and current players, or legendary observers of the game, that same question came up. It was my ever-ready companion each time I set down to write, the incessant enquiry that gave force and direction to the task at hand.

Why do Indians like to spin?

Why is it that, South Africa aside, India are the only Test team to have played with four spinners in the same side? How can it be that one nation—albeit with a vast population—produces no bowlers of genuinely express pace, but a conveyor belt of spinners of the calibre of Gupte, Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna, Venkataraghavan, Kumble, and Harbhajan, and all in the space of a few years?

No shortage of explanations has been offered by cricket writers over the years; but before turning to them, it may be worth adding a few caveats. The tendency of Indian bowlers, even today, to think of themselves as merchants of mystery rather than purveyors of pace is not the only instance of a national characteristic spreading through one form of bowling. Take the case of English left-arm spinners, for instance. They have tended, over decades now, to be slightly mad.

Phil Tufnell, that hugely talented spinner who now makes his fortune as a contestant on celebrity shows, was one of the game’s great pranksters, and a victim of pranks too. At one Test in Australia, a crowd member shouted: “Oi Tuffers! Lend me your brain, I’m building an idiot.” Keith Medlycott, a brilliant left-arm spinner selected to tour with England, was suddenly struck by the yips, the fatal disease that causes a bowler to completely lose his ability to deliver the ball to the batsman. Fred Swarbrook was another one to get the yips. Eventually he went to a psychologist, who told him to keep a pebble in his pocket, and rub it before he came in to bowl. One day when he sent the ball flying into the air, only for it to land on his own head, his captain Eddie Barlow said: “Fred, have you thought about rubbing the ball and bowling the pebble instead?”

So it’s not only Indians whose eccentricities can be clearly traced in bowling methods. But we should be sceptical, too, of the idea that packing a side with spinners is peculiar. In fact, such a claim is absurd when one considers the grand sweep of cricket history.

When cricket began to spread in the late 18th century, ‘bowling’ meant literally that: bowling in the manner of ten-pin bowling, with the ball rolled along the ground. A bowler’s best hope, if he wanted some deviation off the pitch, was to hit a fox hole or mole hill. It was only significantly later that bowlers actually started to give the ball some air. Even then, they were restricted to bowling under-arm.

It was not until close to the middle of the 19th century that round-arm bowling—releasing the ball at shoulder level—was introduced; and only much later was over-arm bowling, the form bowlers use today, deployed. The implication of this is that, for nearly the entire first century that cricket was played competitively, a bowler’s best hope was to impart the ball with spin, because generating pace with under-arm or round-arm deliveries is very hard to do (unless you’re Lasith Malinga). Seen from this perspective, the domination of fast bowling in today’s teams is a kind of decades-long aberration.

So, with these caveats—that other nationalities produce their own eccentricities, and that spinners dominated bowling attacks until the 20th century—let us return to the question of why Indians prefer to spin.

When I set down to write the book, my initial working subtitle was A Cultural History of Spin Bowling. I only changed tack when it dawned on me just how unlikely this history of mystery is, and how utterly beholden to the vicissitudes of fate. But my initial feeling, that understanding spin bowling was a route to understanding different cultures, found no surer expression than in the curious case of Indian spinners.

Indians, as readers of this distinguished publication can well attest, are an intellectual bunch. On the whole, they tend to be cerebral, and delight in mind games and flights of imagination. This sits very comfortably with what I have called the spinner’s spirit. As I write in the first chapter of the book, ‘Spin bowling speaks to a frame of mind, a spirit and attitude, that is eccentric, manipulative, relaxed about deceitfulness, curiously obsessed with the twisting motion of spherical objects, and bent on ingenuity’—in other words, the Indian frame of mind.

The spinner is just as attacking as the pace bowler, but seeks to think the batsman out rather than bounce him out. His weapons are more cerebral than pure power; and he wishes to make the batsman fearful not of pain, only ignominy. In all these respects, he speaks to the cultural tendencies of Bangalore and Bombay (as I still insist on calling it), not Barbados or Brisbane.

If that is the cultural explanation, perhaps there are some natural ones too, and I’ll leave it to the aspiring anthropologists among you to argue over whether nature and culture amount to the same thing. In one of my favourite passages from the pen of George Orwell, he refers in the seminal essay A Hanging to ‘the bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knee’. There is wisdom in that. Many Indians, especially those of an early generation, are small and sinewy of build, not 6’8” and terrifyingly muscular like the great West Indian fast bowler Joel Garner. Such comportments lend themselves much better to the demands of spin and swerve than swing and pace.

And what of climate? The sweaty heat of an Indian summer means the spinner can get through 30 overs in a day if need be, whereas the pace bowler, with his absurdly long run-up, cannot. It’s true that many other cricket playing nations—West Indies and Australia, for example—have very hot summers, but perhaps they are not as dry. Of course, the dry summers of India produce pitches that are dustbowls by the end of the first day, or even before. This too encourages bowlers to spin, knowing they’ll be able to extract plenty of grip from the pitch, rather than seam or swing, neither of which is encouraged by the climate.

Something resembling this, then, is my answer to the question of why Indians bowl spin. It is a complex interplay between cultural and natural factors. But above all, it is because the very essence of spin bowling is victory by deceptive means—and the intellectual agility at the core of that is in turn the very essence of Indian civilisation.

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Amol Rajan’s book Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket’s Greatest Spin Bowlers was published by Yellow Jersey earlier this year