Why Lala Amarnath was really sent home

Lala Amarnath was the best all-round cricketer on India's 1936 tour of England. He had made 613 runs in twenty innings, more than anyone else on the tour, and had taken thirty-two wickets at under twenty-one apiece. He was also the first Indian to score a Test century.

He was on a boat home before the first Test was played.

The afternoon it happened

The account most often given runs like this. In the match against the Minor Counties at Lord's, the captain, the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, who had bought his way into the side and the captaincy, kept Amarnath padded up through a long afternoon, sending in lesser batsmen ahead of him. When Amarnath finally went in it was close to stumps and there was nothing left to bat for.

He came off, threw his kit down in the dressing room, and said what he thought.

Within days he was on a ship. The stated ground was indiscipline.

What that word is doing

It is carrying ninety years of weight and it has never been unpacked. There was no hearing. No charge sheet was published. No account of what was actually said in that dressing room was ever set down by anyone who heard it.

This is not hindsight. Wisden said the same thing the following spring, in the ordinary voice of a tour report: the action was unparalleled in the history of modern cricket, and a clear and convincing explanation of the reason for it was withheld at the time. The gap was visible to the people writing the record while they were writing it. They simply had nothing to put in it.

Wilfrid Brookes, The Indian team in England 1936, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1937 →

Amarnath was later cleared. Both things are true: he was sent home in disgrace mid-tour, on a charge serious enough to end his participation in a Test series, and he was subsequently exonerated. Nobody has ever reconciled them.

Who agreed to what

The record cannot answer this. Vizianagram worked with the tour manager to have Amarnath removed. The Indian board, several thousand miles away, was not consulted before its best player's tour was ended.

A captain and a manager, alone, removed the leading cricketer from a national side on an overseas tour, and there is no minute of that decision that anyone has produced. Not a cable, not a letter, not a note of a meeting.

The pattern recurs across the first century of Indian cricket: the punishment survives in the record and the reasoning does not.

There is no scorecard for this

India's first Test of that tour was played at Lord's in June 1936 without him. He did not play another until 1946.

Lala Amarnath, obituary, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2001 →

There is no card to link, because the most consequential thing that happened to India's best cricketer that summer left no mark on any scoresheet at all. The matches he did not play produced no runs and no wickets and no entry against his name.

It is the cleanest example of the problem this blog keeps running into. Cricket's records are exhaustive about what happened on the field and silent about the decisions taken off it, and the decisions are frequently the more important half.

Who was being sent home

This was not a marginal selection. Amarnath had made India’s first Test century three years earlier, at Bombay in 1933, on debut, and he could bowl. He was the closest thing the side had to a match-winner in either discipline.

The captain who sent him home was the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, who had acquired the job by means other than performance and who contributed almost nothing with the bat all summer. India lost the series.

Afterwards

Amarnath came back. He played for India for another sixteen years, captained the side, and took the wicket of Don Bradman. He became one of the game's great difficult men and told the story of 1936 many times, always as the wronged party, which he may well have been.

Vizianagram never gave a full account. Neither did the manager. The 1936 tour is the oldest hole in the Indian record and it is now unfillable, because everyone who could have filled it is long dead.

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No. 11 in Mysteries, a series of 11.

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