Why Lala Amarnath was really sent home

He was the best all-round cricketer on India's 1936 tour of England — six hundred-odd runs, thirty-plus wickets in the warm-up games — and he was on a boat back to Bombay before the first Test, on grounds of “indiscipline.”

That word is doing an enormous amount of work, and it has been doing it for ninety years.

What the record actually says

The official version is thin. The trigger, by most accounts, was Amarnath losing his temper in the dressing room after the captain, the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, made him sit padded up for hours and then sent him in near stumps. Vizzy worked with the team manager to have him removed. Amarnath was later cleared.

Note the shape of that. A man is sent home mid-tour, in disgrace, on a charge serious enough to end his participation in a Test series — and then, later, quietly exonerated. Both things are true. Neither has ever been reconciled.

The part nobody has answered

What has never been fully established is who agreed to what, and why the Indian board wasn't consulted before a man's tour was ended. A captain and a manager, several thousand miles from the body that selected the side, between them removed its best player. There is no minute of that decision anyone has produced.

This is the pattern that recurs across Indian cricket's first century: the punishment survives in the record, the reasoning does not. We know Amarnath went home. We know he was cleared. The document that connects those two facts, if it was ever written, is not available to anyone.

Why there is no scorecard here

India's first Test of that tour was played at Lord's in June 1936 without him. There is no scorecard to link to for the innings Amarnath didn't play, which is precisely the point — the most consequential thing that happened to India's best cricketer that summer left no mark on any scoresheet at all.

He came back, of course. He captained India, he took the wicket of Don Bradman, and he became one of the game's great difficult men. But the 1936 tour is a hole in the record, and it is the oldest one on this list.

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No. 11 in Mysteries, a series of 11.