Sir Garfield Sobers considers Subhash Gupte the greatest leg spinner yet in Test history, superior to Shane Warne. Ian Chappell thinks the world of Erapalli Prasanna’s off spin, while his contemporary and compatriot Doug Walters regards Bishan Singh Bedi as a greater artist with his left arm spin. Jim Laker’s idea of paradise was “Lord’s in the sunshine, with Ray Lindwall from one end and Bishan Bedi from the other.”
Wizards: the Story of Indian Spin Bowling, by Anindya Dutta, offers all these nuggets and more. It must be part of a world record of sorts, as the author is said to have written his first book as late as 2017, and this is already his fourth. It is as if the Singapore-based international banker and columnist had all these books bottled up inside him, and gave vent to them in one continuous outpouring of cricket writing.
Even more significant is the fact that Wizards is the first comprehensive book on India’s spin riches through the decades, not counting Ramachandra Guha’s Spin and Other Turns, the cricket biographies of Bishan Bedi and BS Chandrasekhar, and the autobiographical One More Over by EAS Prasanna. It is a story well told, treading a middle ground, as it were, between nostalgia for the greats of the past and obsession with the over-televised deeds of today’s heroes, relying not only on solid research but also on meaningful conversations with a wide range of experts. The author’s respect and admiration for the likes of the famed ‘quartet’ of Indian spinners do not prevent him from dispassionately analysing their strengths and weaknesses.
The early Indian bowling attacks were better known for seam and swing. The first great spinner was the left armer Palwankar Baloo, immortalised by Ramachandra Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field, one of the many sources Dutta has drawn upon.
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