History of Indian Cricket: 1932 to World Champions

India lost its first Test match and did not win one for nearly twenty years. It lost abroad for four decades. It then won two of the most improbable away series in the sport's history within four months of each other, won a World Cup nobody had backed it to reach, and finished the century as the game's largest audience and its least reliable travelling side. The next twenty years fixed most of that and made India the financial centre of world cricket. Few national teams have changed character so completely, so often.

This is the story of the national side from its first Test onward. How the game reached India in the first place, who played it before there was a team, and how the Ranji Trophy and the BCCI came into being are covered separately in our origin of cricket in India. The broader set of national histories sits in our cricket history index.

1932 to 1947: the first Tests

India's first Test match was played at Lord's in June 1932, a single three-day fixture, with C. K. Nayudu as captain. England won. The tourists were competitive for a session at a time and not for much longer than that, which became the pattern of the next fifteen years.

Between 1932 and the Second World War India played a small number of Tests, all against England, home and away. Individual performances stood out. Amar Singh was a genuinely fine seam bowler who also batted usefully and was rated highly by English professionals who faced him. Mohammad Nissar was quick and hostile. Vijay Merchant scored heavily and consistently on both sides of the world, and his first-class record is among the highest ever compiled by anyone. Lala Amarnath became the first Indian to score a Test century, at Bombay in 1933-34.

What India did not have was a settled side. Captaincy was decided partly by cricketing merit and partly by the standing of the princely states involved, and touring parties were assembled amid rows that occasionally spilled into the press. The 1936 tour of England, in which Amarnath was sent home mid-tour after a dispute with the management, is the notorious example. The war then removed most of a decade.

1947 to 1970: waiting for the first win

Independence in 1947 changed the country and, in the short term, weakened the cricket team. The partition of the subcontinent removed a number of players to the new state of Pakistan, whose own beginnings are traced in our history of Pakistan cricket. India's first post-independence assignment was a tour of Australia against a side captained by Don Bradman, and it went as badly as that sentence suggests.

The first Test victory came in February 1952, at Madras, against England. India won by an innings, with Vinoo Mankad taking wickets in both innings and effectively bowling England out on his own. Later the same year India won its first Test series, at home against Pakistan.

Mankad deserves a paragraph of his own. He was a left-arm spinner and an opening batsman of real quality, and his performance at Lord's in 1952, where he scored heavily in both innings and bowled almost unbroken through England's, is one of the great individual Test performances by a losing player. The match is still referred to as Mankad's Test.

Home and away

Through the 1950s and 1960s India developed a clear split personality. At home, on slow turning pitches, with a batting order raised on spin and a bowling attack built for it, India was awkward to beat and occasionally excellent. Away, particularly in England, Australia and the West Indies, India was frequently overwhelmed. The 1959 tour of England produced a five-nil defeat. The 1967-68 tour of New Zealand did at least produce India's first overseas series win, which was a genuine landmark even if New Zealand were then among the weaker sides.

The batting of this era rested on Polly Umrigar, Vijay Manjrekar, Chandu Borde and the wristy, elegant Nawab of Pataudi junior, who took over the captaincy in his early twenties after a car accident had cost him much of the sight in one eye and led India for most of the 1960s. Pataudi's contribution was tactical as much as personal. He was the captain who decided that if India could not compete with four seamers, it should stop pretending, and pick three or four specialist spinners instead.

1971: the year everything changed

That decision produced the spin quartet: Bishan Singh Bedi's left-arm orthodox, Erapalli Prasanna's off-breaks, Bhagwath Chandrasekhar's fast, unreadable leg-spin bowled with an arm withered by childhood polio, and Srinivas Venkataraghavan's off-spin. They rarely all played together. Any three of them could bowl a side out on a surface offering the slightest help, and unlike most spin attacks they were dangerous away from home as well.

In 1971, under Ajit Wadekar, India won a Test series in the West Indies and then a Test series in England, within the same calendar year. Both were firsts. In the Caribbean, a twenty-one-year-old opener named Sunil Gavaskar came into the side after the first Test and scored 774 runs in four matches, which remains one of the greatest debut series by any batsman. At The Oval a few months later, Chandrasekhar took six wickets in England's second innings to leave India a small target, and India knocked it off to win in England for the first time.

Those two series are the hinge of Indian cricket. Before them, India travelled hoping to compete. After them, the possibility of winning abroad was real, even when it did not happen often.

Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and the 1970s and 1980s

Gavaskar became the defining Indian batsman of the era and one of the finest opening batsmen the game has produced. He faced the West Indian fast bowlers of the 1970s and 1980s without a helmet for most of his career and averaged over fifty against them. He was the first player to reach ten thousand Test runs, and he retired holding the record for Test centuries. He also captained India, in a period of frequent and not always coherent changes of leadership.

The most celebrated Indian batting performance of the decade came at Port of Spain in 1976, when India chased 406 to beat the West Indies. Gundappa Viswanath and Mohinder Amarnath made the runs alongside Gavaskar. It stood as the highest successful fourth-innings chase in Test cricket for many years, and it prompted Clive Lloyd, watching his spinners fail to defend it, to commit permanently to the four-fast-bowler attack that dominated the following decade.

Kapil Dev

India had never produced a fast bowler capable of leading an attack for a decade. In 1978 it produced Kapil Dev, a Haryana all-rounder who swung the ball at genuine pace, batted with uncomplicated aggression, and did both while playing more or less continuously for sixteen years. He finished with 434 Test wickets, which was the world record when he retired in 1994, and more than five thousand Test runs. On the flat, unhelpful pitches India prepared at home for its spinners, he bowled thousands of overs for very little assistance and rarely broke down.

The tied Test

The 1980s also produced one of only two tied Test matches ever played. At Madras in 1986, Australia declared and set India a large fourth-innings target on a ground where the heat was severe enough to hospitalise players. India went for it. The match came down to the final over, Maninder Singh was given out leg before to Greg Matthews with the scores level, and the game finished tied for the second time in Test history. Both tied Tests, as it happens, involved Australia.

1983 and the arrival of one-day cricket

India's record in the first two World Cups was almost comically poor, with a single win in six matches, that one against East Africa. In 1983, under Kapil Dev, India went to England as long odds outsiders and won the tournament.

The group stage produced the innings that anchors the legend. Against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells, with India collapsing early, Kapil made 175 not out, an innings that survives only in scorecards and eyewitness accounts because a broadcast strike meant it was never filmed. India then beat England in the semi-final and met the West Indies, twice champions and overwhelming favourites, in the final at Lord's.

India were bowled out for 183. It should have been over. Instead the Indian seamers found movement, Kapil ran a long way backwards to catch Viv Richards, and the West Indies were dismissed for 140. Mohinder Amarnath, who took the last wicket, was named man of the match.

The consequences were commercial as much as sporting. One-day cricket became the dominant format in the Indian market, television followed the audience, and within a few years the subcontinent was the game's most valuable territory. India and Pakistan co-hosted the 1987 World Cup, taking the tournament out of England for the first time. India also won the 1985 World Championship of Cricket in Australia, a tournament sometimes forgotten but at the time a demonstration that 1983 had not been a fluke. Our World Cup history piece follows the tournament itself in more detail.

The 1990s: Tendulkar, and a team that could not travel

Sachin Tendulkar made his Test debut in Karachi in 1989, aged sixteen, against a Pakistan attack containing Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Imran Khan. He batted for India for the next twenty-four years. He finished with more Test runs than anyone has scored, and one hundred international centuries across the two formats, a figure that has the odd quality of sounding invented.

For much of the 1990s he was carrying a side that was formidable at home and poor abroad. India lost heavily in England, Australia and South Africa through the decade. Mohammad Azharuddin captained for long stretches and was a magnificent batsman on his day. Anil Kumble emerged as a leg-spinner who relied on bounce and relentless accuracy rather than big turn, and became India's leading Test wicket-taker; in 1999, against Pakistan at Delhi, he took all ten wickets in an innings, something only two other bowlers have done. Javagal Srinath provided the pace.

The 1996 World Cup, hosted in the subcontinent, ended in one of the game's ugliest afternoons. India, chasing Sri Lanka's total in the semi-final at Eden Gardens, collapsed. Sections of the crowd threw objects and started fires in the stands, play could not continue, and the match was awarded to Sri Lanka.

The match-fixing inquiries

In 2000, investigations that began with the South African captain Hansie Cronje widened to include Indian players. India's Central Bureau of Investigation published a report, and the BCCI acted on it. Azharuddin was banned for life by the board, as was Ajay Sharma; other players received shorter suspensions. The Azharuddin ban was set aside by the Andhra Pradesh High Court in 2012. The episode is documented, was damaging at the time, and marks the point at which cricket administration worldwide began building anti-corruption machinery that had simply not existed before.

The Ganguly and Dravid years

Sourav Ganguly took the captaincy in 2000 with the team's reputation at its lowest. He held it for roughly five years and changed what India expected of itself.

The turning point was the home series against Australia in 2001. Australia arrived on a sixteen-Test winning streak and won the first match easily. At Eden Gardens, India followed on more than 270 behind. V. V. S. Laxman and Rahul Dravid then batted together for almost the whole of the fourth day, Laxman making 281 and Dravid 180, and India won a Test after following on, which had happened only twice before in the history of the game. Harbhajan Singh took a hat-trick in that match, the first by an Indian, and finished the series with an enormous haul. India won the decider at Chennai and took the series.

What followed was a run of results that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier: a tied series in England in 2002, the NatWest one-day final at Lord's chased down from an apparently hopeless position, a run to the 2003 World Cup final where Australia proved too strong, a drawn Test series in Australia in 2003-04 in which Dravid scored 233 at Adelaide, and in 2004 a first Test series win in Pakistan, where Virender Sehwag made 309 at Multan, the first triple century by an Indian.

Dravid took over the captaincy and led India to a Test series win in England in 2007. He also led the side at the 2007 World Cup, where India lost to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and went out in the first round. That failure, in a tournament India had expected to contend in, had unusually large consequences.

Dhoni, 2011 and the shift in balance

The response to the 2007 exit was to send a young squad to the inaugural World Twenty20 in South Africa under a twenty-six-year-old wicketkeeper, M. S. Dhoni, on the reasonable grounds that expectations were low. India won it, beating Pakistan in the final at Johannesburg.

Dhoni went on to captain India across all three formats for most of a decade. Under him India reached the top of the Test rankings in 2009, holding it for around eighteen months, and won the 2011 World Cup at home, beating Sri Lanka in the final at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. No host nation had won the tournament before. It was also Tendulkar's sixth World Cup and his only winner's medal, and the images of him being carried around the ground by younger teammates did a good deal of the emotional work of that night. India added the Champions Trophy in England in 2013.

Dhoni's captaincy was calm to the point of appearing passive, and his record away from home in Tests was poor. His record in limited-overs cricket, and his ability to finish a chase himself, put him among the most successful captains the game has had.

Kumble, and then the batting group of Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman, Ganguly and Sehwag, retired within a few years of each other around the turn of the 2010s. Losing five batsmen of that standard in one cycle should have cost India a decade. It cost considerably less than that, largely because the domestic system had kept producing.

The IPL and the reshaping of Indian cricket

The Indian Premier League launched in 2008. A city-based Twenty20 competition with player auctions, franchise ownership and an eight-week window in the calendar, it was not the first attempt at franchise cricket in India, but it was the one with the board behind it.

Rajasthan Royals won the first season under Shane Warne, from what was widely regarded as the weakest squad. Since then the competition has settled into a familiar shape, with a small group of clubs accumulating most of the trophies. Our own IPL records show Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians as the most decorated franchises, with five titles each, and Kolkata Knight Riders next. The auction mechanism, which we explain in detail in our guide to how the IPL auction works, turned player valuation into a public spectacle in its own right.

The IPL's effects on the national side were real and mostly positive. Uncapped Indian players began sharing dressing rooms with senior international professionals years before they were selected. Domestic cricketers acquired financial security that the Ranji Trophy alone had never provided. Selectors gained a high-pressure proving ground. The cost was a crowded calendar and a permanent argument about workload, particularly for fast bowlers.

The BCCI

The commercial consequences were larger still. Broadcast money from Indian audiences had already made the BCCI the wealthiest board in the game before 2008; the IPL turned that advantage into something structural. Tour schedules, revenue distribution at the ICC and the survival economics of smaller boards all now depend to some degree on Indian television rights.

Governance did not keep pace, and in 2013 a spot-fixing case involving IPL players and team officials led to a Supreme Court intervention. A committee headed by former Chief Justice R. M. Lodha was appointed, reported in 2016, and its recommendations produced a substantially rewritten BCCI constitution covering tenure limits, state association representation and conflict of interest. Implementation was contested and partial. The episode remains the most significant external reform of Indian cricket administration.

The modern side

The last decade or so changed the one thing India had never fixed: fast bowling depth. For most of its history India travelled with one good seamer and hope. It now produces several at once, and the effect on away results has been immediate. India won its first Test series in Australia in 2018-19 and won there again on the following tour. Overseas conditions are no longer a guaranteed loss.

Virat Kohli's captaincy pushed that shift hard, prioritising pace and fitness and treating draws as a failure of ambition. The Test side of that era combined a specialist spin pair capable of winning matches at home with an attack that could take twenty wickets on any surface. India reached the final of the World Test Championship in its first two cycles and lost both, to New Zealand and to Australia, which is a fair summary of where the side has stood: consistently among the best two or three, and short of the last step more often than its supporters would like. The comparable Australian story is in our history of Australian cricket.

The other change is in how Indian batsmen score. The generation that came through after 2010 was raised on Twenty20 as well as on the Ranji Trophy, and it treats scoring rates in the longer formats as something to be dictated rather than accepted. That has costs; it also means India rarely runs out of time in a Test it wants to win. Wicketkeeping, fielding standards and running between the wickets, all areas in which Indian sides were once routinely and fairly criticised, are no longer weaknesses.

What has not changed since 1932 is the depth of the base. India's domestic system produces more cricketers than any other country's, and the national selection problem has become one of choosing between good players rather than finding them.

India's landmark firsts

Landmark	When
First Test match	1932, at Lord's
First Test win	1952, at Madras
First Test series win	1952-53, at home to Pakistan
First overseas series win	1967-68, in New Zealand
First series win in England and the West Indies	Both in 1971
First World Cup	1983
First World Twenty20	2007
Second World Cup, as hosts	2011
First Test series win in Australia	2018-19