Tiger Pataudi overcame the disability of a damaged eye to become one of India’s most important captains. His Wisden obituary in 2012 remembered a remarkable figure.
Pataudi, Mansur Ali Khan, died on September 22, 2011, aged 70.
Tiger Pataudi was an unlikely revolutionary. Raised in a palace, attended by servants, educated at Winchester and Oxford, and aristocratic in demeanour as well as by birth, the last Nawab of Pataudi might easily have been typecast as a gifted dilettante, useful only for bringing a whiff of the exotic to the staid world of 1960s international cricket.
Instead he became a hard-headed captain of India who, with a beguiling mixture of personal charm and tactical know-how, forced the team to abandon their deep-rooted factionalism and become a disciplined fighting unit. He was, quite simply, one of the most important figures in the history of Indian cricket.
Had fate not intervened, he might also have been regarded as one of his country’s finest batsmen, but an eye injury sustained in a car crash when he was 20 halted what seemed like inexorable progress towards greatness. Showing extraordinary resolve, he learned to cope with one properly functioning eye – and was still talented enough to score six Test centuries and become an outstanding cover fielder.
He assumed the Indian captaincy less than a year after his accident – at 21, Test cricket’s youngest leader at the time – but his suitability for the role was not questioned, and if results remained modest they were a clear improvement on what had gone before. Nor can his impact be assessed purely by statistics. His background bought him influence with selectors that his predecessors had not enjoyed: players were now picked on merit, not to satisfy some unwritten regional quota system. And they were made aware who they were representing. “He was the first captain to give us a feeling of Indian-ness,” said Bishan Bedi.
Pataudi was stripped of the family title in 1971, when Indira Gandhi abolished the anachronistic privileges enjoyed by Indian royalty and aristocracy, but he did not lose an aura of glamour that had been enhanced by his 1969 marriage to Sharmila Tagore, one of Bollywood’s most glittering stars. He edited a sports magazine, was a TV summariser, dabbled in politics, and featured as the unnamed hero in a short story by his old Oxford friend Jeffrey Archer. In 2007, the Pataudi Trophy was inaugurated for series between England and India. Four years later, he presented it to Andrew Strauss at The Oval just a month before his death from lung disease.
On a later visit to Ireland, he was reunited with Robin Waters, who recalled: “He invited me to dinner at the team hotel and afterwards said, ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ We strolled out on to the beach and eventually sat Buddha-like under a tree. He looked at me and said: ‘Robin, I have a feeling that over the years you have tortured yourself about the accident, but I have never ever blamed you for what happened.’”
