The success of Ranji in England fired the imagination, especially among his fellow princes back home. Many sent for coaches from England and lavished huge sums on ensuring that they could boast the best facilities. In 1907 the Hindus joined the Europeans and Parsees to make it a triangular competition and in 1912 the Mohammedans also started to participate. In 1937 the Christians and Jews combined to for a side called The Rest and the competition became known as the Pentangular.
While the competition was the mainstay of the cricket calendar, there was no real attempt to launch a national competition until after India's Test debut in 1932. That first match, at Lord's, came more than two decades after India's first steps to earn Test status. In 1911 and All-India side toured England under the Maharajah of Patiala - with moderate success - and by the late 1920s the performance of the side against an MCC XI led by Arthur Gilligan persuaded the ICC that they might be ready
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The one stumbling block was that India did not have a central body running the game, and so in 1928 the Board of Control for Cricket in India came into being. India were due to make their Test debut in 1930-31 but extreme nationalist sentiment and activity at the time led to the trip being cancelled and so it was at Lord's 18 months later that India joined the Test ranks.
In 1934 the BCCI launched a national competition between "the princes and the princely states" and it was named after the greatest Indian player to that time, KS Ranjitsinhji.
The board also set up and inter-varsity tournament. In 1936 the first major stadium - the Brabourne in Bombay, the Lord's of India - was opened, the first of many giant arenas.Looking for a definitive date for the beginnings of cricket in Madras, a Daniells painting seemed to indicate that it would have been 1792. By the 1840s, European clubs, British military teams and Planters’ XIs had begun to play the game a bit more seriously and by the 1860s, more competitively. By the 1860s too, they had introduced the game to Indians, who began to play it in schools and colleges and in friendlies between scratch teams. But it was the founding of the Madras United Cricket Club in 1888 that resulted in Indian cricket being born as an institution. That Club, now called the Madras United Club, will begin celebrating its centenary year from December 8, a few days away.
Responsible for founding the Club was M. Buchi Babu Naidu of the Dera Venkataswami Naidu clan, and a few of his friends who shared his passion for the game. Buchi Babu’s own passion for the game developed when the English nurses he and his four brothers had, used to take them to watch the sahibs at play. It was said many years later, “Buchi Babu lived and died like an Englishman with all the English love for horses, cricket, tennis and fox-hunting.” It was this love for the game that had him gathering as many teenagers as possible in his neighbourhood to learn the niceties of the game in the spacious grounds of the family mansion in Luz. His fellow-founders of the Club did the same in their homes. And these recruits were the nucleus of the MUCC team when it got its own ground on the Esplanade where its clubhouse still is, though those grounds have been taken over by Government.
With the MUCC having a ground and a team, Buchi Babu was determined to take on the first formal cricket club in South India, the ‘Europeans Only’ Madras Cricket Club.
This was easier said than done, with Indians not being allowed the use of the pavilion. Buchi Babu, who came from a family of dubashes (of Parry & Co) and who himself was a dubash, was, as a result, on friendly terms with many of the members of the MCC. One of them was P.W. Partridge of that leading law firm of the time, King and Partridge, which had a big say in the affairs of the MCC. And when Buchi Babu and Partridge worked out a formula whereby the MUC could use the pavilion but lunch on Indian food at a separate table, the first MCC-MUC match was played c.1890. Indian cricket was on its way. This fixture was to lead to what was Madras’s ‘Big Match’, the Presidency Match played annually during Pongal between the Presidency Europeans and the Presidency Indians.
The entire history of cricket in India and the sub-continent as a whole is based on the existence and development of the British Raj via the East India Company.
On 31 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a Royal Charter to the (EIC) East India Company, often colloquially referred to as "John Company". It was initially a joint-stock company that sought trading privileges in India and the East Indies, but the Royal Charter effectively gave it a 21-year monopoly on all trade in the region. In time, the East India Company transformed from a commercial trading venture to one which virtually ruled India as it acquired auxiliary governmental and military functions, until its dissolution in 1858 following the Indian Mutiny. The East India Company was the means by which cricket was introduced into India.
In 1639, the Company effectively founded the city of Madras, and in 1661 acquired Portuguese territory on the west coast of India that included Bombay. In 1690, an Anglo-Mughal treaty allowed English merchants to establish a trading settlement on the Hooghly River, which became Calcutta. All of these places became leading centres of cricket as the popularity of the game grew among the native population
The first match almost did not come off, Buchi Babu passing away a few months before the scheduled dates at the end of December. But his lieutenant B. Subramaniam felt the best way to honour Buchi Babu’s memory was to play the match. The European XI was mainly a MCC team, whereas the Indian XI was mainly college players and Subramaniam, P.D. Krishnaswamy and R. Chari from the MUC. The next year (1909), Subramaniam organised the Buchi Babu Memorial tournament which is still with us. The MUC ran the tournament till the first representative organisation for Madras cricket was formed in 1933.
Over the years that followed its founding, the Club began looking at other sports activities. After all, its bye-laws stated that to become a member, you had to participate in some sport or the other. And so the MUCC became the MUC when the membership decided to introduce other sporting activities. A MUC team took part in the first hockey tournament played in Madras, the Madras Hockey Tournament, for which the MCC offered the trophy. The MUC team and a Royal Artillery team from Bangalore were the first to take the field when the tournament started on July 22, 1901. The MUC team included Buchi Babu at full back and its best player, as reported at the time, was centre half S.V. Chetty. But the Indian team was thrashed 15-0 in the match, something which did not happen in later years when M.J. Gopalan began playing for it.
Tennis too was a sport in which the MUC played a leading role in ensuring participation in the game by Indian clubs. This was in 1913, with J.G. Ramaswami Naidu of the Club playing a key part. When in 1917 the South Indian became the MCC Lawn Tennis Tournament, with Indians included in the competition; the MUC was offered two places on the organising committee. And by 1925, the MUC was organising an All-India tournament of its own on its courts.
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