Lankan cricket-buffs have recently been discussing the cricketing capacities of Mahadeva Sathasivam of the Tamil Union and Ceylon. I have never seen Satha, as he was widely known, bat. But my researches have revealed some facets of his career. And I happen to have beautiful sepia-tone picture Garfield Sobers and Satha exchanging pleasantries in Lanka during the early 1960s. From the evident warmth of this occasion my conjecture is that this event and its rapport was rendered possible by stories conveyed to Sobers by the Barbadians in the West Indian teams that had toured Sri Lanka in the Sathasivam era – notably the three Ws. It is on record that Worrell considered Satha “the best batsman he had ever seen” (C H Gunasekara, The Willow Quartette, Colombo: Sumathi Publishers, 1996, p. 57).
In any event octogenarians and observers of that era make it clear that the debonair “Satha” was twinkle-toes, all class and finesse as batsman. Indeed, folklore suggests that Ghulam Ahmed considered him the best batsman he had ever bowled to. The statistics provided by Jason in the Dilmah Forum indicate why. And before someone decries all this as park cricket, let me assure people that when the Muslims played the Rest of India in year whatever in the 1940s they did so as Ranji Trophy champions. In brief, it was the equivalent of, say, New South Wales playing the Rest of Australia after they had won the Sheffield Shield. In short one had the best sub-continental cricketers on display.
So, to, did the Bombay Pentagular Gymkhana of the 1930s draw some of the sub-continental best. One needs to peruse Ramachandra Guha’s books to gain a sense of this world of cricket. The fact that some Ceylon cricketers were invited to participate was recognition by Indian cricket circles of the quality of a few Ceylon players.
As for Sathasivam’s capacities, let me add two conclusive illustrations. Firstly, he scored 101 runs in 1944 for the Rest of India versus the Hindus, the All-India champions in that year (even though he was technically unqualified – for he was a Hindu!). Secondly, he made a masterly 111 runs in difficult conditions against the full complement of Indian bowlers under Merchant at the Unofficial Test Match between India and Ceylon in 1945 and a remarkable 96 runs out of a total of 153 when the Ceylon side struggled against a visiting Commonwealth team on a rain-affected pitch in February 1950. As any cricket lover knows, it is a solid score when all around you fail that reveals the best batsmen.
So, as others within the Dilmah Forum have stressed, the foundations for Sri Lanka’s capacities were being laid in the 1930s and 1940’s. Young F C de Saram scored a brilliant 128 out of Oxford’s total of 218 against Woodfull’s Australian team in 1934; made 50 and 122 not out for the Rest of India vs the Muslims in 1937; and scored masterly centuries for the SSC when they played Madras and Baroda on their tour of India in 1945. Again the Ceylon Cricket Association’s trip to Madras to play South India in January 1947 was a triumphant occasion: Sri Lanka scored 521 for 7 with Sathasivam playing what many considered to be the finest innings ever seen at the Chepauk grounds up to that date, 215 runs in 248 minutes; and then dismissed the local side for 197 and 200, with RL de Kretser (off spin) and LE de Zoysa (right arm leg spin) as main destroyers.
Ghulam Ahmed’s evaluation of Satha undoubtedly developed from his encounters with him on some of these occasions.
Fun and Games
Satha was also a superb ballroom dancer. In personality and panache he had so much in common with such cricketers as Sobers, Denis Compton and Keith Miller – both on field and off the field. These were young men about town, virile playboys, each a debonair Don Juan with a taste for wine, women and song. Legends grow around such men.
Neville de Silva picks up on one of these stories when he speaks of gallivanting Satha going out to bat and making a century after a night out on the town and without much sleep. His purpose, alas, seems to be a celebration of the generation yesteryear and a belittling of the players today. Though I played cricket with Neville, I do not share this attitude and indeed, take exception to the disparaging tone of his essay and the whimsical insertion of irrelevant matter such as the con-job effected by a Lankan handball team who beat the immigration laws to reach Germany. But that is of less importance than the issue at stake.
The issue of discipline and fitness among cricketers must necessarily attend to differences in each era and its expectations. In the 1930s and 1940s cricketers had more leeway in their off-field activities and were not under public scrutiny to the same degree as recent times. No more so than in Ceylon those days where the game was an amateur and elitist pastime.
Again, while old-timers and young pups may argue about the comparative batting and bowling skills of stars of the 1940s and those of 2004 till the cows go home, I believe that there is one field within which, on average, today’s cricketers stand head and shoulders above those of the 1940s: that of fielding. True, there were natural athletes (Learie Constantine say) who were mercurial fielders. But the average level of athleticism and fine-honed skills revealed today surely exceeds that of the average cricketer of bygone days. It is because of this standard of excellence that critics frown on excessive drinking and fornication in the midst of a match.
One could, of course, make an argument for fornication in moderation with a regular lover as being helpful. I go further: I affirm that it is as beneficial as exhilarating. One can be rendered purring-satisfied in ways that enable calm focus towards the fresh task at hand or, alternatively, one can be fired up for the new day. But a night of s…g (serially or otherwise) probably generates exhaustion. I have no experience in the booze field as I dislike the stuff, but I suspect that it is broadly true to say that excessive drinking slows the reflexes in the same manner as marijuana smoking. And as for hard drugs, I gather they do dull/skew the senses.
So one must attend to the legends about playboys Satha, Sobers, Miller and others with some measure of reservation. Apocryphal tales are selective. They omit those moments when a night of revelry led to a dismal performance as cricketer. And especially as fielder. On the authority of a Barbadian friend, Joe Hoad, who played with Sobers, I am ready to grant that that guy’s reflexes were so extraordinary that his fielding may not have suffered much after an all-night binge. But Satha? I suspect that he was a prima donna on the field, given to laziness even on the best days. [And subsequently Neville Jayaweera has confirmed this speculation: “Satha was a hopeless fielder, never chased a ball, dropped catches and all because for most of the time he was drunk.”] So, his all-night revelry compounded his tendency to let his team down on the field.
With the cricketer of today, whether Joe Bloggs or Joe Perera, therefore, cricket lovers have the right to demand moderation and discipline in extra-curricular activities. Too much is at stake nowadays. The libertarianism of yesteryear does not prevail to the same extent.
Ironies of Circumstance
In a controversial decision the Ceylon Cricket Association selected Mahadeva Sathasivam of the Tamil Union to lead the All-Ceylon XI when Bradman’s team of Invincibles played a one-day whistle-stop game on 30 March 1948 when their P & O liner paused at Colombo as it vended its way to England. F C de Saram of the Sinhalese Sports Club was senior to Sathasivam and had been expected to lead. The contretemps and repercussions surrounding this decision is another story.
The story I relate is of a different order. Five years later, when Lindsay Hassett’s team played All-Ceylon on 30 March 1953 while enroute to England, the captain was F C de Saram. And what of Satha? He was in jail charged with murdering his wife.
Let me assure readers that Sathasivam was not the culprit. Indeed, he was acquitted and subsequent events have confirmed that it was a domestic servant named William who had been responsible – he committed another murder. Grapevine gossip suggests that the police authorities led by Sir Richard Aluvihare were directed by tunnel-vision. The thick respectability and prudery of middle class society at that time, a mixture of Victorian Puritanism and Buddhist reformism, encouraged some vengeful blindness. Satha had penetrated so many bedrooms that high society looked askance at the man.
There are other asides to this tale however. Australian journalists travelled with their team to cover the Ashes. Fingleton had been one of the journalists who watched the Don and Satha toss the coin in 1948. He was present in Colombo in 1953 as well. And he had the savvy to discover that Satha was in jail and to insert this fact into his match report (see Roberts & James Crosscurrents, 1998, p. 83).
Fingleton could not have foreseen a supreme irony: that the Ceylon captain in 1953 would also be jailed. F C de Saram had been a senior officer in the Army for some part of his adult life; and after he transferred to the Army Reserves as a civilian he was drafted into military service during the troubled times of the early 1960s when the government had declared emergency rule as part of its struggle against the agitations of the Left. F C de Saram then became one of the leaders in a military coup d’etat in January 1962– as a segment of the elitist English-educated classes attempted to turn back the trend of populist nationalism which had brought the reins of government into forces representing Sinhala linguistic nationalism. Well, this coup was aborted at the eleventh hour because a leak (and what else could one expect in Ceylon!) disclosed their plans. F C was man enough to say mea culpa. So he spent the best part of the 1960s in jail till a legal technicality of the same order as the Bali trials in Djakarta and the Privy Council of UK’s diktat saved his bacon (literally for FC liked his bacon and eggs).
This must surely be a record worthy of book of Guinness or, maybe, many pints in many an Irish pub. Two Ceylon captains who had the privilege of leading their country against the famous Australian cricketers both ended up in jail. Cheers mate
