India vs South Africa: A brief history on and off the field

Commemorative stamp issued on July 26, 2018, by India and South Africa on the 125th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's Pietermaritzburg Station incident, and to mark Nelson Mandela's centenary. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

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In Test cricket, India and South Africa compete for the Gandhi-Mandela Trophy – the only bilateral series named after two men who were neither cricketers nor administrators. Few cricketing nations share a relationship as layered and nuanced.

From 1860, labourers migrated from India to Natal. They settled down. Over the subsequent decades, they – and their descendants – branched out into other professions and launched small businesses. However, they received poor treatment during the apartheid era.

After 1906, all Indians were required to carry passes, and after 1946, they were virtually ineligible to own land without a permit. And they were not granted citizenship until 1961. It was not the white government alone. The 1947 Durban riots, instigated mostly by the Zulus, claimed 142 lives, almost all of them Indians, and led to the destruction of 58 shops and 247 dwellings.

Amidst all this, a young Indian law clerk arrived in South Africa in 1893. He was evicted from a first-class compartment at Pietermaritzburg after a white man objected to sharing space with a ‘coolie’. The man, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, wired to the general manager of the railway and his sponsor in Durban. He reboarded the same train from the same station in a first-class berth, this time protected by the stationmaster.

The incident changed Gandhi forever. He lived in South Africa until 1914, and returned home as an activist and a politician. In 1993, to mark the centenary of the incident, they unveiled his bronze statue in Pietermaritzburg.

Seven years after Gandhi returned to India, the Christopher’s Contingent – a group of South African Indian footballers and cricketers – travelled from Durban to India for a two-month tour. They played 14 football and two cricket matches. The cricket contests were the first between the Indian and South African sides, almost seven decades before Clive Rice’s men arrived in India.

The South African Indian Cricket Union was founded in 1940. In the 1950s, they combined with the African and cricket communities to form the South African Cricket Board of Control (SACBOC). None of this was acknowledged by the International Cricket Council (ICC), who had granted official status to the existing all-white South African team.

The SACBOC requested the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) president Anthony de Mello to send an Indian cricket team to South Africa to play against the non-whites. However, the BCCI did not want to risk their association with the ICC, and the tour never happened.

What did happen was a tour by the Indian Football Association XI in 1934. They played 19 matches in South Africa, most of them in Natal, all of them against coloured teams. The white South Africans were not keen.

South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1961, which should have cost them their ICC membership as per the laws. England, Australia, and New Zealand – the white nations – voted for South Africa, while India, Pakistan, and West Indies voted against. England and Australia’s veto power meant that South Africa stayed.

South Africa were eventually exiled from cricket for almost the entirety of the 1970s and for all of the 1980s. The paths of the two nations did not cross – though they could have, in the final of the 1974 Davis Cup. India, steadfast in their anti-racism stance, refused to tour Johannesburg for the match and chose to give a walkover instead.

Throughout the 1980s, former South African captain Dr Ali Bacher invited several overseas teams to play in South Africa – but India were not one of them. When South Africa evolved from the abnormal apartheid policies, India honoured Nelson Mandela with the Bharat Ratna in 1990. They were also the first country to host them for a cricket tour, in 1991/92. A 90,000-strong crowd welcomed the South Africans upon their return from exile at the Eden Gardens.

The tour was historical in more ways than one. Until then, the BCCI had never made money out of cricket coverage (they sometimes paid Doordarshan to cover matches). Bacher, now manager of the side, paid them USD 120,000 – the Indian board’s first income from televised cricket, and their first step towards using telecast and streaming of live cricket to emerge as a behemoth in global cricket.

The next season, India became the first team to tour post-apartheid South Africa. Some members of the Indian squad still carried passports bearing the text ‘Valid for travel to all countries except the Republic of South Africa.’ At the 1993 ICC meeting, it was South Africa’s vote that helped the Indian subcontinent clinch the hosting rights for the 1996 World Cup.

A dispute between Doordarshan and TWI led to the first few matches of the 1993 five-nation Hero Cup in India not being telecast. When the South Africans back home were unable to watch their match against Zimbabwe, Bacher threatened to withdraw his vote. Things escalated to the extent that Mandela was making attempts to talk to Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao before a truce was called.

The two nations were undergoing historic changes at this time. As South Africa were putting the curse of the apartheid behind them, the Indian economy was welcoming foreign investments. Throughout the decade, the two nations clashed in several classics that stand the test of time.

The decade culminated in eerily similar fashion for both teams, as Mohammad Azharuddin and Hansie Cronje – who had led them for most of the 1990s – and several of their colleagues were accused of match-fixing.

When India toured South Africa in 2001/02, Mike Denness penalised several Indian cricketers on multiple grounds after the Port Elizabeth Test. The BCCI appealed against the decision, demanding Denness be sacked. They found support from the United Cricket Board of South Africa. The ICC had little option but to yield against both boards, removing Denness from the next Test. However, they stripped the match of Test status, and Virender Sehwag still had to serve a one-match ban.

Later that season, South Africa hosted India for their first Women’s Test in the post-apartheid era, in Paarl. It was the first Test match the Indian women's team won away from home. Within the next three years, both India Men (2003) and India Women (2005) played excellent cricket to reach their respective World Cup finals – in South Africa.

In 2007, India won the first World T20, in South Africa. And in 2009, when the Indian Premier League (IPL) clashed with the Lok Sabha elections, they chose South Africa as the alternate venue. South Africa’s decision to forge an alliance with India during the Denness affair bore fruit.

With the growing popularity of the IPL, players like Jacques Kallis, A.B. de Villiers, Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel, Faf du Plessis, Kagiso Rabada, and Anrich Nortje became household names in India, while touring Indian teams remain popular among locals, especially in Durban.