In the very first edition of Round The Wicket, in the distant past a couple of months ago, we carried this piece from Mani Collins, a keen watcher of Indian cricket (too keen his parents might say) about Yashavi Jaiswal. As we repost this now Jaiswal is 139 not out on his Test debut against the West Indies. Don’t say we didn’t tell you.
The game between Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians, won by Mumbai in a flurry of Tim David sixes, contained a vignette of India’s past and India’s dominant future. The cameras cut frequently to the watching Sachin Tendulkar whose son Arjun is in his first IPL campaign. Out in the middle, Yashasvi Jaiswal, with 124 from 62 balls, was making his claim to be the next entrant to the pantheon of Indian batsmen.
It is early days for Jaiswal but he looks like he might be the real deal. After 15 first class matches he has 1845 runs, with 9 hundreds, at an average a touch over 80. But the thing that makes Jaiswal such an interesting herald of India’s future is not just that he is so good. It’s not where he’s going that is unusual; it’s where he has come from.
Specifically, Jaiswal has come from a poor family in Uttar Pradesh, the son of a small hardware store owner. At ten Jaiswal moved to Mumbai to pursue his cricket and took accommodation in Kalbadev in return for working in a dairy. Cricket was so all-consuming, though, that Jaiswal was soon fired. With no place of his own, he then billeted in a tent with the groundsman at the Maidan. He often went to sleep without eating and sold pani puri as a street vendor to make ends meet. He slept in the tent for three years before he was spotted by Jwala Singh, the boss of a cricket academy, who took power of attorney and became his legal guardian.
The boy who comes from poverty to the Wankhede stadium is not an unprecedented story in modern India but it is still an uncommon one. But here is the prospect of dominance. If this cricketing nation of more than a billion people starts to tap its talent from the Jaiswals of Uttar Pradesh as well as the Tendulkars of Mumbai it will surely be unstoppable.