The Little Master(s)

GH on Sunil Gavaskar and Gundappa Viswanath

Sunil Gavaskar, now seventy-five, is our guest this summer on Channel Seven; his great counterpart, Gundappa Viswanath, is well-remembered for a match-winning hundred in Melbourne in 1981. This short appreciation comes from my new book Indian Summers.

For more than a decade, Sunil Gavaskar and Gundappa Viswanath were Indian batsmanship front and back - captains, professionals, brothers in arms, brothers-in-law, small men with great reputations defying an age growing bigger, taller and faster. They were the nearest India has come to an axis like Hutton and Compton, great contemporaries of contrasting methods, except that they were never in their own eyes rivals - which did not prevent admirers calibrating their allegiances with a certain fineness.