Anandji Dossa - A treasure house of knowledge

It was in the late 1990s that I had first met the legendary Raj Singh Dungarpur at the CCI. As a young researcher wanting to dig into the archives of Indian cricket, Raj Singh was someone I just had to meet. And of the few things that Rajbhai told me in the course of the very first meeting was that I should meet Anandji Dossa, a statistician based in Mumbai whose work goes far beyond the realm of numbers. Dossa, still fairly active then, had very kindly given me time and it was a sheer delight to look at the meticulously handwritten treasures he had compiled over the years, documents and scrapbooks that comprise invaluable source material in trying to reconstruct India's cricket history.

It is pertinent to say that without his contribution there would have been a serious void in the study of Indian cricket. His collection, part of which is housed in the Cricket Club of India in the Anandji Dossa library and part of which has been sold off by Theo Braganza included almost all the early gems of Indian cricket. Books like Parsi Cricket by M E Pavri published in 1901, Stray Thoughts on Indian Cricket by J M Framjee Patel published in 1905 or the first encyclopaedia of Indian cricket compiled by WD Begg in 1929 were all a part of Dossa's collection.

More importantly, Dossa also had in his library most of the annuals published by P N Polishwala in the 1920s and 1930s. These annuals, which include scorecards, brief match reports, players' details and the like, are treasures to understand the contemporary cricket scene. Perhaps inspired by Polishwala, Dossa too did something similar regarding the Indian tours to England in the 1930s and 1940s. Also, he had managed to compile or acquire the minutes of the meetings of the Bombay Pentangular Committee from the 1940s, meetings that shaped the course of cricket in independent India.

Dossa's book on India-Pakistan cricket ties is interesting but of far greater relevance is his meticulous compilation of contemporary newspaper cuttings documenting the history of the game. Several of these scrapbooks, which I was given access to in the course of my research, helped in understanding the nuances of cricket politics in the 1950s and 1960s. In the absence of material in the more well known traditional libraries, it was the likes of Anandji Dossa who can be called the early pioneers of the study of sport in India. The task, needless to say, was immensely difficult making his contribution that much more significant.

Dossa, now living in New York with his daughters, was always there to hand hold a young researcher. As I look back to the many, some of them rather inane, questions that I asked of him I realise how much patience it had taken on his part to answer them all with a smile. His help and support in those formative years can never be forgotten.

Even today sports scholarship in India is a relative novelty. The number of students seriously studying sport is very small in number and Indian universities continue to neglect sports scholarship despite its growing global relevance. Despite the fact that Sachin Tendulkar and his ilk have best captured the imagination of the modern Indian, serious studies on Indian cricket continue to be rare and far between. It is against this backdrop that we need to situate and understand Anandji Dossa. That's when we realise what he has done and how much he has contributed to documenting the history of India's singular passion.