Last month saw the 154th birth anniversary of Ranjitsinhji, the first Indian to play Test cricket for England. Later this month, the 92nd edition of the tournament named after him — the Ranji Trophy — begins. A great deal has been written about Ranjitsinhji (or “Run-Get-Sinhji”, as the British press nicknamed him), some of it unkind, much of it fantastical. In Cambridge, where his cricketing career began, rumour had it that his adoptive father, the Jam Sahib (the title of the ruler of Nawanagar), would have three slaves executed every time his son scored a century. If this were true, wags quipped, the populace of Nawanagar must be “growing beautifully less”. There is, however, one astonishing — and true — story that is little known. Ranjitsinhji’s life may have turned out very differently had an English-speaking, Bengali ascetic named Swami Anandashram not come down to Nawanagar from the Himalayas.

Born to a prosperous Bengali mercantile family in Calcutta, Anandashram made a mark early in life when, after being educated by missionaries, he renounced his inheritance and devoted himself to the “amelioration of India”. Viewing the garb and peripatetic life of a sannyasi as the best means of realising this objective, in the late 1850s, he joined a math in Kashi whose initiates were expected to undertake a 12-year pilgrimage. He then proceeded to spend about six years in the Himalayas before working his way down to Jaipur in the early 1860s.

The choice was intentional. The Maharaja of Jaipur, Ram Singh, was gaining fame by modernising his kingdom, investing in education, medicine, and public works. Following the death of his trusted dewan and tutor, Shivdin Singh, the Maharaja had recently imported Hari Mohan Sen, an accomplished Hindu College graduate, who was tasked with introducing a “semblance” of........

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