Once hailed as one of India’s most naturally gifted cricketers, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan did not enjoy a long international career. The leg-spinner, who once bamboozled greats of the game like Saleem Malik and Imran Khan, could not live up to the expectations he had set as a teenager. But the fault did not lie entirely with his talent or the progress he failed to make despite a promising start. In an interview, Sivaramakrishnan opened up about “other factors” that left a mental scar he struggled to erase, particularly incidents of racism that kept cropping up.
According to an interview, the former India spinner gave to The Indian Express, the first scar came at the tender age of 14. Sivaramakrishnan had joined the Indian camp as a net bowler at Chepauk. Still in uniform, he rushed straight to change in a small room at the stadium when a senior India batsman called out to him. A senior Indian player allegedly asked him to come and clean his shoes.
Stunned by the comment, Sivaramakrishnan recalled: “I just looked at him and said, ‘That’s none of my business, you just do what you need to do.'”
He clarified that the senior player had mistaken him for ground staff. “I didn’t know what racism or colour discrimination was. I was just wondering why this man had to react like this.”
The incident was not an isolated one. In the Tamil Nadu team, he said, prominent players called him “karupa” (dark-skinned). On occasions when he fielded near the boundary in Mumbai, Chandigarh, and Jalandhar, crowds would often chant “Kalia, tera kya hoga”, mocking his skin colour.
Narrating another incident of racism, Sivaramakrishnan revealed how one senior India player compared the colour of his skin to a cake that was brought for his 17th birthday. It was Sunil Gavaskar who had to pacify him as he cut the cake with tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Hey Sunny, you ordered the right colour cake. Such a dark chocolate cake for a dark boy,” a senior player said, according to Sivaramakrishnan.
“I started crying and refused to cut the cake. Sunil Gavaskar had to pacify me and then I cut the cake with tears in my eyes.”