Celebrating fifty years of Wankhede Stadium

By Vidyadhar Date*

Mumbai: Celebrating fifty years of Wankhede Stadium on January 23, 2025, brings back different memories apart from cricket for me. I had seen Sheshrao Wankhede handle legislative assembly proceedings as a Speaker in an amicable way. I had known his son-in-law Bal Mahajani well before his marriage with Ramola. In Nagpur we knew him by his nickname Bal, he was a badminton champion of Vidarbha and used to make frequent visits from Amravati to Nagpur for matches.

Mr Wankhede and Chief Minister Vasantrao Naik were badminton players, playing mixed doubles with wives as partners. They were more urbane in their dress, politicians from Western Maharashtra wore mostly dhotis with exceptions like Sharad Pawar.

Mr Wankhede chose Shashi Prabhu, then in his twenties, as an architect because of the recommendation of Professor Madhukar Vinayak Chandgadkar, a senior in the cricket association, Prabhu had been his student at Podar College.

Prabhu recalls that the contractor firm Bilimoria, chosen for the construction, helped raise funds through the Central Bank of India, then dominated by Parsis.

That reminds me of Bachi Karkaria’s first sentence in an article on Parsis in the Illustrated Weekly of India, there are two kinds of Parsis, those who work in the Central Bank and those who don’t. That was in the 1970s.

A fire had broken out in a stand in the new Wankhede stadium with wooden benches during the first test match match there against the West Indies causing a lot of damage. The stand was repaired overnight with Bilimoria providing a thousand workers. This took West Indies captain Clive Lloyd by surprise, he had insisted on playing the next day, turning down a request to take a rest day before its schedule.

Trouble had broken out after the legendary cricket lover Babu Tangewala of the then Poona had rushed to the wicket after Lloyd had scored a century. The police rushed to catch him and that led to a lot of confusion. Babu was a horse carriage driver in the days when tongas were still in use in Poona. The city had quite a few unusual characters. One professor used to do a running commentary on matches there sitting on a tree.

Ramola Mahajani, who had a good career in the Taj Mahal Hotel, recalls that her father built the stadium a few metres from Brabourne because of differences with Vijay Merchant. There were other reasons, we know, that is another story… But then Wankhede named a stand in the new stadium after Merchant.

Politics was different in those days and Wankhede was even more different!

*Senior journalist