Boy Wondering

GH on the age of Sooryavanshi

National leader and Narendra Modi

Like everyone with a cricket bone in their body, I am dazzled by the talent and poise of Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who did not just dominate the recent Indian Premier League but rather defined it. Without him to generate new headlines, we may have had to fall back on too many old - how great Virat, how old Dhoni, how rich everyone etc. Sooryavanshi is a saturnalia, turning the T20 universe upside down. The best minds in cricket’s world have been turned to stopping him, and he has breezed past them all. In a way ever less common in the age of highlights and clips, his innings have recalled the days of ‘event viewing’: I wonder how many Australians, like me, have been staying up simply to watch him, then retiring to bed when he gets out.

Yet the question of Sooryavanshi’s age, officially fifteen, will not go away. A 2023 interview surfaced featuring the following exchange (translated from Hindi).

That would make him eighteen months older than is claimed. Rumours continue to circulate of further inconsistencies: at the weekend, Et Al learned that, in response to an official question last year concerning his age, Sooryavanshi said that he was nineteen. The source, whom I judge reliable, is not mine to reveal, but would have no reason to lie. The result is that, right now, I am unsure quite what to think. But I also sense that others are choosing not to think, or at least to hedge: a recent profile in The Times, for example, preferred such locutions as ‘regardless of controversy over IPL star’s true age’ and ‘it is possible, in fact, that Sooryavanshi’s accepted birthdate of March 27, 2011 is wrong.’ This is confusing: is it a possibility, or a fact?

Like actresses’, cricketers’ ages can be slippery. Historians regularly disinter birth dates at odds with Wisden records: nobody has ever been able to find Victor Trumper’s birth certificate, and his tombstone may, or may not, have his age wrong.

I know of at least one Australian Test player who snipped years off his age after World War II in order not to look too old afterwards, and suspect there were more. Cricketers are habitually marked harder as they age. It would be tempting to stave that process off.

In Sooryavanshi’s case, of course, we should also allow for the possibility of misunderstanding. It can be understood that the certification of births in India is a tricky business - hardly surprising when about 65,000 babies are born every day. Registration can be delayed. Paperwork readily goes missing, must be replaced, is sometimes forged. But the incentive for ambitious Indian cricketing parents to lie about the age of their offspring is not far to seek: successful falsification of personal particulars might allow those children to play against younger kids, and thus to excel in the world’s most Darwinian cricket habitat. Rahul Dravid drew attention to the issue as far back as a Pataudi Lecture more than ten years ago: