Kapil Dev Indian Cricketer Born 1959 in Chandigarh

Early life

Kapil Dev Nikhanj was born on 6 January 1959 in Chandigarh, into a Punjabi Hindu family. His father, Ram Lal Nikhanj, was a teak merchant. After the partition of India the family moved to Fazilka before settling in Chandigarh, where Kapil Dev studied at D.A.V. College.

Career

He made his first-class debut for Haryana in November 1975 against Punjab, taking six wickets in a win, and he finished that season with 121 wickets in 30 matches. A strong performance in the final of the Duleep Trophy in 1978-79 brought him national attention, and in October 1978 he made his Test debut against Pakistan in Faisalabad. His first Test century, 126 in Delhi against the West Indies, came off 124 balls. In the 1979-80 home series against Pakistan he became the youngest player to complete the double of 100 Test wickets and 1,000 runs, doing so in 25 matches, and in the Madras Test he took ten wickets in the match and scored 84. He also played county cricket in England, for Northamptonshire from 1981 to 1983 and for Worcestershire in 1984 and 1985, taking 103 of his 835 first-class wickets in that competition.

Kapil Dev became India's captain in the 1982-83 season, replacing Sunil Gavaskar. At the 1983 World Cup, India handed the West Indies their first-ever World Cup defeat in the group stage, though they also lost two group matches. Against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells on 18 June 1983, with India in difficulty, he scored an unbeaten 175 from 138 balls and shared a ninth-wicket stand of 126 with Syed Kirmani that stood as a world record for 27 years. India beat England in the semi-final and defeated the West Indies in the final, with a running catch by Kapil Dev to dismiss Viv Richards that is regarded as a turning point in the match. He finished the tournament with 303 runs, 12 wickets and 7 catches, and India won the World Cup for the first time.

After a difficult period he was reappointed captain in 1986 and led India to a Test series win in England that year. He kept the captaincy for the 1987 World Cup, where he agreed with the umpires to raise Australia's total by two runs after a boundary had been wrongly signalled as a four. India lost that opening match by a single run, a story that Wisden cited as an example of his sportsmanship. He did not captain India again. He played in the 1992 World Cup, his last, and retired in 1994 after passing Richard Hadlee's record for Test wickets. He is the only player to have taken more than 400 wickets and scored more than 5,000 runs in Test cricket, and he was the first to take 200 wickets in one-day internationals.

Away from playing, he was appointed coach of the Indian national team in September 1999 and resigned in September 2000. In 2004 he worked as a bowling consultant before India's tour of Pakistan, and in October 2006 he was named chairman of the National Cricket Academy. In 2007 he joined the Indian Cricket League as chairman of its executive board, and he resigned from the league in July 2012. In 2019 he was appointed the first chancellor of the Sports University of Haryana. On screen, he appeared as himself in the 2005 film Iqbal and has other credits including Will You Marry Me? (2004) and Mazhavillinattam Vare (2012).

Recognition

Kapil Dev received the Arjuna Award in 1979-80 and the Padma Shri in 1982. Wisden named him one of its Cricketers of the Year in 1983, and in 2002 it named him the Indian Cricketer of the Century. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1991. In 2010 he was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame, and in 2013 he received the C. K. Nayudu Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest honour given by the Board of Control for Cricket in India to retired players. He was given the Bharat Gaurav Award in 2019.

Public roles

He served as India's national team coach from September 1999 to September 2000, as chairman of the National Cricket Academy beginning in October 2006, and as chancellor of the Sports University of Haryana from 2019.

Personal life

Kapil Dev took up golf in 1993. He was the only Asian founding member of the Laureus Foundation in 2000, together with the cricketers Ian Botham and Viv Richards. He has written four books, three of them autobiographical, including By God's Decree (1985), Cricket My Style (1987) and Straight from the Heart (2004), and a book on Sikhism, We, The Sikhs, in 2019.