Rolf Johnson

Indian Derby
Rolf’s Ramblings

This is no joke. I put “Indian Derby” in the search engine and it came up with “Ten Best Indian Restaurants in Derby”.

Don’t laugh; we don’t take racing in Indian anywhere nearly serious enough even though we British set it up in Madras in 1777, three years before the first Epsom Derby. By Independence the British in India had built over 120 racecourses. Yet except for special occasions, and the 72nd HPLS Indian Derby in Mumbai on the first Sunday in February at Mahalaxmi (Hindu goddess of fortune) track was special, Indian racing is in the doldrums. The goddess is withholding her gifts.

There are just eight courses left, the majority under threat. When the Brits were here the tracks were on the outskirts of the cities on land nobody much wanted. When, only a few decades past I first visited Mahalaxmi, cotton mill chimneys were the back drop. Now the track is locked in a canyon of skyscrapers, its lease in jeopardy. The green acres of India’s courses, which also contain the training centres, are  the ‘lungs’ of the cities: development, sometimes called progress, is choking them to death.

The Mahalaxmi stands have an air of faded glory though the weighing room stands out in all its colonial day glory. Rather than the former tens of thousands the crowd for this Derby, the crowd had sunk to eleven thousand; not far away along Marine Drive, the Wankhede Stadium’s T20 capacity cricket crowd was overflowing. Miles to the north the current Kumbh Mela, a passionate pilgrimage for Hindu devotees at the confluence of the Ganges and Yumuna rivers, attendance was in countless millions – as many as four crores (forty million) over the festival.

“They attract different kinds of worshippers,” said my sardonic Indian friend. I suppose you could say the same about Ascot, Lords and Glastonbury.

One of the (many) promotional tourist ploys is “Inscrutable India” – nowhere more apt than Indian racing. Your friends, who may soon be enemies, and vice versa, will constantly insist “you don’t know Indian racing” whenever one inevitably puts one’s foot in it. Riddled with as much self-doubt as they suspect of their rivals there is constant strife and the consequence of this introversion confining monster egos with masses of cash, is turning the industry into a not so glorified casino.

And we will go the same way if betting is driven underground – the route taken by Indian punters subject to a 28 per cent tax.

This threnody must conclude somewhere. I, like many ‘would be players’, tend to exhibit what little I think I know about Indian racing, rather than draw on a bank of it – and suffer the consequences from friends and associates who feel it is their prerogative to be doom-laden: so they are, but console themselves that the further Indian racing retreats from the international scene, the stronger, the more profitable the engagement this burgeoning country has with the rest of the economic world.

There were five foreign jockeys engaged for the Derby: Oisin Murphy, Tom Marquand, David Allan, who over the years has ridden more winners than any ‘import’; Christophe Lemaire and Billy Lee. But none is based in India as used to be the case every winter when Richard Hughes was in constant demand to ride. He was in a long tradition. Before the advent of all-weather programme and constant international competition Indian racecards were packed with the names of the greats – Piggott, Dettori, Mick Kinane, Ryan Moore. The first Indian Derby, 1943, was won by a Brit – the Australian Edgar Britt.

Richard recalls when he won the millennium Indian Derby on the favourite Smart Chieftain that it was ten years before another favourite won - another Hughes tour de force with the Triple Crown heroine Jacqueline, a mare good enough to be flown to Coolmore to be mated with Galileo.

“I owe them a lot – Jacqueline’s owners Khushroo Dhunjiboy and Vijay Shirke,” said Richard. “They’ve supported me with horses since I started training. Wish there were more like them. The Derby has that special atmosphere of any of the great races I’ve ridden, anywhere in the world. The crowd is engaged like nowhere else.”

Richard could say that again. ‘Brickbats’ (chappals i.e. slippers) are no longer thrown at the losers but in the heat of the day the intensity of the atmosphere leaves you gasping for air and the crowd, if not exactly baying for blood – shall we say a demanding one.

India’s tracks are relics of British times, heritage sites and I always make a beeline, a few hours train journey inland, for the Royal Western India Turf Club in Pune founded in 1800. English breakfast on the verandah on the home turn, kites wheeling on soft eddies above the racecourse centre field, one drifts into a time warp. Until it was refurbished recently by the Poonawalla family of Covid vaccine fame, framed pictures of English Classic winners from early last century adorned its walls, along with British hunting prints. Some have been preserved. The picture of Rock Sand 1890 Derby winner has been relocated: strong favourite for this year’s £150,000 to the winner Derby was the Two Thousand Guineas hero Santissimo who is by the Highclere Rock Sand syndicate’s Richard Hannon Snr-trained 2010-11 sprinter Gusto, now deceased. 

One change for the better at the RWITC has to be the beds. When Harry Herbert visited a bed his size had to be ‘knocked up’ from scratch: it took about two hours. They’re all king size now.

Statistics and bloodlines are the drivers of Indian racing and it was widely thought that Santissimo and Oisin Murphy would follow up their Two Thousand Guineas success. Oisin cautioned me that he thought Santissimo would win at ten furlongs but after that it was in the lap of the gods – unfortunately on this occasion it wasn’t Laxmi’s lap.  

This year there were five ‘travellers’: Murphy; David Allan, rider of more winners in India than any foreign jockey; Christophe Lemaire (pronounced limelight by the commentator on one occasion), Tom Marquand and Billy Lee from Ireland. Allan had partnered Desert God to win the 2016 Derby edition but India’s champion didn’t acclimatize here and was humbled in 2017 handicaps at Ffos Las and Windsor. Southern Regent, the 2005 Derby winner, won a hurdle at Market Rasen for Alan King and a run of the mill Southwell flat race for John Quinn - again inadequate examples of his true ability.

Gusto, now deceased, exceeded all expectations at stud in the Punjab. Nobody could forecast he would get a Classic winner, let alone a prospective Derby winner. Santissimo though fulfilled Oisin’s fears. He gave a disconsolate verdict: “Didn’t stay”. In fact none of the foreign jockeys featured and the winner went to  Ranquelino and A Sandesh who made hay throughout the Derby weekend. Ranquelino is a four-year-old gelding by a Japanese sire son of Deep Impact out of an American mare. Though the next five home were all big prices, suggesting this wasn’t an exceptional Derby, the time of 1m 28 seconds for the 2400m was not a bad one by any standards. He had won the Bangalore Derby only six days previously and travelled hundreds of miles north by road to overcome a field of six colts, six geldings and four fillies.

Sandesh is one of India’s top three jockeys and it really is time they were given their opportunity in the Shergar Cup – their absence as striking as the virtual exclusion of Indian staff on whom British racing relies, for Stud & Stable Staff Awards.

You could say Indians themselves are parochial – they’d rather win their own classics (each racecourse has its own) than risk exposure to foreign competition. If only Deepak Khaitan the leading Calcutta owner had not died young. His loyalty to Highclere was unfailing, his enthusiasm inexhaustible. His mantle has passed to Vispi Patel for whom Approval is reason enough for the globetrotting businessman making his UK and Highclere calls.

The first two Indian Derbies were won by products of Renala which had been India’s premier stud – until we Brits doodled Partition, lopped off Pakistan with Renala the ‘wrong’ side of the border. In India I have written affirmation that five top races are open to foreign competition – but they have never been taken up.  We may have a lot to answer for in our conduct of Empire but we can be proud of the part we played introducing horseracing – and should foster it again.

So many misconceptions about the sub-continent: once the ‘essentials’ for a trip were, in no particular order: toilet rolls, unquestioning toleration for free ranging holy cows, and cures for the inevitable ‘Delhi belly’. They’ve all been swept away though India remains a place of contradictions – a Lamborghini showroom on Malabar Hill; rickshaws still being manhandled in Calcutta.

But in common with racing universally the Indian scene is under pressure from those, mainly politicians, with the impulse to dictate, ignorant of the freedom of spirit sport upholds. The name of Gandhi (a reformed gambler himself) is invoked to castigate betting: life is a gamble. Long after we quit this immense country in 1947, through the arch of Bombay’s Gateway to India, there were Indians who didn’t know we’d left – and still more who didn’t know we’d ever been! We left the enduring legacy of racing – but then nothing is permanent in Indian philosophy and, as in so many spheres, India is moving on.