By the time Sourav Ganguly fell at 98 on Sunday, he had left a nation slack-jawed. Has there ever been a man with greater grit in cricket history? Has there ever been a cricketer with such self-belief, such tenacity, such indomitable spirit? For it is the quality of his mind and the strength of his will that have powered the most remarkable comeback in recent cricketing history. At 34, Ganguly is not getting any younger. And for the sort of player he is — his batting is based on eyesight and reflex rather than the bedrock of textbook technique, like say Rahul Dravid — 34 is quite an age. Add to that the fact that he is not a natural left-hander (he is right-handed in everything but batting), and wasn’t actually setting the field ablaze during his exile. Has there ever been such a cricketer? Certainly not in India.

With a hostile coach waiting gleefully for one failure so he can send him back to the history books, with a majority of Indians wishing he would just go away and not hang around like an embarrassing cousin, with a team unsure of whether to welcome or shun him, this man has sealed his place again in both the test and one-day teams. Can anyone imagine a World Cup team now without Ganguly? If any comeback deserves that lofty adjective, this one does: this comeback is Sisyphean. The gods are on the backfoot.

But the inescapable question that one has to confront — inescapable because Ganguly’s Bengaliness is as much part of his persona as the lofted six over the bowler’s head — is: Is this man really a Bengali?

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