When Sourav Ganguly and his men landed in Trinidad, they would have done well to head for the beach and hunt for footprints in the sand, those of the indelible kind. If they looked hard enough, they would have found traces left behind by Indian cricket's true pioneers, Ajit Wadekar's crew of 1971. That summer was the most important Indian cricket has ever known. First up was a tour of the Caribbean, where an upset victory at Port-of-Spain was enough to get the better of a West Indies team led by Sir Garfield Sobers. The hosts were no longer the world-beaters that they had been in the sixties, when Sobers, Rohan Kanhai and Wesley Hall were an irresistible force that brushed aside most objects. The bowling attack was particularly uninspiring and 21-year-old Sunil Gavaskar pounded them to the tune of 774 runs

. Agreed, it was a West Indian team in one of its less mighty guises, but the triumph still meant the world to an Indian side that had seldom come within sniffing distance of winning a Test match abroad. There was a 3-1 victory over New Zealand in 1967-68, but Australia's impoverished neighbours had long been recognised as the basement dwellers of the world game.

Port-of-Spain was to be that Indian team's springboard to greatness. A few months later, they went to England and bested an English side universally recognised as the best in the game. Bhagwat Chandrasekhar's legspin – cricket's equivalent of the Indian rope trick or levitation – decimated England at the Oval and suddenly, Indian heads were taking in the unaccustomed view at the top of the tree – some no doubt suffering from a bit of giddiness.

The achievements of that summer were no fluke either. In Gavaskar, they had unearthed an opening batsmen destined to be the best the sport had seen since the halcyon days of Jack Hobbs and Len Hutton. The spin quartet, though they rarely all played together, were coming into their prime, asking questions that even batsmen with a Euclidian background had difficulty answering. For another three seasons, they would sweep all before them, before coming a cropper in the cold English summer of 1974.

Three decades on, Indian cricket needed another Trinidadian tonic. By some quirk of fate, they faced another West Indian team in the doldrums. And in Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman, they had three high-class batsmen with the ability to replicate Gavaskar's prodigious run-scoring feats of two generations ago. But the similarities ended there. Back then, Erapalli Prasanna and Srinivas Venkataraghavan had spun India to victory. Their off spinning successor, Harbhajan Singh, wasn't up to a similar task, not even close. Instead, it was left to the three pace-bowling musketeers – Javagal Srinath, Ashish Nehra and Zaheer Khan – to waylay West Indies's best-laid plans of chasing 313.

It's appropriate in a way that spin played little part in the 37-run triumph. Cricket has moved on, and some would say that our obsession with spin, and playing two spinners, has held India back, especially on tours. The days of Abid Ali and Eknath Solkar sharing the new ball – rather, taking off the shine as quickly as possible before the spinners came on – are long gone, and good riddance. India won in Trinidad because their quick bowlers were superior to anything that the West Indies had to offer, Cameron Cuffy excepted.

It's too early to say whether Ganguly's team will put together the sort of winning streak that Wadekar's did in the early 70s. But at the Queen's Park Oval – which could be considered Indian cricket's spiritual home away from home – they took a big stride in the right direction. And suddenly, the word "tour" doesn't make you want to duck under the bedclothes and hide till the demons leave at first light. That's a good place to start.

Dileep Premachandran is assistant editor of Wisden.com India.

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