The following piece will appear in the August issue of Wisden Asia Cricket.

I remember Kapil Dev's debut in Pakistan. The memory has an antique air about it because it unspools in black-and-white. It was 1978, a time when Doordarshan made television programmes, Weston made television sets, and only real life happened in colour. But we weren't complaining as we watched young Kapil bound in to bowl: for a generation that had grown up listening to the BBC's Test Match Special on short wave frequencies that mooed and whistled, watching a Test match telecast live from another country (specially Pakistan) was a modern miracle.

We hadn't played a Test against Pakistan since 1961, and when we played them at hockey, we generally lost. The only time we had beaten them comprehensively was at Dacca, in the 1971 war. That violent contest ensured that seven years later, the '78 series was more than a cricketing contest.

Pakistan had a very, very powerful team: Mushtaq Mohammad was captain, and backing him up was a glittering array of Packer's pirates: Zaheer Abbas, Javed Miandad, Asif Iqbal, Intikhab Alam, Wasim Bari, Imran Khan, Sarfraz Nawaz… If we hoped to do well, it was because we had Sunil Gavaskar (like Krishna, worth whole armies) and the great spinners: Bedi, Prasanna and Chandrasekhar who had had a very good series just before the Pakistan tour.

Well, we got hammered. Zaheer and Miandad sent the spin trio into early retirement and Gavaskar played a lone hand against Pakistan's rampaging pace attack. We lost that three-match series 0-2; and that scoreline flatters us. We were killed.

Kapil Dev was the silver lining. This loose-limbed, gawky Jat bowled fast and batted furiously. He didn't get many wickets and he didn't score a ton of runs, but he hit Sadiq Mohammad on the helmet with a bouncer before Sadiq had time to react, and he faced Pakistan's fast men with the sort of uninhibited aggression that no Indian of my generation had seen before. Think of Yuvraj Singh pumped up to the power of 10 and you have some idea of what that debut meant to Indian cricket, to us.

If Kapil hadn't happened along we'd have had to invent him. For a start, he was big. In 2002, when everyone in the team bar Tendulkar and Shiv Sundar Das hovers around the six-foot mark, that sounds unremarkable, but in the seventies, when Indian cricketers came in three physical types, puny, portly and passable, size mattered. The best batsmen, Gundappa Viswanath and Gavaskar, were five-and-a-half feet in their socks. Our "fast" bowlers, Eknath Solkar, Abid Ali and Madan Lal had twelve-valve hearts in Standard Herald bodies. Bedi and Prasanna, great bowlers both, were pear-shaped for most of their playing lives. And such tall ones as there were, men like Mohinder Amarnath and Dilip Vengsarkar, were battlers without the physical presence and simple self-assurance that this big rookie had been born with.

I can remember a famous picture of Kapil hooking Ian Botham during the 1982 tour of England. The camera had caught him at the end of his one-legged pivot, and something about the pose suggested that he had really creamed that ball. You could see Botham at the top of the frame, looking up at the end of his follow through – their big boy against ours. We lost that series comprehensively and Botham's figures were better than Kapil's but he was our best bowler and an 80 he struck was the most violent innings I'd ever seen in Test cricket. During that series he was asked in a television interview on the BBC about the comparisons that were being made with Botham. He thought for a second and said in the Rapidex drawl that he was to make famous in the course of an amazing career: "Ah play mah way". He certainly did.

He was a gust of fresh, provincial air that blew away the stifling prudence of middle-class cricket. And this isn't sentimental hindsight: I was a student in England when India toured in 1982 and the magic about watching Kapil play was the dizzy thought that anything was possible. After years of trench warfare dominated by defensive foot soldiers, India had found a cavalryman eager to lead the charge. A lot of the time the team were mown down, but there were some famous victories, none finer than the World Cup in 1983. The winning of the World Cup in England in 1983 was Kapil's finest hour, not only because we won but because the manner of the victory showcased Kapil's particular talents. First, there was the berserker 175 not out against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells where he singlehandedly won the match for India. Then there was that marvellous catch, running backwards to dismiss Viv Richards in the final, but most of all, it was his achievement in making a bunch of military-medium losers (Madan Lal, Roger Binny, Mohinder Amarnath, Balwinder Singh Sandhu) believe they made up a bowling attack that could win cricket's greatest prize. Only an inspirational cricketer like Kapil could have helped this middling bunch play so far above their abilities.

But it is in the nature of inspiration that it comes and goes, and not even Kapil could turn it on at will. He wasn't a particularly good captain: he captained India in 34 Tests, of which he won four and lost seven. By way of comparison, Gavaskar captained India in 47, won nine and lost eight. But there was one last achievement as captain after the World Cup. Restored to the captaincy three years later, Kapil led India to a comprehensive series victory against the old enemy, England.

That's the reason Kapil has a fair claim to be India's cricketer of the century: not because he is representative of the traditional strengths of Indian cricket, but precisely because he is not. On the strength of his enormous talent and his willingness to lead by example, he helped the Indian team crawl out of its bunker and go over the top. There had been aggressive and dominant Indian cricketers before him: CK Nayudu, of course, is the great example. But he, I'm afraid, despite his talent and charisma, falls victim to the Barry Richards Syndrome: he just didn't play enough Test cricket to be a serious contender. Then there were men like Mushtaq Ali, Lala Amarnath, Salim Durani, Farokh Engineer, cavaliers all, who lightened the lives of careworn Indian fans, but none of them had the discipline to sustain their talent and daredevilry over a long career.

Kapil, it bears repeating, took 434 wickets at under 30 runs per wicket, scored more than 5000 runs (eight centuries and 27 fifties among them) at an average of over 30 runs per innings, played more Test matches (131) than any other Indian cricketer, and over a sixteen-year career never missed a Test because of injury. To be a top-class outswing bowler for that long, especially when you're not fearsomely fast requires unwavering discipline and commitment. When you think of the punishment his body took as a fast bowling allrounder who played more than half his cricket on dead Indian wickets, the awesomeness of his achievement becomes apparent. Mushtaq Ali and the rest were comets to Kapil's constant star.

But how does Kapil stack up against other great allrounders? To weigh the historical achievement of an Indian cricketer, we should compare him not only to his compatriots but also his contemporaries and rivals from other Test-playing countries. Someone championing Gavaskar's cause as India's greatest cricketer can legitimately argue that he was the greatest opening batsman of his time. The only serious contender is Gordon Greenidge. (There are those like Christopher Martin-Jenkins who will argue Barry Richards's cause, but it's time we stopped strumming cricket's might-have-beens. By this logic, Lawrence Rowe was arguably the greatest top-order batsman who never was: the man had a triple-century and a double-century to his name in Test matches before eye trouble ended his career. We don't know how good Barry Richards might have been over a long Test career because he didn't have a long Test career. Period. Had Graeme Hick not been cruelly exposed in the Test arena, white nostalgists would now be telling us that, but for cruel fate, he would have been the equal of Viv Richards!)

But Kapil played in the same era as Imran Khan and Ian Botham (I shan't include Richard Hadlee, who was arguably the greatest bowler of the four but not good enough as a batsman to qualify as an allrounder of their class) and a powerful case can be made that they were Kapil's betters. Do we really want our champion of the century to have been the third-best player of his kind among his contemporaries? More parochially, if Imran Khan is Pakistan's greatest-ever player (which he is) and Kapil is ours, do we want Their greatest to be self-evidently greater than Our greatest? Unless we can make a case to the contrary, maybe we should choose Gavaskar over Kapil Dev.

So is there a case to be made? I think there is. There's really nothing to choose between Kapil and Botham as bowlers. As a batsman, Botham has a definite edge and the record to prove it. Botham was a fine fieldsman close to the wicket, Kapil was brilliant in the outfield. As a captain, Kapil has a World Cup to show for his efforts, while Botham has nothing comparable.

The comparison with Imran is harder to sustain. Imran was the scarier fast bowler, though Kapil has the larger tally of wickets. Imran was also one of the pioneers of the dark art of reverse swing. He was incomparably better as a captain. Kapil was probably the better fielder and much the more talented batsman, though Imran husbanded his batting talent better than the prodigal Indian. My own feeling is that Imran is ahead of Kapil by a nose but it's not a clear-cut thing. And it can be said in Kapil's defence that, unlike Imran, he would never have been narcissistic enough to forget his team-mates in victory.

Only one comparison remains. How does Kapil measure up against Tendulkar and Gavaskar? You can make the list of contenders as long as you like, but the contest for the greatest Indian cricketer of the 20th century is basically a three-horse race. If stand-alone talent was the only criterion, Tendulkar would probably get most people's votes, but it isn't. Tendulkar has made no difference to India's fortunes abroad, and that's a terrible indictment, while Kapil and Gavaskar have won us matches more than once in epic offshore struggles. So it has to be between the two of them. I'm an old partisan of Gavaskar, but Kapil gave us all so much pleasure that I can't see even Gavaskar's fans minding too much if the jury awarded the palm to Kapil.

Even today, when India does badly I ward off depression by thinking of a particular photo of his. It's an early picture and the photographer has caught the young Kapil gathering himself in his pre-delivery leap, exaggeratedly side-on, head flung back, eyes gleaming with passion and purpose. Kapil deserves to be our cricketer of the last century because he was a talisman: once upon a time, he stood for both adventure and hope.

Mukul Kesavan is a novelist and essayist based in Delhi. His last book, Secular Common Sense was published by Penguin in 2001.

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