Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji is name of the first cricketer from India. On September 10, 1872, Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, The father of Indian cricket was born. Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji also known as MAHARAJ JAM SAHEB, was the ruler of the Indian princely state of Navanagar (now Jamnagar in Gujrat). Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji was completely unique, and there is no one in the history and development of batsmanship who can compete with him.         

 Ranji or Ranjitsinhji was his nickname, but his full name was Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji. His name apparently means ‘the father of Indian cricket who conquers in battle’. His style was a fantastic example of how a man can express personal genius in a game, not just personal genius, but the genius of a race as a whole.

For Ranjitsinhji’s cricket was of his own country; when he batted, a strange light, a light from the East, was seen for the first time on English fields. It was breathtaking magic, unlike anything else that had happened in cricket before Ranji came to us.

W.G. Grace‘s prediction that there would be no batsman like Ranji for a hundred years is obviously untestable; however, even if there has been one, one could regard it as contingent on Ranji’s existence. Furthermore, Ranjitsinhji was not only the first Indian cricketer known to the general public, but also the “first Indian of any kind to become globally known and famous,” as The father of Indian cricket.

Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, the second, was perhaps the most outstanding cricketer ever born, a self styled prince from Jamnagar with uncanny eyes and wrists, who first opened the leg side as a scoring area and first tackled the pace of the ball in the power of the stroke.

Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, Maharaj Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, was a phenomenal cricketer, one of only a few dozen freak performers in cricket history. At the start of his career at Cambridge, he scored centuries for three different teams on the same day. When he was 39 years old and hadn’t batted in four years, he finished sixth in the English county averages and topped the Sussex batting with a 50.36 average, the next best average being 32 from Joe Vine. That’s how incredibly gifted he was. More importantly, he contributed something that cannot be quantified statistically.