India's Greatest Test and ODI Opening Batters

Opening the batting for India has meant two almost unrelated jobs at different points in the same century. For fifty years it meant surviving: seeing off Trueman or Lillee or Roberts on a pitch prepared for spin, protecting a middle order that could not be exposed early, and treating a first-hour maiden over as a small victory. Since roughly 2001 it has meant something close to the opposite — taking the new ball on and putting the opposition behind the game inside twenty overs.

Very few countries have swung that far. India did it because it produced, at the top of the order, two batters of completely opposite temperament who were each the best in the world at what they did: Sunil Gavaskar and Virender Sehwag.

This page follows the openers, the pairings and the specific innings that mark the shift, in Tests and in the fifty-over game, and it ends with the women's side, where the opening slot has become the strongest position in Indian cricket.

Merchant and Mushtaq Ali, Old Trafford 1936

The first Indian opening partnership to register outside the subcontinent came in the second Test of the 1936 tour of England. Vijay Merchant made 114 and Syed Mushtaq Ali made 112, and the pair put on 203 for the first wicket, which was enough to save a match India were losing.

Merchant is the more remarkable career. His first-class batting average of 71.64 is second in the history of the game only to Don Bradman's, and he was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year for 1937 on the strength of that tour. He played only ten Tests, because the war and the scarcity of fixtures for Indian sides took most of his prime. What he left instead was a body of runs in the Bombay Pentangular and the early Ranji Trophy that nobody in the country has approached since.

Mushtaq Ali was the counterweight: an attacking right-hander from Indore who hit the ball hard through the off side and drew crowds in a period when Indian cricket had few of them. The domestic Twenty20 competition carries his name.

Gavaskar: 774 runs, then seventeen years

Sunil Gavaskar's Test career began in the Caribbean in March 1971, and the debut series remains the standard nobody has reached. He made 774 runs in four Tests at 154.80, with four centuries and three fifties, in a series India won 1-0 — their first Test win and first series win against the West Indies, home or away. It broke George Headley's record for a debut series and has stood for more than half a century.

The rest followed from the same method. Gavaskar batted with his weight forward, played the moving ball as late as anyone has, and refused the hook shot for most of his career against attacks built entirely around bouncers. Thirteen of his 34 Test centuries came against the West Indies, which is the number that answers most arguments about who he was facing. He was the first batter to 10,000 Test runs.

He was also, by his own account and everyone else's, a batter who valued not getting out above almost everything. That produced a 36 not out in sixty overs against England in the 1975 World Cup, an innings still raised whenever the question of temperament comes up, and the reason it is raised is that it was so far out of line with everything else he did.

The partner problem

For most of Gavaskar's career India could not find anyone to bat with him for long.

Chetan Chauhan came closest. The pair batted together 59 times in Tests and put on 3,010 runs at better than 53, including ten century stands and a 213 at The Oval in 1979. Chauhan himself made 2,084 Test runs in 40 Tests without ever making a century; his highest score was 97. He is one of the largest Test aggregates in the history of the game without a hundred, and the reason he kept his place was that Gavaskar wanted him there.

Krishnamachari Srikkanth then took the position in the mid-1980s with an entirely different attitude — squared-up, chest-on, hooking and slashing at anything short — and he is the direct ancestor of what came later. His 38 from 57 balls was the top score in India's 183 in the 1983 World Cup final at Lord's, a total India defended by 43 runs, and the shot people still describe from that innings is a pull off Andy Roberts played off one knee.

Navjot Singh Sidhu made his name against spin, hitting slow bowlers over the top in one-day cricket in an era when that was still considered eccentric rather than a plan. Ravi Shastri opened in both formats at various points, having started his career as a left-arm spinner batting at eleven.

None of them solved it. India went into the 1990s with Gavaskar retired and no settled opening pair, and for most of that decade Sachin Tendulkar's move up the order in one-day cricket was doing the work that a specialist opener could not. In Tests the position turned over constantly: Manoj Prabhakar, Vikram Rathour, Nayan Mongia in an emergency, Sadagoppan Ramesh, Devang Gandhi, Shiv Sunder Das. Some of them made runs. None of them held it for three years.

Sehwag: the same batting, one position higher

Virender Sehwag was a middle-order batter who was moved up to open, and the significant thing is that nothing else about him changed. He kept playing the same shots to the same lengths, and the results looked absurd on a scorecard.

In March 2004 at Multan he made 309, India's first Test triple century, off 375 balls with 39 fours and six sixes. Four years later at Chennai he made 319 against South Africa off 304 balls, reaching 300 in 278 balls — the fastest triple hundred anyone has made in Test cricket. In 2009 at the Brabourne Stadium he was caught for 293 against Sri Lanka, seven short of a third.

The Multan innings came in India's first Test series in Pakistan for fourteen years, in a first-innings total of 675, and its context is set out in the guide to the India-Pakistan rivalry. Sehwag also made a one-day double century, and among Test openers with that weight of runs his scoring rate has very few comparisons in any era. The relationship between scoring rate and volume is unpacked in the explainer on batting average against strike rate.

What made him difficult to bowl at was that he had no interest in the conventional distinction between a ball to leave and a ball to hit. He judged length and hit accordingly, from the first over, and his footwork barely moved. Bowlers who set out to dry him up found that the plan required six consecutive good balls rather than four, and that any error was gone through cover or over mid-off. Coaches disliked the method as a template for anybody else, which is the standard verdict on a genuine original.

His limitation was the same as his strength. When the ball moved late, as it does in England, the same shot brought the same edge, and his overseas Test record is a good deal thinner than his home one. He remains the only Indian with two Test triple centuries, and the only Indian to have come within a boundary of three.

Gambhir's two finals

Gautam Gambhir opened alongside Sehwag through India's best Test period, and the innings that fix his reputation are both in world finals.

At Johannesburg in 2007 he made 75 off 54 balls in the first men's World Twenty20 final, which India won by five runs. At the Wankhede in 2011 he made 97 from 122 balls in the World Cup final after India had lost both openers cheaply. He was India's top scorer in both matches, which is a distinction no other Indian batter holds.

Rohit Sharma's second career

Rohit Sharma spent six years as a middle-order one-day batter of obvious talent and inconsistent output, and then in late 2013 was moved up to open. What followed reset the format's record book.

• 209 against Australia at Bengaluru in November 2013.
• 264 against Sri Lanka at Eden Gardens in November 2014, off 173 balls with 33 fours and nine sixes — still the highest individual score in one-day international history.
• 208 against Sri Lanka at Mohali in December 2017, making him the only man with three ODI double centuries.

At the 2019 World Cup he made five centuries in nine matches, more than anyone had made in a single edition, finishing as the tournament's leading run-scorer with 648. He later opened in Tests as well, with a very different method at home from the one he used abroad.

Dhawan, Vijay, Rahul and the overseas question

The decade after Sehwag and Gambhir produced openers who were excellent in one set of conditions and exposed in another.

Shikhar Dhawan announced himself at Mohali in March 2013 with 187 against Australia, reaching his hundred in 85 balls — the fastest century by anyone on Test debut, and the highest score by an Indian on debut. He put on 289 for the first wicket with Murali Vijay. Dhawan then became a very good one-day opener and an unreliable Test one.

Vijay was the reverse: a technically orthodox opener who did his best work abroad. KL Rahul has made Test centuries in Australia, England and the West Indies, and has spent much of his career being moved between opening, the middle order and the wicketkeeper's slot — a versatility that has cost him a settled position more than once.

What all three had in common was the difficulty of the same job in two places. On the surfaces described in the guide to Indian pitch types and conditions, an Indian opener faces a hard ball for a short period and then spin; in England or New Zealand the new ball keeps moving for an hour and a half.

Jaiswal and Gill

Yashasvi Jaiswal had the most productive series by an Indian opener since Gavaskar's debut, making 712 runs across five Tests against England in early 2024, with 209 at Visakhapatnam and 214 not out at Rajkot. He hit 26 sixes in the series, the most anyone has hit in a Test series, and he reached 1,000 Test runs in nine matches, faster than any Indian before him.

Shubman Gill has opened, batted three and captained, and his Test career has run alongside Jaiswal's rather than in competition with it. The pair represent a change in what India now asks of the position: both were franchise batters before they were Test batters, both came through age-group cricket with a scoring rate already built in, and neither had to spend three years proving they could survive before being trusted to score.

That is a real shift in selection philosophy, and it is not obviously permanent. The Indian order has been rebuilt around an attacking opener twice — after Gavaskar and again after Sehwag — and both times the replacement had to be found in a hurry when the incumbent's method stopped working overseas. The wider arc of India's Test batting is covered in the guide to India's Test cricket history, and the shortest format's version of the opening problem is in the guide to India's T20 international history.

The strongest opening position in Indian cricket

The women's side has the country's most settled top order. Smriti Mandhana has made more one-day international centuries than any other Indian woman, passing a dozen and going past Mithali Raj's total by a distance, and she reached 5,000 ODI runs faster than any woman has. In the 2025 Women's World Cup she and Pratika Rawal put on 212 for the first wicket against New Zealand, a record India opening stand in the tournament.

Mandhana's case is worth putting alongside the men's. She is a left-hander who scores at a rate that would have been thought reckless in the women's game twenty years ago, and she does it while averaging at the top of the ICC rankings. That change, and what preceded it, is set out in the guide to the India women's team history.

Career records for the players named on this page are in the player index; the batters who followed them in are covered in the guide to India's greatest middle-order batters; and the rest of the Indian game sits on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Series and match figures here are drawn from full scorecards and from the ICC's tournament records for the 2007 World Twenty20, the 2011 and 2019 World Cups and the 2025 Women's World Cup. Career aggregates come from published international career records checked against BCCI and ICC player material, and the 1936 Old Trafford details from the contemporary Wisden report of that tour. Vijay Merchant's first-class average is the figure carried in standard first-class records. Where a current player's totals are still moving — Mandhana's century count in particular — they are described in general terms rather than fixed. This page is descriptive rather than computed: the selection and ordering are editorial, and no ranking here comes from a model.