India v England Rivalry: 1932 to the Present

Every other rivalry India has was chosen. This one was inherited. England were the opposition in India's first Test match, at Lord's in June 1932, because England were the only side who could confer Test status by playing you, and for the next twenty years the fixture was less a contest than an examination administered by the examiner.

What makes it interesting now is that the power has moved so completely. In 1932 India were a colonial invitee with one recognised world-class player and no first-class championship of their own. In 2025 the two sides played a five-Test series that finished level and produced the highest run aggregate by an Indian captain in a series since Don Bradman, and the argument beforehand was about which board had the leverage to schedule it.

The relationship has stayed close throughout, which is part of why the fixture is played over five Tests when almost nothing outside the Ashes is. It also means the rivalry has more distinct phases than India's contests with Australia or Pakistan, and the phases are worth taking one at a time.

The examination, 1932 to 1951

India's first Test was at Lord's, captained by C K Nayudu, and England won it. That was the pattern for two decades: tours were infrequent, England sent varying strengths of side, and India lost or drew.

The interesting figure of the period is Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi, who played Test cricket for England — scoring a century on debut in the Ashes — and later captained India. That a single player could represent both countries says most of what needs saying about the constitutional position of Indian cricket before independence. His name would be attached to the trophy seventy-five years later.

India's first Test victory over anybody came against England, in February 1952 at Madras, by an innings and eight runs, with Vijay Hazare captaining. It came two decades into India's Test existence. A decade later again, back-to-back home wins at Calcutta and Madras in the 1961-62 season gave India their first series victory over England. Both breakthroughs came at home, on turning pitches, and both were dismissed in England as products of conditions — a line of argument that has never entirely gone away and that the guide to India's spin bowling tradition puts in its proper context.

The Oval, 1971

The single most important match in the rivalry was the third Test of the 1971 tour, and it was won from behind.

England made 355 and led by 71 on first innings. Then Bhagwath Chandrasekhar, bowling quick leg-breaks with an arm withered by childhood polio, took six for 38 and England were dismissed for 101. India needed 173 and got there with four wickets in hand, Ajit Wadekar's side having secured the country's first series win in England.

The context makes it larger. India had already won a series in the West Indies earlier the same year. Two away series wins in one calendar year, by a side that had won nothing away from home for forty years, changed what Indian cricket believed was available to it. The Oval crowd that day included Indian supporters in numbers nobody had seen at an England home Test before, and the tour has been remembered ever since as the beginning of Indian cricket's self-confidence rather than merely a good summer.

Kapil's summer, and Gooch's

The next away breakthrough took fifteen years. In 1986 India won at Lord's — fifty-four years after first playing there — and then by 279 runs at Headingley, taking the series 2-0 with the Birmingham Test drawn.

Dilip Vengsarkar made 126 at Lord's, carrying India to 341 and a first-innings lead of 47, and followed it with a disciplined 61 at Headingley on a surface that gave the bowlers plenty. For Kapil Dev the result was personal: he had captained India in twenty Tests without a win before that week.

Four years later at the same ground the rivalry produced its most lopsided single innings. Graham Gooch made 333 and England declared on 653 for four. India replied with a hundred from Ravi Shastri and 121 from Mohammad Azharuddin, and still faced the follow-on with one wicket left until Kapil Dev hit four consecutive sixes off Eddie Hemmings to avoid it by a single run. India were then set 472 and made 224. It remains one of the very few Tests in which a side has been comprehensively beaten and produced two of the match's most-replayed passages of play.

2007: winning without a coach

India's next series win in England came in 2007, under Rahul Dravid, with the side effectively between coaching regimes.

The decisive Test was at Trent Bridge. Dravid bowled first, England were out for 198, and India built 481 with contributions spread the length of the order — Dinesh Karthik, Wasim Jaffer, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and V V S Laxman all past fifty. Zaheer Khan then took five in the second innings and India chased with seven wickets standing. The first and third Tests were drawn and the series finished 1-0.

The tour is remembered as much for a piece of needle: jelly beans appearing on the pitch in front of Zaheer as he batted, which he took as deliberate provocation and answered with the ball. Anil Kumble made the only Test century of his career later in the same series. It was India's first series win in England for twenty-one years.

England in India: 1984-85 and 2012-13

The traffic has run both ways, and England's two modern series wins in India were both built on spin, which is the part that stung.

England won in India in 1984-85. They did not do it again until 2012-13, when Alastair Cook's side lost the opening Test at Ahmedabad by nine wickets and then won at Mumbai by ten wickets and at Kolkata by seven, drawing at Nagpur to take the series 2-1. Cook made 568 runs at better than eighty, with three centuries. Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar took thirty-seven wickets between them. Beating India in India with two finger spinners, on pitches prepared to suit India's own, is the most complete away performance in the fixture's history and English cricket has not repeated it since.

The corrective came quickly enough. England lost 4-0 in India in 2016-17, 3-1 in 2021 and 4-1 in 2024, the last of those after winning the opening Test in Hyderabad by 28 runs — a result that flattered them for about a fortnight. Yashasvi Jaiswal made 712 runs across that 2024 series and Ravichandran Ashwin took twenty-six wickets.

At home, England have been more comfortable, winning the series of 2011, 2014 and 2018. The pattern for most of the 2010s was simple and slightly dull: each side won at home.

2021, 2022 and the Test that waited ten months

That pattern broke in 2021. India won at Lord's in a manner that has since become a template.

Set up by an 89-run ninth-wicket stand between Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami, who finished unbeaten on 56, India left England 60 overs to survive and bowled them out for 120. Mohammed Siraj took four for 32, Bumrah three for 33, and a match England had controlled going into the final day was gone inside a session.

India led 2-1 after four Tests. The fifth was postponed on the eve of play because of Covid cases in the Indian camp and eventually played at Edgbaston in July 2022, ten months later, with a different England captain, a different coach and a different playing philosophy. England won it and the series finished 2-2. Whether it was one series or two is still argued about, and the records treat it as one.

2025: level, and decided by six runs

The 2025 series in England was the best the fixture has produced in a generation, and it ended with nothing separating the sides.

Test	Venue	Result
First	Headingley	England won by 5 wickets
Second	Edgbaston	India won by 336 runs
Third	Lord's	England won by 22 runs
Fourth	Old Trafford	Match drawn
Fifth	The Oval	India won by 6 runs

Three of the five went into the final session of the final day. Shubman Gill, captaining in a Test series for the first time, made 754 runs — the second-highest aggregate by a captain in any Test series, behind Bradman's 810 in the 1936-37 Ashes. Mohammed Siraj finished with twenty-three wickets, equalling the most by an Indian bowler in a Test series in England, a mark Bumrah had set across the split 2021-22 series.

The Oval finish was the narrowest run margin in India's Test history. England needed 374, reached 367, and India's six-run win replaced a thirteen-run victory over Australia at Mumbai in 2004-05 at the top of that particular list. At Old Trafford, England had made 669 and India had still saved the game by batting through most of two days in the fourth innings.

It is the series that best illustrates how the relationship now works. England's approach under Brendon McCullum is to force results and accept the risk; India's fast bowling in English conditions is now a genuine strength rather than an aspiration. Two sides trying to win rather than trying not to lose produced a drawn series in which four matches could have gone either way.

The trophies, and the argument about renaming one

Series in England were played for the Pataudi Trophy from 2007, instituted to mark seventy-five years since the 1932 Test and named for Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi. Series in India are played for the Anthony de Mello Trophy, named after a founding figure of the Indian board who served as its first secretary and later as president in the years around independence.

In 2025 the Pataudi Trophy was replaced by the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy, honouring James Anderson and Sachin Tendulkar. The decision was criticised sharply in India and by parts of the English press, on the grounds that the Pataudi name carried a specific historical meaning — a family that had genuinely belonged to both cricket cultures — that a pairing of two great modern players does not. Supporters of the change pointed out that Anderson and Tendulkar between them span nearly the whole modern history of the fixture. Both positions are reasonable; the older one is the harder to answer.

The white-ball fixture is not the same rivalry

In limited-overs cricket the relationship has produced sharper single days than long arcs, and England have generally had the better of the recent knockouts.

• Old Trafford, 1983. India beat England in the World Cup semi-final on the way to the title that reorganised the sport's economics.
• Bangalore, 2011. A World Cup group match tied at 338. Tendulkar made 120, Andrew Strauss 158, and Graeme Swann needed two off the final ball and found cover.
• Lord's, 2002. England made 325 in the NatWest Series final; India were 146 for five and won by two wickets with three balls left, Yuvraj Singh making 69 and Mohammad Kaif 87. Sourav Ganguly's response from the pavilion balcony is the most-shown piece of footage in Indian ODI history.
• Edgbaston, 2013. The Champions Trophy final, cut to twenty overs a side by rain. India made 129 for seven and defended it by five runs, Ravindra Jadeja making 33 not out and taking two for 24.
• Adelaide, 2022. England won a T20 World Cup semi-final by ten wickets, Jos Buttler and Alex Hales putting on 170 unbroken — the highest partnership for any wicket in the men's tournament's history — after India had made 168 for six.

What the ledger says, and what it leaves out

England lead the overall Test count, which is a function of the first forty years rather than the last forty. India have won far more of the recent home series and, since 2021, have stopped losing away ones. Neither side has won a series in the other's country since England's 2012-13 tour, which is a longer stalemate than either board expected.

The honest summary is that the fixture is now the most evenly matched five-Test contest in the game outside the Ashes, and that it is one of the very few series still granted five Tests at all. That scheduling privilege is a commercial judgement about which contests sell, and it survives partly because these two boards jointly account for most of the sport's revenue — a dynamic that also shapes the World Test Championship cycle.

For the grounds where the Indian half of the fixture is played, see the guide to India's Test cricket grounds and the survey of iconic Indian stadiums. The domestic competition that produced most of the Indian players named here is covered in the Ranji Trophy guide, the longer national story is in the history of India cricket, and how the game arrived in the first place is in the origins of cricket in India. The rest of the Indian game sits on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Match results, series margins and the individual performances described here have been checked against official scorecards and board records, including BCCI and ICC published material on the 2025 series and the naming of its trophy. Historical detail on the earlier tours draws on Wisden's match reports and long-form published cricket history. Where a figure is a record — Gill's series aggregate, Siraj's wicket tally, the six-run margin at The Oval — it is stated as reported at the time of that series and may be superseded by later cricket. Overall head-to-head totals move with every Test and are described here in relative rather than absolute terms for that reason. This page is descriptive; no statistics were computed for it.