India Test most stumpings: All-Time Records

Two men lead this list and they finished level. MS Dhoni and Syed Kirmani were each credited with 38 stumpings in India's Test cricket, from careers of 90 and 88 matches played thirty years apart. Nothing else about their wicketkeeping is comparable — Dhoni's catch total is 96 higher — but on the one skill that requires standing up to the stumps, the record has not moved since Kirmani set it in 1986 and has only ever been equalled.

That is the fact worth holding onto. India have played roughly three times as many Tests since 1986 as they did before it, and every other keeping record has inflated accordingly. The stumping has not. It is bounded by something a fixture list cannot supply: a spinner good enough to beat a Test batter in the air, and a batter willing to leave the crease against him.

A stumping is credited only when the batter is out of his ground and the keeper breaks the wicket with the ball in hand and no fielder involved. Run-outs at the keeper's end, however similar they look from the boundary, are not stumpings and appear nowhere below. The counts are career totals in India men's Tests.

India's Test stumping leaderboard

Rank	Keeper	Span	Tests kept	Stumpings	Catches	Dismissals
=1	MS Dhoni	2005-2014	90	38	256	294
=1	Syed Kirmani	1976-1986	88	38	160	198
3	Kiran More	1986-1993	49	20	110	130
4	Rishabh Pant	2018-2026	52	18	166	184
=5	Farokh Engineer	1961-1975	46	16	66	82
=5	Naren Tamhane	1955-1961	21	16	35	51
7	Wriddhiman Saha	2012-2021	39	12	92	104
8	Probir Sen	1948-1952	14	11	20	31
9	Parthiv Patel	2002-2018	25	10	62	72
10	Pandurang Joshi	1951-1960	12	9	18	27
11	Nayan Mongia	1994-2001	44	8	99	107
12	Budhi Kunderan	1960-1967	15	7	21	28
13	Dinesh Karthik	2004-2018	19	6	51	57
14	Vijay Rajindernath	1952	1	4	0	4

Below four the list dissolves into single figures and one-Test selections. Fourteen names carry the whole record, and eight of the fourteen kept before 1980.

Rajindernath's four, and the strangest career line in the book

Vijay Rajindernath played one Test, against Pakistan at Kolkata in December 1952, and stumped four batters in it. He took no catches. He never played again. His career fielding record therefore reads four dismissals, four of them stumpings and none of them a catch, which is a line no other keeper in Test history has retired with.

It was not a fluke of weak opposition. Vinoo Mankad and Ghulam Ahmed bowled long spells of spin in that match on a surface that turned from the second morning, and four Pakistan batters came down the pitch and did not get back. Rajindernath was then in his mid-twenties and was never picked again, largely because Tamhane and then Engineer occupied the position for the next twenty years. Four stumpings in a single Test is a figure Dhoni never managed.

What Dhoni and Kirmani were standing up to

Kirmani kept to Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Srinivas Venkataraghavan and Bhagwath Chandrasekhar in the first half of his career and to Dilip Doshi and Ravi Shastri in the second. Four spinners in an eleven was routine, and the number of deliveries he took standing up in a home Test would be unrecognisable to a keeper today.

Dhoni kept to a much narrower spin attack — Anil Kumble at the end of his career, then Harbhajan Singh, Pragyan Ojha, Amit Mishra and Ravichandran Ashwin. The ball-by-ball record shows how his stumpings distributed across them: eleven off Ojha, eight off Kumble, five each off Harbhajan and Ashwin, and the remainder scattered over Mishra, Ravindra Jadeja, Piyush Chawla, Ramesh Powar and one off Virender Sehwag's part-time off-breaks.

Ojha is the surprise in that list. He played 24 Tests, far fewer than the men around him, and still appears more often in Dhoni's stumping column than any of them, because his stock delivery drifted in and turned away from the right-hander at a pace slow enough to draw a batter forward. How India assembled and reassembled its slow-bowling attacks over seventy years is set out on the spin bowling tradition page.

Dhoni's three at Bengaluru

The only Test in which Dhoni took three stumpings was against Australia at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in October 2010. Ojha stumped Tim Paine and Michael Clarke; Harbhajan stumped Peter George. India won by seven wickets. It came against a side that had decided, correctly in principle, that the way to handle Indian spin was to come at it, and it is the clearest illustration on the record of what that plan costs when it misfires three times in one match.

Pant's eighteen, and the pink ball at Bengaluru

Rishabh Pant reached 18 career stumpings in 52 Tests, a rate marginally ahead of Dhoni's, and the archive shows where they came from. Six were off Ravichandran Ashwin and six off Axar Patel — two bowlers whose lengths ask entirely different questions but who share the trait of being quick enough through the air to punish a stride that goes nowhere.

His best single match was the day-night Test against Sri Lanka at Bengaluru in March 2022, where he made three stumpings across two days: two off Ashwin, one off Axar. Under lights on a used pink ball the spinners were skidding on rather than gripping, and three Sri Lankan batters played for turn that never arrived.

Pant also holds the only stumping any India keeper has recorded at a neutral venue, Tom Latham off Ashwin in the World Test Championship final at Southampton in June 2021. His full keeping record sits on the India Test wicketkeeper dismissals record page, and the catching half of it on India Test most catches.

Home and away, which runs opposite to the catching split

Every leading India keeper takes more catches abroad than at home. Stumpings run the other way, and steeply. Of the stumpings recorded in the ball-by-ball archive from December 2001 onward, roughly two in three were made on Indian grounds. Dhoni's split was 24 at home to 12 away; Pant's was 12 to four.

Wriddhiman Saha is the exception, with seven of his twelve away or at a neutral venue — a consequence of when he played rather than how he kept. Saha took the gloves in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the West Indies during a stretch when India toured the subcontinent and the Caribbean more often than England or Australia, and those are the away grounds where a stumping is still on offer.

The mechanism is the one described on the pitch types and conditions page. A dry Indian surface gives a spinner enough turn and enough grip to beat the outside edge; a green pitch at Centurion gives him neither, so he bowls twelve overs in the match and the keeper stands back for the other eighty.

Opponents

Of the stumpings in the archive era, Australia have lost the most — twenty — with England and West Indies next on twelve each and Sri Lanka on nine. Pakistan appear once. That distribution is partly fixture volume and partly method: Australian and English batters of the 2000s and 2010s were coached to use their feet against spin in Asia as an active plan, and the plan has a failure mode that shows up in exactly this column.

The Australian entries cluster in the series of 2004, 2010 and 2013 in India, all covered on the India versus Australia in Tests page. The English ones cluster in 2021, when Axar and Ashwin shared the great majority of the wickets across four Tests; that series is on India versus England in Tests.

Four things the ranking hides

The record has been static for forty years while every other keeping record has doubled. Kirmani reached 38 in 1986, Dhoni equalled it in 2014, and nobody since has come within twenty.

Six of the top fourteen kept fewer than 25 Tests. Tamhane's 16 in 21 matches and Sen's 11 in 14 are rates no modern keeper approaches, because both stood up to Mankad, Subhash Gupte and Ghulam Ahmed on uncovered pitches in an era when leaving the crease was a normal way to bat rather than a calculated risk.

Dhoni and Kirmani finished level on stumpings and 96 apart on catches. That single comparison is the cleanest statement of what has changed about the job: India played four spinners in 1978 and two in 2010, and the keeper's hands moved back accordingly.

Every stumping in the ball-by-ball record since December 2001 came off a spinner, without exception. That is expected rather than surprising, but it is worth stating plainly, because it means this leaderboard is not really a keeping record at all. It is a record of who India picked to bowl slow, and of how long they kept picking them.

The careers behind these numbers are indexed in the player directory, the men who held the gloves before Dhoni are profiled on the great India wicketkeepers page, and the format's chronology in the country sits at Test cricket in India and on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Career stumping, catch and dismissal totals are the published India men's Test keeping records, cross-checked against this site's companion pages so that the catch and stumping columns sum to the dismissal column on every row. Tests kept counts matches in which the player took the gloves rather than matches played, which is why Karthik shows 19 against 26 caps.

Everything attributed to the ball-by-ball record — the bowler each stumping came off, the home and away splits, the opponent distribution, the three-stumping matches — was computed here from the Cricsheet Test archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0). India coverage in that archive begins with the Mohali Test of December 2001 and is thin for the two or three seasons after it, so those computed splits describe the modern era rather than the whole record and are labelled that way above. For the same reason no stumping before 2001 is attributed to a named bowler here.

Ties carry an equals sign and are ordered alphabetically by surname, so Dhoni precedes Kirmani on 38 without any claim being made about which is the better figure. No qualification threshold applies to the main table: a stumping is a discrete event, and Rajindernath's four are as real as Dhoni's thirty-eighth. Figures were checked in the last week of August 2026, and Pant's row is the only one that can still move.