India Test wicketkeeper dismissals record: All-Time Records

Forty men have kept wicket for India in a Test match since Janardan Navle put the gloves on at Lord's in 1932, and between them they have been credited with 1,568 dismissals. MS Dhoni accounts for 294 of those, taken in 166 innings behind the stumps across 90 Tests. No other India keeper is close, though the man in third place is accumulating faster than anyone before him.

Syed Kirmani's 198 held the record for two decades and still looks formidable given the bowling he stood up to. Rishabh Pant reached 184 in 102 innings, fewer innings than Kirmani needed to pass 130. Those three sit apart from the rest of the list, and the gap has less to do with glovework than with how many Tests India now play in a decade.

One point of arithmetic before the table. The matches column counts Tests in which the player actually kept wicket, not Tests played, which is why Dinesh Karthik shows 19 rather than 26 and why KL Rahul appears at all. A dismissal is credited when the keeper catches or stumps the batter himself; run-outs and catches taken while somebody else had the gloves are excluded.

Every India Test keeper with ten or more dismissals

Rank	Keeper	Span	Tests	Inns	Dismissals	Catches	Stumpings	Best in inns
1	MS Dhoni	2005-2014	90	166	294	256	38	6
2	Syed Kirmani	1976-1986	88	151	198	160	38	6
3	Rishabh Pant	2018-2026	52	102	184	166	18	6
4	Kiran More	1986-1993	49	90	130	110	20	5
5	Nayan Mongia	1994-2001	44	77	107	99	8	5
6	Wriddhiman Saha	2012-2021	39	76	104	92	12	6
7	Farokh Engineer	1961-1975	46	83	82	66	16	3
8	Parthiv Patel	2002-2018	25	47	72	62	10	4
9	Dinesh Karthik	2004-2018	19	35	57	51	6	4
10	Naren Tamhane	1955-1961	21	35	51	35	16	4
11	Probir Sen	1948-1952	14	21	31	20	11	4
12	Budhi Kunderan	1960-1967	15	26	28	21	7	5
13	Pandurang Joshi	1951-1960	12	20	27	18	9	4
14	KS Bharat	2023-2024	7	14	19	18	1	3
=15	Dhruv Jurel	2024-2025	6	12	15	13	2	4
=15	MSK Prasad	1999-2000	6	11	15	15	0	4
17	Sameer Dighe	2001	6	11	14	12	2	3
=18	Deep Dasgupta	2001-2002	8	15	13	13	0	3
=18	Chandrakant Pandit	1986-1992	3	5	13	11	2	4
=18	Ajay Ratra	2002	6	11	13	11	2	3
=21	Bharath Reddy	1979	4	5	11	9	2	3
=21	Sadanand Viswanath	1985	3	6	11	11	0	4

Eighteen further keepers finished with fewer than ten dismissals, most of them one-Test selections from the decades either side of independence. The catching half of these figures sits alongside the outfielders on the India Test most catches list; the stumpings are ranked on their own at India Test most stumpings.

Four keepers have taken six in an innings

Six dismissals in a Test innings is the India record and four men hold it. MS Dhoni and Rishabh Pant took six catches; Kirmani and Wriddhiman Saha took five catches and a stumping. Nobody has managed seven.

Kiran More's five in an innings is the strangest entry on the list, because every one of the five was a stumping. It is the only time an India keeper has stumped five batters in a single innings and one of very few instances in Test cricket anywhere. Five stumpings is not really a feat of glovework; it requires a batting side repeatedly beaten in the air by spin and repeatedly out of its ground, a combination that arrives perhaps once in a career.

The rate table, and why twenty innings is the cut

Dismissals per innings is the fair comparison between keepers with very different career lengths, and it is useless on four or five matches. Chandrakant Pandit's 2.60 from five innings and Rahul's 2.67 from three are sample size, not skill. The table below applies a threshold of 20 innings behind the stumps, which leaves thirteen names.

Keeper	Inns	Dismissals	Per innings
Rishabh Pant	102	184	1.80
MS Dhoni	166	294	1.77
Dinesh Karthik	35	57	1.63
Parthiv Patel	47	72	1.53
Probir Sen	21	31	1.48
Naren Tamhane	35	51	1.46
Kiran More	90	130	1.44
Nayan Mongia	77	107	1.39
Wriddhiman Saha	76	104	1.37
Pandurang Joshi	20	27	1.35
Syed Kirmani	151	198	1.31
Budhi Kunderan	26	28	1.08
Farokh Engineer	83	82	0.99

Farokh Engineer's 0.99 is the lowest figure and the most misleading one. He kept to Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Bhagwath Chandrasekhar and Srinivas Venkataraghavan on Indian pitches, where a four-man spin attack takes wickets lbw, bowled and caught at short leg. The spin bowling tradition page sets out how that attack was assembled; its consequence for the man in the gloves was that the edges were going elsewhere.

Home and away: the split that reorders everything

Every leading India keeper has a higher dismissal rate abroad than at home, and the gaps are wide enough to be structural rather than incidental.

Keeper	Home inns	Home dis	Home rate	Away inns	Away dis	Away rate
MS Dhoni	80	127	1.59	86	167	1.94
Rishabh Pant	32	41	1.28	68	142	2.09
Syed Kirmani	86	108	1.26	65	90	1.38
Kiran More	40	49	1.23	50	81	1.62
Nayan Mongia	46	55	1.20	31	52	1.68
Wriddhiman Saha	47	61	1.30	29	43	1.48
Farokh Engineer	49	39	0.80	34	43	1.26
Parthiv Patel	20	29	1.45	27	43	1.59
Dinesh Karthik	16	24	1.50	19	33	1.74

Pant's is the widest split: 1.28 at home against 2.09 away, a difference of more than four-fifths of a dismissal an innings. Two thirds of his innings as keeper have come outside India, which is unusual and goes a long way to explaining how his total climbed so fast. Dhoni's split runs the same way but less steeply. Kirmani's barely moves at all, and that is the clearest signal in the table that an Indian home pitch in 1980 asked a different question of a keeper than an Indian home pitch in 2020.

The mechanism is not subtle. Seam and bounce in England, Australia and South Africa send the ball through to the keeper; finger spin on a dry surface sends it to short leg, into the pad or onto the stumps. What India's own surfaces do is described on the pitch types and conditions page.

Pant also owns the only dismissal by an India keeper at a neutral venue, a stumping in the 2021 World Test Championship final at Southampton. KS Bharat added five catches in the 2023 final at The Oval.

Against England and Australia

Keeper	v England Tests	v England dis	v Australia Tests	v Australia dis
MS Dhoni	21	67	19	71
Rishabh Pant	16	53	12	53
Syed Kirmani	20	42	17	41
Kiran More	9	37	—	—
Farokh Engineer	18	29	9	18
Wriddhiman Saha	—	—	8	20
Parthiv Patel	5	15	7	19

Pant's 53 against Australia came in 12 Tests and every one of them was a catch, not a stumping. At 2.21 dismissals an innings it is the best figure any India keeper has recorded against a single opponent across ten or more Tests, and it says as much about how Australian batters get out to fast bowling as it does about Pant. That contest is set out on the India versus Australia in Tests page and in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy history.

More's 37 in nine Tests against England, at 2.06 an innings, is the strongest short-run figure here. It came largely in 1990 and 1992-93, keeping to Kapil Dev and Manoj Prabhakar abroad and to Anil Kumble at home.

Five things the ranking does not show

Dhoni and Kirmani finished on exactly 38 stumpings each from careers of almost identical length, 90 Tests against 88. Their catch totals differ by 96. The stumping is the part of wicketkeeping that has not changed; the catching is the part that has.

Three of the four keepers who have taken six in an innings did it within the last twenty years. The fourth, Kirmani, is the only one from the era when India routinely picked three spinners.

Pant has 166 catches from 52 Tests against Kirmani's 160 from 88. On current selection patterns he should pass Kirmani's dismissal total inside a season and Dhoni's within four or five, injuries permitting.

One India keeper finished with a dismissal column made entirely of stumpings: Vijay Rajindernath, four stumpings and no catches in the only Test he played, in 1952. No other Test keeper anywhere has retired with four dismissals and not one of them a catch.

India used eleven different keepers in their first twenty Tests. Selection settled only when Tamhane held the place through the second half of the 1950s, and how the position was fought over is told on the great India wicketkeepers page. The wider chronology sits on the history of Test cricket in India page, and individual careers are indexed in the player directory and across the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Dismissal, catch and stumping totals come from ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru fielding tables with the wicketkeeper filter applied, restricted to India men's Tests. That filter is what makes the matches column mean "Tests kept in" rather than "Tests played", and the distinction matters for Karthik, Rahul and Kunderan, all of whom also appeared as specialist batters.

Dismissals per innings divides dismissals by innings fielded as keeper, shown to two decimal places. The 20-innings threshold on the rate table is imposed here rather than by the source; below it a single five-dismissal Test distorts the figure past usefulness. Home, away and neutral splits use Statsguru's venue classification, under which a Test played in England between India and New Zealand counts as neutral.

Best-in-innings figures give the highest number of dismissals in one innings, with the catch and stumping breakdown checked case by case. Everything in this cluster moves whenever India play a Test; these tables were verified in the last week of August 2026, and Pant's rows in particular will change during the home season ahead.