The team, however, gained strength in the 1970s with the emergence of players such as Gavaskar, Viswanath, Kapil Dev, and the Indian spin quartet.
He was selected as the captain of India on its first Test tour of England in 1932, but dropped out for reasons of health two weeks before departure and the Maharaja of Porbandar took over.
[11] Together with established players like Bishen Bedi, Srinivas Venkataraghavan, Erapalli Prasanna and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Gavaskar formed the nucleus of arguably India's strongest Test team up to that point in time.
India won 1983 Cricket World Cup, however, the West Indies were targeting Sunil Gavaskar and got him out During the 1980s, other players like Mohammed Azharuddin, Ravi Shastri, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, Sanjay Manjrekar, Krish Srikkanth and Maninder Singh emerged.
Sunil Gavaskar became the first batsman to accumulate 10,000 runs in Test cricket, and went on to register a record 34 centuries, surpassed only recently by Sachin Tendulkar.
The emergence of Sachin Tendulkar and Anil Kumble in 1989 and 1990 was to herald an era of Indian cricket that was dominated by stars and individual brilliance.
After Tendulkar quit captaincy and Azharuddin was banned for match-fixing, Sourav Ganguly took over as captain, and the New Zealander John Wright became coach.
The series is best known for a remarkable turnaround by the Indian team in the Kolkata Test, when VVS Laxman, Rahul Dravid and Harbhajan Singh's performance took India to victory after they had followed on.
This was followed by a sensational win in Australia at Adelaide in 2003, where Dravid, VVS Laxman and Ajit Agarkar scripted a come-from-behind victory after the team had conceded 556 runs in the first innings.
The series win in Pakistan that followed was marked by Virender Sehwag becoming the first Indian to score a triple century in Test cricket.
Along with Sehwag, players like Yuvraj Singh and Mohammed Kaif emerged, making the Indian batting order one of the strongest in the world in both forms of the game*.
In the bowling department, India unearthed a plethora of fast-bowling talent, with Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra, and later Irfan Pathan and L Balaji leading the pack.
After a somewhat slow season marked by a dip in team performance following the famous Pakistan series ended, the coaching job passed from John Wright to the Australian Greg Chappell.
Saurav Ganguly, whose batting form had taken a beating in that year, was involved in a spat with Chappell over whether he should be continuing as captain to reduce pressure on him.
While Tendulkar, Sehwag and Dravid formed the mainstay of the Indian batting, the coming of age of players like Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif led to the emergence of younger stars like Suresh Raina and MS Dhoni.
Currently, it has a very strong batting lineup with Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag all being selected to play for the ICC World XI in the 2005 "SuperTest" against Australia.
In previous times, India was unique in that it was the only country to regularly field three spinners in one team, whereas one is the norm, and of the fifteen players to have taken more than 100 wickets, only four were pace bowlers from the last 20 years.
[14] However, in recent years, Indian pace bowling has improved, with the emerging talents of Irfan Pathan, Munaf Patel and Sreesanth and many more playing in the national team.
The players who took India to great heights over the past ten years such as Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble grew older and did not maintain their form and fitness.
India's unconvincing ODI form continued, scraping past a West Indian team depleted by industrial action in the 2005 Indian Oil Cup and a similarly depleted Zimbabwean team only to be defeated twice in the finals by New Zealand, continuing a poor ODI finals record.
After a series of high-profile board meetings and public jousting including some players, Rahul Dravid was installed as the captain, triggering a revival in the team's fortunes.
An important part about this series was the discovery of the young talent of the team, including Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Suresh Raina, Gautam Gambhir and Irfan Pathan.
[17] Dravid's captaincy was cut short in the ill-fated 2007 World Cup, where India were out of the league stage following an embarrassing loss to Bangladesh.
[23] In June 2017, India toured England for the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy where the Virat Kohli led mighty team lost to Pakistan in the final by 180 runs.
[25] In January 2018, Virat Kohli led Indian team toured South Africa where they lost the Test series by 1–2.
[29] A new era began when the captaincy was passed from Virat Kohli to Rohit Sharma and coaching shifted from Ravi Shastri to Rahul Dravid.
In the year after their World Cup victory, (1984) India continued its new-found dominance over One Day Cricket with a comprehensive win over arch-rivals Pakistan in the final.
However, in 1997, a confident Sri Lanka riding on their first-ever World Cup victory swept past a weaker Indian side, breaking the 4-tournament winning streak.