The Cricketer and The Ashes

It is the story of The Cricketer and The Ashes. But it's not about the sport's famous Test series between Australia and England.

Instead, it is the story of a remarkable bond between a long-dead Punjabi man, three generations of an Australian family who never knew him, and, now, a legendary former Indian cricketer.

Kapil Dev is the greatest fast bowler in Indian history.

He has spoken to SBS Radio's Punjabi program.

Interview with Kapil Dev

The search for Pooran Singh's relatives

The original story of Pooran Singh's ashes

"If I can fulfil Pooran Singh's last wish, I will come myself and try to take the ashes and try to give them to the family, which I come to know through you and through the media (of India) are there but are not financially well-off enough. But I wish ... if I can do this type of work, I'd feel very proud and happy"

In search of a better life

Sixty-three years after Mr Singh died and was cremated in the quiet, south-west Victorian coastal centre of Warrambool, Kapil Dev is coming to take him home.

It is the final chapter in the story lying behind a simple plaque on a wall at Warrnambool cemetery, reading: 'Pooran Singh, died 8 June 1947, an Indian hawker in western Victoria.'

It begins in 1899, when the then 30-year-old bachelor from Uppal Bhopa village in the Punjab province of what was British India, set out to earn a better living in Australia.

Like many other Punjabis of the time, he became a hawker, travelling from one country town to another, selling the goods piled into his horse-drawn wagon.

Melbourne historian Len Kenna, a specialist in Indian arrival in Australia and especially in Victoria, says Indian hawkers thrived in the half-century Mr Singh worked at it.

He says that hawking started with the arrival of the whaling ships in the1790s. By the 1860s, and as they travelled further into Victoria and New South Wales they earned a bad reputation.

"They weren't to be trusted. And what happened was that the hawking tapered off, and then, in the 1880s, Indian hawkers were introduced. They slowly built up a good name for themselves and for the occupation that they followed. And that continued on until (the) early 1950s," Mr Kenna says.

Indians ended up lonely

The Indian hawkers earned a good living, but Mr Kenna's research partner, Crystal Jordan, says that does not mean the living was good.

After Australia introduced the White Australia Policy in 1901, the Indian population in the country quickly dwindled, and the hawkers were, essentially, deprived of countrymen.

They could not bring families with them from India because the nature of their work meant they had no fixed abode, so many ended up on their own.

Ms Jordan, whose own father was born in India, was the one who discovered an old handwritten note about Pooran Singh's ashes sitting at Warrbanbool and could not forget.

The date caught her attention.

"It kept nagging at me, because the date was 1947 that he died, and that's the year I was born. And I'm a migrant myself to Australia, and I've been here since 1948, so I thought, 'He's been sitting there as long as I've been in Australia'."

Guyetts Funerals in Warrnambool had handled the cremation.

At that time, brothers Jack Bert and Ern Guyett owned the business, before it passed to Jack's son, also called Jack.

Shortly before the younger Jack died in 1986, he passed on to his daughter, Alice Guyett-Wood, something that was nagging him, too.

Last request

"Prior to his death, we had a conversation about Pooran Singh's ashes, saying that, um, they were still with us and should be organised ... or he should have organised to send them back to India, to the River Ganges, to be scattered," Ms Guyett told SBS.

That had been Pooran Songh's last request before he died at age 77, that his ashes be returned to India and spread in the holy river in Hindu tradition.

It was not written anywhere, just passed on to the Guyett family and down through the generations.

Mr Singh had written out a will, though, showing assets amounting to more than ₤2,300 ($A4,145) -- enough to buy a house in those times.

Some of the money went to a few local residents who presumably cared for him in the last stages of his life, and some went to the local hospital, as the hawkers often did.

Len Kenna, the historian, says the rest was left to his four nephews in India.

But Mr Kenna says it was probably Indian history -- the terrifying Partition of India and Pakistan at independence -- that left Mr Singh's ashes stranded in Warrnambool.

"Apparently, there were arrangements for one of his relations to come out and pick up the ashes, and that's probably why that never happened," Mr Kenna told SBS.

In the late 1980s, at the suggestion of one of the cemetery's trustees, the plaque went up on the wall to give him some recognition in his home away from home.

Cricketing connection

Alice Guyett-Wood says she thought, perhaps, one day she would get to Inida and deliver the ashes personally.

But it was when Mr Kenna told SBS Radio's Punjabi program about them, and a broadcaster mentioned it to Kapil Dev in passing, that the final piece of the story fell into place.

Dev, named Cricketer of the Century for the cricket-crazed country back in 2002, told the program he wanted to help.

"I .. am delighted to do that work, because, if you can do that, you just feel happy and you feel proud if somebody's last wish can be fulfilled," he said.

The story quickly became front-page news in India, and Dev is now set to arrive in Australia later this month or in early August to take the ashes.

He met with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Mr Singh's brother over the weekend in India.

And Pooran Singh's relatives in Britain have told the Punjabi program they also plan to fly in for the handover.

Dev says he is deeply moved that the Guyett family would save the man's ashes for 63 years.

Ms Guyett-Wood, the last of the three generations involved, just sounds content that, in the end, it has mattered.

"After this long period of time, I think that, for Pooran Singh to go home to India ... it would be the right time for that to happen," she says.

And one final footnote to the story ...

SBS's Punjabi program has now learned it was nearly ₤1,500 ($A2,300) - quite a sizeable sum at the time - that Mr Singh bequeathed to his nephews, and it did, indeed, reach them back in 1947.

With that money, they built a house in Uppal Bhopa, his home village.

The house still has a sign outside it.

It reads, Pooran Singh, brother of Sultani Ram, of Australia.