When reader and president of the Calcutta Parsee Club Prochy Mehta sent Parsiana a forwarded image from the Durban Cricket Club, we were intrigued to see a reference to a Rustomjee Cup. We asked senior lawyer and cricket buff Fredun De Vitre if he could shed more light on the provenance of the forward. De Vitre promptly got back stating that the Kismet Cricket club is one of the oldest cricket clubs in South Africa having been set up in 1900. It was racially segregated, the majority of members then being Indians. It was one of the five clubs affiliated to the Durban Cricket Association in 1965. At some point, it was merged with another racially segregated cricket club, the Pirates, and became the Kismet Pirates Cricket Club. It appears to have been an "assembly line” for young cricketers, essentially of Indian origin, who later (after apartheid ended) became students in South Africa’s greatest cricketing school, DHS (Durban High School).
As far as the Rustomjee Cup is concerned, it is an educated guess at this stage without further research that it was initiated by "Parsee Rustomjee,” one of the great supporters of (Mohandas) Gandhi. F. J.
Image from Durban Cricket Club