Benjamin Frank (1919 – 12 August 1986) was an Indian

cricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by st ...

er. He played

first-class cricket First-class cricket, along with List A cricket and Twenty20 cricket, is one of the highest-standard forms of cricket. A first-class match is one of three or more days' scheduled duration between two sides of eleven players each and is officia ...

for

Assam Assam (; ) is a state in northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . The state is bordered by Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh to the north; Nagaland and Manipur ...

Bengal Bengal ( ; bn, বাংলা/বঙ্গ, translit=Bānglā/Bôngô, ) is a geopolitical, cultural and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal, predom ...

and

Mysore Mysore (), officially Mysuru (), is a city in the southern part of the state of Karnataka, India. Mysore city is geographically located between 12° 18′ 26″ north latitude and 76° 38′ 59″ east longitude. It is located at an altitude of ...

. He played for Bengal in the

1952–53 Ranji Trophy The 1952–53 Ranji Trophy was the 19th season of the Ranji Trophy. Holkar won the title defeating Bengal in the final. Highlights * Kerala Kerala ( ; ) is a state on the Malabar Coast of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, follow ...

. Frank made his first-class debut playing in the Bombay Pentangular in the 1940s. He went on to play for

Mysore state Mysore State, colloquially Old Mysore, was a state within the Dominion of India and the later Republic of India from 1947 until 1956. The state was formed by renaming the Kingdom of Mysore, and Bangalore replaced Mysore as the state's capita ...

, before joining the Mohun Bagan Club in

Calcutta Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comm ...

. Here he played with success against touring teams becoming the first Indian player to score a century against the

West Indian A West Indian is a native or inhabitant of the West Indies (the Antilles and the Lucayan Archipelago). For more than 100 years the words ''West Indian'' specifically described natives of the West Indies, but by 1661 Europeans had begun to use it ...

side in 1948. A few years later he scored 93 against the visiting Pakistanis. Cricket writer Ramachandra Guha writes that he would have made the national side had he not come from an underprivileged background. In 1959, Benjamin Frank recommended that Kenneth Powell, a bowler for Kolar Gold Fields, switch to running.

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* 1919 births 1986 deaths Indian cricketers Assam cricketers Bengal cricketers Karnataka cricketers Cricketers from Bangalore Anglo-Indian people {{India-cricket-bio-1910s-stub

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