In 2011, the year India conducted its last full census, Vaibhav Suryavanshi was born in Samastipur district of Bihar, a state long seen as peripheral to the power centres of Indian cricket – often convincingly, and at times condescendingly, described as its backwaters. Fifteen years on, with the next census now underway, that landscape has shifted, if only incrementally, even as the media universe around the sport has transformed far more sharply. Faster, more restless. Suryavanshi’s emergence as a teenage sensation in the Indian Premier League sits squarely within that shift, even as he remains yet to arrive on the international stage and in the longer, more exacting formats of the sport.
