DHARAMSALA: Shane Warne has played an unwitting hand in Australia's fourth Test struggles.

The leg-spin great taught India's game-changing spinner Kuldeep Yadav how to bowl the ball which triggered the visitors' batting collapse on day one.

There is a strong Australian flavour in Kuldeep's game with former one-day specialist Brad Hogg also a major influence on the left-arm wrist spinner's career.

Kuldeep rewarded the faith of Indian selectors by capturing four wickets to give India the upper hand after another keenly fought day.

Australia had been in a strong position at 1/144 early in the second session only to lose a flurry of wickets and be dismissed for 300 on the stroke of stumps.

Kuldeep started the slide by dismissing David Warner with a flipper that he learned from Warne during the first Test in Pune.

"It's fun to learn it from him and then dismiss batsmen from his country itself," Kuldeep said in an interview translated from Hindi.

"Warne is my idol and I have followed him since childhood, even now I watch his videos. When I met him, it was a dream come to true to meet and talk to my idol, learning from him.

"As he told, I kept following it. Now he has promised me to meet again and hold a training session with me."

Kuldeep also counts Hogg, a two-time World Cup winner, among his mentors. The pair, who shared a dressing room while playing with the Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League, talk on Skype.

???Australia have worked hard to negate the impact of India's spin twins Ravi Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja but had trouble reading Kuldeep's variations. Glenn Maxwell was completely bamboozled by a wrong-un.

"It took a couple of balls to get used to it, he bowled a lot of different deliveries," Matthew Wade, who made a fighting half-century, said.

"He bowled a lot of leg-spinners with a scrambled seam and then his wrong-un was scrambled seam as well, so it took a few balls to get used to it.

"But once you stayed out there for a little while, you got a read on him."

Wade said Australia had not been blindsided by Kuldeep's shock selection, saying they had studied video footage of his bowling during their preparation for the series. They will need to learn fast or risk being spun out by Kuldeep in the second innings.

"We have a look at everyone before the start of the series, so the boys were on top of what he was going to bowl," Wade said.

"It's different when you get out into a game scenario, especially the way the wicket was going to play and what's going on out there. But everyone has had a look at his footage, and he bowled quite well today."