BEYOND BOUNDARIES
Celebrating Pakistani cricket and the rich life of our national obsession—in their country. Like so many cross-border narratives, this book too reminds us that our enduring rivalry is also a history of shared passions
First of all, a reviewer’s confession: I haven’t read either Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones— often mentioned as the best book written on Pakistani cricket—or its possible companion, Peter Oborne’s Wounded Tigers, which is a comprehensive history of cricket in Pakistan. White on Green is different. As the introduction tells us, “This book is not a history… instead we have presented a series of characters or episodes that seemed to us to provide some kind of dramatic connexion to Pakistani cricket.” In a way, to the outsider (or a biased, nosy neighbour who can only occasionally peek over the wall), Pakistani cricket has always seemed to defy both chronological narrative and any cogent analysis, and this book is the best proof of that. Taken as a whole, the multitude of stories and portraits jam-packed in here seem to provide a great mirror to the chaotic, strife-torn celebration that is cricket on our local rivals’ side of the border.
For an on-again, off-again India supporter like myself, the book elicits many conflicting emotions. At many moments you feel extreme relief, a sharp sense of “there but for the grace of a (non-specific) god, go we”. At other points, the reservoir of envy and resentment that is the Indian fan’s constant companion vis-à-vis the old antagonists opens its flood-gates—“Damn,” you find yourself thinking, “their cricket stories are far more dramatic and poignant, far funnier and more satisfying than ours!” Time and time again, the feeling is akin to that of someone brought up on quite bland but healthy home-cooked fare discovering a craving for erratic, dangerous but deliciously spicy street food just outside their house. This response is ridiculously irrational, of course, not least because, as Ram Guha’s lovely book, A Corner of a Foreign Field lays out so well, for many decades the chaotic carnival belonged equally to all of us in the subcontinent and, even after the brutal bifurcation of the nascent mela, Indian cricket’s post-Partition history is no less gripping or full of absurdities.
However, picking through this book, you are reminded how deeply the early history of cricket in the Islamic Republic is inscribed by the experience of Partition. Whether in Junagadh or Bhopal or somewhere else in today’s India, the stories of many famous and not so famous Pakistani cricketers actually begin well before Independence. Repeatedly, there is the business of crossing over westwards during the massacres, of families sundered, of close ones lost, and then the challenge of piecing together a life in an alien Karachi or Lahore, of cricket as providing solace, or a means to stability, or a physical sadhana that helps make sense of this crazy new life that’s been thrust upon this young man or that. So many of these boys, whether prince or middleclass, would face the double or even triple under-dogging that 1947 brings: many of them were rank outsiders who had to break into the clubs in the new country’s towns and cities; then there was the large, lowering neighbour next door, and then the strange cricketing world outside the subcontinent, ruled by the snotty, still very racist, English and sundry cricket-playing gora nations.
In this, someone like Prince Mohammad Aslam Khan, son of the Nawab of Manavadar, ruler of a princely state in Gujarat, manages to survive the great cleaving, re-settling in Pakistan with his bank accounts, sports cars and musical entourage intact. “His life was a long party in which cricket was included,” says the piece on him; and in this partying he manages to be “the real inventor of the doosra” and conduct a quirky career as a left arm spin bowler of great but unfulfilled potential for over 20 years. The future great Hanif Mohammad and family make it out of Junagadh but initially into destitution in Karachi. Fazal Mahmood escapes only because C.K. Nayudu defends him on a train, using a cricket bat. Cricket-wise, perhaps the story of Master Aziz is the most moving: at Partition, Abdul Aziz has to leave behind his 12-year-old son in India. In place of his son, Aziz coaches many young Pakistani boys in Karachi, becoming a legend in the process, his most famous student being
THERE ARE IRRITATIONS, OF COURSE, AND WHAT COMPENDIUM OF SUBCONTINENTAL CRICKETING STORIES WOULD BE COMPLETE WITHOUT THOSE, ESPECIALLY FROM ACROSS THE INDO-PAK BORDER?
Hanif Mohammad; on the other side of the border, Aziz’s son also fulfils his father’s desire to see his child play test cricket—Salim Durani becomes one of India’s most dashing and elegant all-rounders.
Through vignettes such as these, the book moves down the years, stopping to examine the lesser known corners of Pakistan’s long and tumultuous love affair with cricket, even as it touches on some of the best-known moments. Certain patterns emerge, as well as running jokes. Pakistani cricket was, if anything, run along even stronger feudal lines than the Indian game. If we had the Nawab of Patiala and later, other priapic potentate potatoes, they had the great dictator in A.H. Kardar. In White on Green, it seems that someone was always falling foul of the great ‘autocratic’ Kardar, while someone else is always being lifted out of obscurity by a wave of the great man’s hand. The falling foul could be because of family feuds, because a promising young cricketer successfully chats up the wrong beauty (one the skipper had his eye on, leading to an immediate end of the cricket career) or some other bee in Kardar’s bonnet.
As Indian cricket moves into what could be called its regionalism/licence raj era, Pak cricket moves from Feudal Phase I to Feudal Phase II, coming under the tender attentions of Ayub Khan (who, like Zia later, didn’t even like cricket) before moving into the modern era under various military and quasi-military Board Commanders. If we had the (doubtlessly, unquestionably apocryphal) story of Pankaj Roy ducking in Calcutta’s New Market at the sight of the West Indian pace-terror Roy Gilchrist wandering its corridors, the neighbours have the story of Saeed Ahmed, the No. 3 on their England tour of 1971, a man who would always develop a mysterious fever if there were really fast bowlers in the opposing line-up (a good man, this Ahmed, because he is the one who allows one un-helmeted, bespectacled Zaheer Abbas to take over that No. 3 spot and come into his own).
There are irritations, of course, and what compendium of subcontinental cricketing stories would be complete without those? On the World Team that toured Australia in ’71, we are told poor Zaheer Abbas had to face ‘heavy-handed jokes’ about the ongoing Indo-Pak war from his Indian team-mates Bedi, Gavaskar and Engineer (“Good!” can be the only response to that). Then there is an almost loving interview (by Najum Latif) with Dr A.Q. Khan, better known in India as the ‘Nuke Dukandar’ (like many of our own higher-end fascists the man is refined, erudite, a thorough gentleman and a good raconteur) and there is an equally lovey-dovey (but fascinating) portrait of S.F. Rahman, onetime cricketer and ballroom dancer, now a Wahhabi mullah who doesn’t think women should hold public office and who defends Mumtaz Qadri’s murder of Salman Taseer. While the authors point out their disagreement with the (erudite and courteous) Salafist, all they say in conclusion is, “we reached no intellectual or moral meeting point”.
However, the quibbles are few and far between and are balanced by lots of good stuff. For instance, there is also a pretty unflinching examination of how Tablighi religiosity creeps into the Pakistan team and how the team later gets rid of it. With this and many other ‘snapshots’, the authors have put together a volume that will provide fascinating reading for anybody with more than a passing interest in subcontinental cricket and its many tributary stories. And, for those of us who can’t take their eyes off the Jekyll and Hyde phenomena of the men in white and green, as the Pakistan team takes everybody on yet another roller-coaster ride in the English summer, we can be completely assured that this collection with its portraits and anecdotes is but a precursor to several others.