The managers of the two IPL teams most affected by the loss of Pakistani players reacted with predictable dismay. But it seems unlikely that this latest interruption in the two country’s cricketing relations will last as long as the first one. It has always been part of the tangled, indeed tortured, history of the two cricketing nations that – for good or ill – the present offers no guarantee for the future. Nonetheless it provides a useful vantage point from which to survey the six decades of cricketing relations between the two countries, against the backdrop of the political, diplomatic and social currents animating (and bedevilling) their relationship.
My account of this history is necessarily a subjective one; no cricket fan can truly pretend to the detachment of the objective historian. But I have not been a participant in the events I describe; I am not an ‘insider’; I count no cricketers amongst my close friends. Mine is, instead, the account of a keen observer, a lover of the game who has followed it from afar, often while living in non-cricketing countries, his enthusiasm sharpened by the keen edge of deprivation. If this approach suffers from evident limitations, I can only hope that what it lacks in professionalism it makes up for in passion.
The Roots
Some analysts trace the history of India-Pakistan cricket relations to the Bombay Quadrangular (later Pentagular), the famous cricket tournament, organized along communal lines, which essentially created the domestic game in pre-independence India. The tournament began as a contest amongst Europeans, Parsis and Hindus; in 1912, the Muslims were admitted as a separate team, and some see that team as the precursor of the Pakistan national team. However, I do not accept this argument.
My dissent from this received wisdom is based on a number of factors. None of the Pentangular’s teams (the Rest, consisting mainly of Indian Christians, came in two decades later) saw themselves as playing for different countries. Religion – more properly ‘community’ – was simply seen as one way of organizing Indians for social purposes; none of the Hindus, Muslims, Parsis or Indian Christians considered themselves to be anything other than compatriots of each other. Equally important, religion was not the only basis on which they played cricket; the same stars, irrespective of faith, played alongside each other for assorted maharajas and nawabs who ran their own cricket teams, as well as for provincial teams in the Ranji Trophy, for scratch teams like a ‘Bengal Cyclone XI’ or a ‘Bijapur Famine XI’, and, if they were good enough, for representative Indian sides. (Indeed, a joint Hindu-Muslim team was fielded against the visiting MCC side as early as 1926.) It is certainly arguable that by the 1940s, when the Muslim League’s demand for a separate state of Pakistan had become popular political currency in some circles, many of that team’s supporters saw a separate Muslim team as a symbol of what would one day be a separate nation; but it is equally true that many Indian Muslims did not see their team that way, and some of the best-known Muslim names in Indian cricket journalism, such as Syed Abdullah Brelvi, editor of the Bombay Chronicle, were unalterably opposed to the very idea of Pakistan. (Brelvi supported Mahatma Gandhi’s call for the abolition of the Pentangular precisely because it encouraged Indians to think of themselves along sectarian lines.) And – this is the clincher – a large number of the very able cricketers who played with conspicuous success for the Muslim team chose not to opt for Pakistan when that country was created.
Indeed, three Muslims, Gul Mohammad, Ghulam Ahmed and Ebrahim Suleiman Maka, featured in the Indian Test sides that played in Pakistan’s inaugural series in India in 1952-53. That has always remained the essential difference between the two countries: one created on the basis that Indians of the Muslim faith were a separate nationality, entitled to their own state, and the other predicated on the fundamental conviction that religion was a fact of life, but not an acceptable determinant of nationhood. India’s nationalist leaders never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing with the logic of Pakistan – that since Partition had created a state for India’s Muslims, what remained was a state for India’s Hindus. Instead they affirmed a pluralist vision of their country, seeing India as a land that belonged to all who had contributed to its richly diverse civilization over millennia, irrespective of faith, language or ethnicity. India’s cricket team has always reflected this syncretism, and the list of India’s cricket captains includes several Muslims, two Christians, two Parsis and a Sikh. (The only non-Muslim Pakistani who came close to captaining his country’s team, the Christian Yousuf Youhana, converted to Islam but was still bypassed for the captaincy by younger and less-experienced Muslim players.) Whereas a non- Muslim playing for Pakistan remains a rarity in a country where passports are stamped ‘non-Muslim’ to denote their bearer’s inferior status, thirty of secular India’s 258 test caps (as of mid-2008) have been awarded to Muslim cricketers. To deny them an equal share in the heritage of their country’s Muslim cricketing forebears – by tracing only Pakistan’s lineage to the Muslim teams in the Bombay Pentangular – would therefore be an injustice.
The two countries’ shared history has imparted a complicated edge to their rivalry. For many Indians, Pakistanis are merely estranged siblings, ‘basically like us’, with appearance, ethnicity, cuisine, language and music largely indistinguishable from northern India’s; it is not uncommon for such Indians to support Pakistan against any side other than India. (There is also the vexed problem of some Indian Muslims’ alleged support for Pakistan even against India, an issue to which we will return.) For other Indians, Pakistan can never be free of the taint of the original sin of its creation – the vivisection of the motherland in the name of religious separatism – and so their attitude as cricket fans is not just to support India against anyone, but also to support anyone against Pakistan.
Part of the complication is that for some Indians the very existence of Pakistan is an affront to the pluralist ideals of their nation. It is, after all, a state founded on the very communalism that, if practised in independent India, would be rejected as unacceptable in civilized society. While India has its share of Hindu bigots hostile to Muslims in general and Pakistanis in particular, Indian liberals, weaned on a diet of decades of preaching about pluralism and religious co-existence, find Pakistani bigotry no easier to accept. It is not easy for a secular Indian to have anything but contempt for a state ideology based on religious intolerance. When Pakistan’s captain, Shoaib Malik, publicly thanked ‘Muslims all over the world’ for their presumed support to his team in the 2007 Twenty20 World Cup, he showcased the sectarianism that animates his team’s, and his country’s, raison d’etre (even at the price of insulting his own side’s non-Muslim legspinner, Danish Kaneria, and ignoring the Muslims playing for other teams, notably India’s). It was a reminder that, for all their superficial similarities, Pakistanis are not Indians: an Indian captain who thanked ‘Hindus all over the world’ for their support would be sacked on the spot, whereas a Pakistani, in doing so, was merely voicing the chauvinist creed of his nation’s founding.
For all of these reasons, to most Indian cricket fans, Pakistan must not be allowed to prevail – as a country, as an idea, as a cricket team. Victory over Pakistan, therefore, means far more than victory over anyone else, whereas a defeat by Pakistan stings far more than a drubbing at the hands of another team. To such Indians, their only consolation in regarding India’s lopsidedly poor record against Pakistan in one-day internationals, for instance, is the fact that India has always beaten Pakistan every single time the two countries have met ‘when it really matters’, in the World Cup – even in the World Cup tournament that Pakistan went on to win.
The Beginnings
Before India and Pakistan played their first Test match against each other, they had already gone to war, over Kashmir in the winter of 1947-48. When Kashmir’s Hindu maharaja, faced with an incursion by Pakistani ‘irregulars’, soon backed by that new country’s army, acceded to India, the Indian Army repulsed the invaders, with considerable backing from the Kashmir Valley’s overwhelmingly Muslim population and
its nationalist hero Sheikh Abdullah, who detested the maharaja but disliked the idea of Pakistan even more. India complained to the United Nations about Pakistan’s violation of its sovereign territory; Pakistan, citing Kashmir’s Muslim majority as ground for it to belong to Pakistan, decried Indian ‘occupation’ of Muslim land. A UN-brokered ceasefire came into force in 1948, however, and it was still holding nearly five years later when the two countries began their cricketing relations.
The wounds of Partition were still raw. The violence, rape, killing and destruction that had accompanied the Partition had been truly horrific, and the human cost of that disastrous decision had been compounded by the waves of refugees who had lost everything, and whose embittered memories of the homes they had left behind (and often of loved ones who had grotesquely suffered) inevitably poisoned the atmosphere between the two countries. But India, guided by the statesmanlike Jawaharlal Nehru, was anxious to leave that era behind. In the very year that the Imperial Cricket Conference admitted Pakistan as the sport’s seventh Test-playing country, India invited Pakistan to send a touring team, sandwiching a five-Test series between a summer in England and a previously scheduled tour of the West Indies in the winter.
The Pakistani touring team of October-December 1952 featured two cricketers who had earlier played for India – their captain, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, an aristocratic Oxford Blue, and the 44-year-old leg-spinner Amir Elahi. Kardar was, not to put too fine a point on it, an educated Muslim chauvinist, one committed to the project of building a Muslim Pakistani state; he would later go on to serve as a minister in the government of his home province, Punjab. During the tour he made it a point to visit monuments and museums that reflected Muslim glories in India, while ignoring the rest. The rotund Elahi was a more popular figure with the crowds, but a less accomplished player at the fag end of his career. The rest of the team, however, included several cricketers of uncommon talent, notably the diminutive teenage sensation Hanif Mohammad, an opening batsman, who marked his Test debut at the age of 17 with an accomplished half-century in his first innings. (Earlier, in the pre-Test tour game against North Zone at Amritsar, he scored a century in each innings, the youngest player ever to record that feat in first-class cricket.) His opening partner, Nazar Mohammad, was no slouch either, scoring his country’s first-ever Test century in the second Test at Lucknow and carrying his bat through the innings. Pacemen Khan Mohammad (unfortunately injured after the first Test) and Fazal Mahmood, a master of pacy swing, were also good enough to have commanded places in the Indian line-up.
The first Test, in the Indian capital, Delhi, resulted in a crushing win for India, by an innings and 70 runs; the second, on a matting wicket in the historically Muslim city of Lucknow, went the other way, the swing bowling of Fazal Mahmood netting him 12 for 94, and, together with Nazar’s carrying his bat for 124, taking Pakistan to victory by an innings and 43. India, after dropping their entire top five and retaining only three players from the defeated side, bounced back promptly in the third Test at Bombay, centuries by Vijay Hazare and Polly Umrigar and the all-round excellence of Vinoo Mankad, as well four wickets by the Indian captain, Lala Amarnath, taking them to a ten-wicket victory. The Pakistanis did not go down without a fight, though, Hanif batting six hours for a dogged 96. The fourth Test, in Madras, was rained off after two days, though not before Amir Elahi, batting at number 11, had joined Zulfiqar Ahmed in Pakistan’s first-ever century stand for the last wicket. The fifth Test, in Calcutta, witnessed another distinction, young Deepak Shodhan scoring a century on debut after batting at number 8, and Abdul Kardar bizarrely declaring at the fag end of the last day to set India a target of 97 to score in 15 minutes (they managed 28 for no loss off the 6 overs that could be bowled in that time). The Indian spinners, Mankad and Ghulam Ahmed, had taken 37 wickets between them in the five Tests; Pakistan, even with Elahi, who took seven wickets, had no tweaker of comparable quality, and their medium-pacers took 40 of the 50 Indian wickets that fell in the series. India won a memorable series 2-1, but the newest Testplaying country had acquitted itself well. The Pakistan wicketkeeper, Imtiaz Ahmed declared that the team, representing a young nation, was greater than the sum of its individual parts.
That first series still bore reminders of the two countries’ recent intimacy. The Pakistanis crossed over to India by road; hostilities had not yet made the land borders all but impassable, as they were to become a decade later. Editorialists on both sides of the border, and civic authorities in all the Indian cities the tourists visited, went out of their way not just to welcome the Pakistanis but to express the hope that the cricket matches would become a harbinger of better relations between the two countries. When the Bombay Test took place, affluent Pakistanis took the boat down from Karachi to watch it, as they would have been able to do more routinely in the pre- Partition days. The warmth of the Indian public’s welcome to the Pakistan cricketers was commented upon by the visiting captain himself. The Indian president, Rajendra Prasad, invited the Pakistani players to tea; the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, met them too, and particularly praised Hanif. In turn, when, during the third test in Bombay, Vinoo Mankad completed the then fastest Test double (1000 runs and 100 wickets in only 23 Tests), Kardar threw him a celebratory party.
But the sources of tension were never far removed either. On the very day the Pakistani cricketers paid tribute at the samadhi of Mahatma Gandhi, the ruling Muslim League back home announced the launch of an ‘all-out struggle’ for Kashmir’s ‘liberation’. As the Lucknow Test was under way, the people of Pakistan were marking the occasion of ‘Kashmir Day’, with black flag demonstrations against Indian ‘occupation’. Reports of the oppression of the Hindu minority in East Pakistan, which had led to a fresh stream of refugees into India, were inflaming Hindu opinion in the country even as the series was going on. But though the Hindu Mahasabha planned protests at Nagpur (where the Pakistanis played Central Zone) and Calcutta (the venue of the fifth Test), not only were the matches not disrupted, but attempts to demonstrate against Pakistan were firmly put down by the authorities, and the Pakistani batsmen found the Indian crowds more than willing to applaud their stroke play.
One recurrent theme of the exchanges between the Pakistani captain and his gracious hosts (who included Indian politicians and sporting notables, including Indian Muslims such as the president of Calcutta’s famous Mohammedan Sporting Club, which hosted a welcome reception) was the Indians’ tendency to hark back to the happier days of an undivided India, even to express sentiments decrying any consciousness of separateness or difference between the two countries – while Kardar took pains to accentuate those differences, harping on the reality of his country’s independent existence. Amir Elahi had played alongside Hazare for Baroda and with several members of the Indian team for India; Kardar himself had done no less. But now they were foreigners, and Kardar made it his mission to make that clear to his hosts.
It was a lesson that was only beginning to sink in. The Indian public embraced the Pakistanis as brothers, cheering them without reserve and making a local celebrity out of the teenage prodigy Hanif; Kardar himself admitted to a journalist that at no stage had he or his team had been made aware of any sectarian or communal feeling as they travelled through the country. Nehruvian India was already conducting itself without consciousness of religious identity, whereas Pakistan, a state created for Muslims with a cricket team consisting entirely of Muslims, had to carve out its own distinctive ‘non-Indian’ identity predicated entirely upon Islam. This was part of the unspoken agenda of the first Pakistani touring team, and it would remain an undercurrent of cricket’s role in nation-building. Finding a space for the new nation on the world’s sports pages was to become a vital way of giving Pakistan its own role on the world stage.
Sadly, as a result, many Pakistanis looked at cricket with India entirely from a communal perspective. Thus Omar Noman, in his authoritative if rather celebratory history of Pakistani cricket, describing Ghulam Ahmed’s mat
ch-saving partnership with Shodhan in Calcutta, could not resist adding: ‘The fact that Ghulam Ahmed was a Muslim added to the poignancy of his efforts. It was as if a Jew had scored a goal against Israel, playing for an Arab team.’1 A more fundamental misreading of the nature of India as a country and as a cricketing culture cannot be imagined. Ghulam Ahmed was a future captain of India, a future chairman of selectors (who picked India’s World Cup winning team of 1983) and a pillar of the Indian cricketing establishment. To suggest that his religion somehow made him more naturally a Pakistani than an Indian fundamentally betrays the vast gulf in the mindset of the two nations.
A little over two years passed before the two countries played each other again. During this time political relations neither improved nor worsened appreciably. The Kashmir dispute continued to fester, with vigorous debates at the United Nations and continuing demonstrations in Pakistan, and the treatment of East Pakistan’s Hindus remained a sore point for many Indians. But the two countries were beginning to go their separate ways: Nehru’s India in an increasingly socialist direction, with five-year plans on the anvil and a new emphasis on public sector investment, especially in heavy industry, as well as an international posture of non-alignment, while Pakistan was emerging as an ally of the United States in the Cold War, with an economy largely in private hands (and run, it was said, essentially by 22 families).
In January 1955 an Indian touring team returned the compliment of Kardar’s side in 1952 by visiting Pakistan for a five-Test series. In the interim, both countries had had encouraging, if modest, attainments on the cricket field. In the only series it had played since that original Pakistan tour, India had managed to lose only one Test to a much stronger West Indies side in the Caribbean. And Pakistan had just returned from a series defeat in England in the summer of 1954 which had, nonetheless, featured a remarkable Test match win at the Oval – something India itself had not yet achieved in the Old Country. Their return engagement was, therefore, looked forward to with great anticipation.
Shadows Across the Playing Field Page 3