Shadows Across the Playing Field

By Shashi Tharoor and Shaharyar Khan

Shadows across the Playing Field tells the story of the turbulent cricketing relations between India and Pakistan through the eyes of two men - Shashi Tharoor and Shaharyar Khan - who bring to the task not only great love for the game, but also deep knowledge of subcontinental politics and diplomacy. Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and man of letters, is a passionate outsider, whose comprehensive, entertaining and hard-hitting analysis of sixty years of cricketing history displays a Nehruvian commitment to secular values, which rejects sectarianism in sports in either country. Shaharyar Khan, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, is very much the insider, who writes compellingly of his pivotal role as team manager and then chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board at a time when cricket was in the forefront of detente between the two countries. In their essays, the two authors trace the growing popularization of cricket from the days of the Bombay Pentangular to the Indian Premier League. They show how politics and cricket became intertwined and assess the impact it has had on the game. But above all, their book is a celebration of the talent of the many great cricketers who have captivated audiences on both sides of the border. If politics and terrorism can at times stop play, the authors believe that cricket is also a force for peace and they look forward to more normal times and more healthy competition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Jun 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9788174369499

Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor served for twenty-nine years at the UN, culminating as Under-Secretary-General. He is a Congress MP in India, the author of fourteen previous books, and has won numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Tharoor has a PhD from the Fletcher School, and was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1998 as a Global Leader of Tomorrow.

Book preview

introduction

in 1987, I arrived by chance at Lahore airport at more or less the same time as Imran Khan and his teammates, who had just won their first Test series against India, followed by a 5-1 victory in the one-day internationals. Proceeding from the airport to Faletti’s hotel took a very long time as the taxi got caught up in a sea of supporters in exultant mood waving flags and cheering their heroes. I particularly remember seeing a phalanx of scooters, six or seven abreast, each with three or four young men on board, each sporting welcoming banners, on one of which was written the memorable slogan: Imran Khan Faateh-i-Hind (Conqueror of India). It was more a reception for a Mughal emperor than for a cricket team captain.

The German military theorist, von Clausewitz, famously wrote that ‘war is merely the continuation of politics by other means’. For much of the last sixty years the same might also be said of the cricketing rivalry between India and Pakistan. Cricket has pride of place in the sporting calendars of both countries and no fixture is awaited with more anticipation than Tests or one-day internationals (ODIs) between them. In all cricket-playing countries, national teams carry the hopes and aspirations of millions of supporters but Indian and Pakistani teams often seem to be engaged more in a proxy war than a sporting encounter. An Indian journalist who visited both teams before their World Cup fixture in South Africa in 2003 was told by one cricketer that ‘the mood in the respective dressing rooms was akin to soldiers in a bunker, both sides desperate to emerge victorious in the end’.¹

Ramachandra Guha in his classic history of cricket in India A Corner of a Foreign Field has brilliantly shown how the game has been closely entwined with politics from the very beginning.² In nineteenth century Bombay, the Parsis and Hindus fought for their own space on the maidan in a challenge to the dominant European gymkhana which mirrored the stirrings of Indian nationalism. In the early twentieth century, the Parsi and Hindu gymkhanas were joined by a Muslim gymkhana – the Muslims taking to cricket, as they took to politics, more tardily than others – and the ground was laid for the famous Quadrangular and Pentagular tournaments between communal teams which brought life in Bombay to a standstill every year in the month of November.

From the late 1930s, the Indian National Congress tried to stop the Bombay Pentangular, arguing that such communal contests played into the hands of the British and their ‘divide and rule’ policy. But the cricketers and their public only acquiesced under pressure. In the early 1940s, the communal matches continued to pull in massive crowds and the heroes of the different teams – men such as C.K.Nayudu for the Hindus and Major Wazir Ali for the Muslims – received a kind of adulation which was all the more intense because of its political resonance. The final of the 1944 Pentangular, in which the Muslims beat the Hindus, with one wicket to spare, was described at the time as ‘by far the most exciting finish ever’. With the Muslim League demand for Pakistan gaining momentum, it was also seen as highly symbolic.

Independence and Partition killed off the Pentangular, which was superseded in India by zonal competitions like the Ranji Trophy, in which teams are selected by geography and not by caste or community. By and large these have been less intense contests, in which sport rather than politics is in the ascendant. After 1947, it has been the cricketing encounters between India and Pakistan which have carried the political intensity of the Pentangular, even if their pedigree is questioned and the criteria for team selection very different.

Since 1947, cricketing relations between the two countries have been as turbulent and unpredictable as their political relations. In times of hostility and war, there have been long periods without matches. Even when the teams have met in more peaceful times, the atmosphere has often been surcharged with nationalist, if not chauvinist, feeling. Yet the passion for cricket on both sides of the border, like the passion for Bollywood, transcends these divisions. In the difficult times it has acted as a common bond, a source of hope and a means of breaking down barriers of mistrust. Cricket has not only given rise to proxy wars; it has also been an arm of diplomacy on both sides of the border.

This volume tells the story of cricketing relations between India and Pakistan through the eyes of two men who bring to the task not only a great love of the game but also a deep knowledge of their political and diplomatic relations.

Shaharyar Khan is a scion of the princely house of Bhopal, who after studying at Cambridge University served Pakistan as a diplomat for more than thirty years. He was ambassador to Amman, London and Paris before becoming foreign secretary of Pakistan in the early 1990s. After his retirement, Shaharyar Khan’s diplomatic skills were put to the service of his first love – cricket. He acted as Pakistan’s team manager on its highly successful tour of India in 1999 and as the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Control Board between 2003 and 2006. These were times when cricket was in the vanguard of diplomacy between the two countries and Shaharyar Khan’s account of those years provides a privileged insight into efforts to build bridges between governments and peoples.

Shashi Tharoor worked for the United Nations for nearly thirty years. He acted as under-secretary-general during the tenure of Kofi Annan and was the runner-up in the election to replace him in 2006. He is also an acclaimed novelist, author and newspaper columnist, who has written extensively on Indian statecraft and foreign policy and is widely read across several continents and in many languages. What is less well known is that he has a passion for cricket, which he has nourished since his schooldays, and follows the fortunes of the Indian team with a keen interest and a discriminating eye. During the Indian tour of England in 2007 I listened with rapt attention to his appearance as a guest on the BBC’s Test Match Special as he elaborated on the personalities and performances of the key players and on the role of cricket in Indian life. It was not long afterwards that he kindly agreed to contribute to this volume.

The two essays are very different in character, though they cover much of the same ground. Shashi Tharoor’s essay is that of a passionate outsider, who has spent much of his life in non-cricket playing countries like the US, ‘his enthusiasm sharpened by the keen edge of deprivation’. Shaharyar Khan, on the other hand, is very much the insider, who has not only played the game himself but also exercised an influence in the counsels of cricket both at home and internationally. Shashi Tharoor’s essay is more encyclopaedic: there is scarcely a match he neglects to cover, even those which were played in secondary venues such as Sharjah and Toronto. Shaharyar Khan concentrates mostly on the Test series and ODIs because he thinks the other matches lack ‘the cutting edge of the bilateral series’.

As the older of the two, Shaharyar Khan retains boyhood memories of the Bombay Pentangular and frames his own essay within that historical context. His account of Pentagular fever in Bhopal and the annual trip to Bombay to support Major Wazir Ali and the Muslim team is a period piece in its own right. However, he begins his essay with Douglas Jardine, who had arrived in India after the notorious Bodyline series in Australia to captain England in the first series between the two countries in the winter of 1933-34. As Shaharyar Khan points out, the Bodyline controversy was probably the first time cricket demonstrated its undoubted power to make or mar relations between nations and it was an extraordinary irony that the man who took the initiative and attracted the flak was supposedly a ‘gentleman’ and committed to the values of fair play which had made ‘It isn’t cricket’ into a household phrase.

C.L.R.James, the celebrated historian of West Indian cricket, wrote that Bodyline was ‘the blow from which It isn’t cricket has never recovered’. He saw the early 1930s as a pivotal period in modern history ‘in which the contemporary rejection of tradition, the contemporary disregard of means, the contemporary callousness were taking shape’. For him, Bodyline was ‘not an incident’ but ‘the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket’.³ By beginning his essay with Bodyline, therefore, Shaharyar Khan is also pointing up the challenge cricket has faced ever since: how to preserve the values of the game in a world where winning has become so much more important.

In terms of the values of the game, both authors find themselves on the same side. Shashi Tharoor is very critical of Indian spectators who carry support for their team so far that they will not applaud the fine bowling or stroke play of their Pakistani opponents. Shaharyar Khan would entirely agree. As Pakistan team manager in India in 1999, he encouraged his team to play open and positive cricket, which contributed to some of the most memorable matches in the history of their encounters. Both authors are very critical of biased umpiring, which was particularly flagrant in Pakistan before Imran Khan took the lead in appointing neutral umpires in the second half of the 1980s. Both acknowledge that the pressure to win puts a huge burden on the players and can too often distort the direction of play. Pakistan had its own Bodyline controversy, featuring the fiery Sarfraz Nawaz, which ultimately produced a new rule on the number of bouncers permitted in one over. A more frequent failing has been defensive play prompted by a determination not to lose. The extraordinary number of drawn Test encounters, particularly in the early days, tells its own story and helps to explain why the oneday international and Twenty20 contests have become so popular.

If this much is common ground, the two men approach their task from very different political points of view. Shashi Tharoor brings to his analysis a Nehruvian perspective which utterly rejects communal divisions, whether in politics or in cricket, pre-partition or post-partition. He is quite clear that India-Pakistan rivalry on the cricket field is not a continuation of Pentangular contests between Hindu and Muslim teams. Pakistanis may see themselves as inheritors of that mantle but India prides itself on the inclusiveness of its teams. Captains of India’s Test teams have been drawn from many communities and at least 30 Muslims have been capped. Shashi Tharoor notes that in recent years communal animus has affected Indian cricket, with parties like the Shiv Sena on occasion trying to disrupt tours by Pakistan teams. But he is as critical of Hindu chauvinism as he is of Muslim sectarianism and brings to his critique of Pakistan cricket the same unyielding support for secular values that Nehru once applied to the Pakistan movement.

Shaharyar Khan is less critical of the Pentangular. In fact he sees it as an important stage in the popularization of cricket in the subcontinent and takes the view that the pre-war communal contests, which were invariably played without incident and to massive audiences, had a role in easing tensions. There is also some evidence that for Pakistan Test players at least, the Pentagular contests sharpened their competitiveness for the India-Pakistan matches which were to follow. This was certainly true for Hafeez Kardar, who had played for India and the Muslims before Partition and was to captain the first Pakistan Test side to tour India in 1952.

Shaharyar Khan acknowledges that for cricketers, as for everyone else, Partition was a time for harrowing decisions. Some Muslims opted for Pakistan, some stayed behind in India. One or two, like the genial Amir Elahi, who migrated later, even played for both national teams at different times. Fewer Hindus stayed behind in Pakistan, though there were some, in Sindh particularly, and that community is still providing a few Test players for the country. However, the increasing trend for minorities in Pakistan to feel marginalized has certainly affected cricket as well, despite the founder’s clear commitment to equality for all communities in his famous speech to the Constituent Assembly. Shashi Tharoor does not pull any punches in criticizing this trend, while Shaharyar Khan refers directly to Jinnah’s speech as an indication of where he stands. He thinks it was only to be expected that cricket would play a role in putting the new nation on the map but he maintains that ‘there was no attempt to give this impetus an Islamic colouring’.

It was a British conservative politician, Norman Tebbitt, who criticized British populations of South Asian and West Indian origin for not supporting the England cricket team during Test matches against their ‘home’ sides and in the process gave currency to the term ‘the Tebbitt test’. Shashi Tharoor accepts that, invidious though it may have been, Indian supporters have sometimes put Muslim cricketers to a similar test, voicing suspicions of stars like Abbas Ali Baig or Mohammad Azharuddin when they have not done particularly well against Pakistani opposition. Shaharyar Khan goes as far as to say that this is more a problem in India than in Pakistan, not least because of the size of the Muslim minority. Both men agree that such behaviour is unwarranted and unacceptable, as is its reverse: the patronizing of ‘good Muslim players’ by Hindu chauvinist politicians – though the practice does take place.

Sufficient has been said to establish that the cricketing contests between India and Pakistan have been about much more than just sport. Over sixty years, they have been played against a background of an unresolved Kashmir dispute, major wars and hostilities and, in more recent times, a nuclear arms race, which have inevitably affected the frequency and the spirit of the encounters. Shaharyar Khan argues that it is politics that divides, rather than sport, and that cricket has ‘the capacity to soften or aggravate the hostility’. The book describes several occasions when cricket and diplomacy became intertwined, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. Hafeez Kardar, the Oxford-educated captain of Pakistan’s first Test team to tour India in 1952, took on an ambassadorial role, playing up the differences between the two newly independent countries and losing some Indian friends in the process. General Zia-ul-Haq’s meeting with Rajiv Gandhi, at the Jaipur Test in 1987, which helped to restore better relations after the border tensions of India’s Operation Brass Tacks, is another high-profile example. A third was the visit of Rajiv’s children, Priyanka and Rahul, to Karachi for the ODI in 2004.

The diplomatic power of cricket has been most in evidence, however, when the peoples of the two countries have been allowed their say. The welcome given to Lala Amarnath, the Indian captain, on his return to his native Lahore in 1955, made it abundantly clear that he was still regarded as a local boy. And when the border was opened to allow spectators from India to attend the Lahore Test match of that year, the numbers who went and the welcome they received put the trauma of Partition into a different perspective. Those were the days before tougher visa regimes restricted crossborder travel to a trickle. But if either country wishes to relax the rules, their otherwise immoveable bureaucracies can still make it happen. In 2004, Pakistan granted visas in large numbers to Indian supporters on the mere presentation of a ticket and even permitted mixing in the stands. Despite the inevitable foreboding, the result was an explosion of goodwill, which played its part in building greater momentum for peace on both sides of the border.

From the 1980s, television played an influential role in the popularization of cricket and the creation of a new cult of celebrity, putting successful cricketers in the same pantheon as film stars and providing them with equally lucrative rewards. This growing popularity was reinforced by the emergence of South Asia as a new hub of international cricket. India’s success in the World Cup in 1983 was the first sign of the new trend, which was confirmed in 1992 and 1996 when Pakistan and Sri Lanka took the same prize. From the late 1990s, with India’s emergence as a world economic power, Indian cricket began to outstrip all rivals in its financial profitability and has now become a powerful force for change. The Indian Premier League (IPL), which pits Indian state and city teams, with their international cricketers, against each other in twenty-over competitions has set new levels of expectation for television rights and players’ remuneration. It has also broken down traditional rivalries and brought Indian and Pakistani players together in the same teams to the deafening cheers of their largely Indian supporters.

Shashi Tharoor welcomes the IPL because he disapproves of the ‘unsportsmanlike chauvinism of our crowds’ in Test encounters and welcomes the vision of Eden Gardens cheering on Shoaib Akhtar even if he is dismissing a great Indian batsman like Virender Sehwag. ‘In the IPL,’ he writes, ‘the past poses no impediment to the future.’ Shaharyar Khan is more sceptical. He understands the commercial importance of the IPL but is concerned that the popularity of big-hitting, fast-scoring cricket will supersede the Test match, which he sees as a far greater gauge of cricketing skills. Moreover, his experience of the Pakistan tour of India in 1999 and the Indian tour of Pakistan in 2004 has convinced him that the crowds on both sides of the border have now achieved a level of maturity which was absent in

Reviews for Shadows Across the Playing Field

[wiredfromback-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A recent review: The title is inspired by an excellent cricket book from Ramachandra Guha that comes more recommended than the frequent in-your-face insertions of statements backing up India's secular ideals espoused in cricket and other arenas here by Dr. Tharoor. Coming from an educated, intelligent and well-traveled man like he is, it seems nothing more than a diplomatic gimmick disguised under anti-diplomatic passion that takes more potshots at Pakistan's sectarian ideals than required. The Shaharyar Khan portion fares better with a tempered and more equitable stance, but is hampered by the language a bit. There is some overlap in content between the Tharoor and the Khan portions that distracts the attention somewhat. Not recommended!