by James Astill
Indian Muslims still had role models, mostly drawn from the rump of the community’s elite. Many were in Bollywood, which was, as it remains today, dominated by Muslim directors, composers and actors. Artists such as Mumtaz and Dilip Kumar (né Muhammad Yousuf Khan) kept alive a Muslim courtly tradition of music and dance. And India’s early Muslim cricket stars were similarly charismatic.
Ghulam Ahmed, an off-spinner from Hyderabad, was the mainstay of India’s bowling in the 1950s and briefly India’s captain. Tall and elegant, he was nicknamed the ‘Nawab of Hyderabad’. Salim Durani, a spin-bowling all-rounder of the 1960s and early 1970s – and the only Test cricketer born in Kabul – was even more of a crowd-pleaser. Handsome, debonair and capable of unpredictable brilliance, he was one of the most popular cricketers of his day. When he was dropped ahead of a Test against England in 1973, the crowd in Kanpur agitated for his reinstatement with placards that read, ‘No Durani, no Test’. He was also the first Indian cricketer to appear in a Bollywood film.
But if such cricketers inspired poor Indian Muslims, they were hardly representative of them. Two of the four picked to play for India in the 1950s and 60s also played for Oxford together. They were Tiger Pataudi and Abbas Ali Baig, alias ‘Buggy’, the son of an engineer in the service of the (actual) Nizam of Hyderabad.
Like his university captain, Baig was marked for greatness from boyhood. He had made his debut for Hyderabad aged 15. At Oxford he secured his blue as a freshman in 1959 and was then rushed into India’s touring side against England. The series was already lost: England were 3-0 up when Baig was picked for the fourth Test at Old Trafford. India lost that game, too. But Baig scored a glorious 112, an innings filled with elegant off-side strokes.
The Indian press went wild for him. ‘One thought one had become a big celebrity – comparisons with Ranji, all that sort of thing,’ a 73-year-old Buggy recalled languidly, when we met for coffee one rainy monsoon day in Delhi. He was another natty Muslim dresser, with a silk handkerchief flowing from the breast pocket of his blazer.
Fifty years earlier, after his century on debut, Baig had returned to India a hero and a heart-throb. In India’s next series, he hit two fifties against Australia in Bombay. After the second of these innings, a match-saving knock of 58, he was trudging back to the pavilion when a pretty young woman dashed on to the outfield and planted kisses on Buggy’s cheeks. The crowd was scandalised and delighted. The historian Mihir Bose considers those kisses a signal moment in cricket’s transition from popular sport to Bollywood-style tamasha.
Yet Baig never scored another fifty for India. Early in 1961 he was dropped after scoring just 34 runs in five innings, during three home Tests against Pakistan. It was subsequently revealed that he had received hate mail accusing him of deliberately underperforming against his fellow Muslims. ‘I was flabbergasted,’ Baig recalled. ‘I mean, it hadn’t even occurred to one that anyone could connect my poor form to my being a Muslim.’
It was a bitter calumny, which went to the heart of Pakistan’s vexed creation. The Muslim homeland had been founded on the strength of two claims made by Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League, a small political party dominated by north Indian landowners. First, that the League represented India’s Muslims, though clearly it did not. In India’s first provincial elections, in 1937, it failed to win even in provinces with strong Muslim majorities. Its second claim was that Muslims could never expect fair treatment in a Hindu-dominated India. Congress rejected both arguments, which its leaders considered a cover for the League’s real concern, its leaders’ desire for power. ‘What is really the religious or the communal problem,’ said Nehru, ‘is really a dispute among upper-class people for a division of the spoils of office.’
There is evidence to suggest he was right. Ignoring Jinnah’s summons to Pakistan, most Indian Muslims stayed put in the mainly Hindu villages they had occupied for centuries. There, Indian Muslim and Hindu rubbed along pretty well, as they usually have done. And soon the migrant flood into Pakistan turned into a trickle, then dried up altogether. Very few Indian Muslims moved to Pakistan after 1947. Most were content to be Indian.
Within a year or two of Partition – despite all the massacres that had attended it – Hindu–Muslim relations appeared, almost miraculously, to have returned to normal in India. This was highlighted by Pakistan’s maiden Test tour of India, in 1952.
It was by far the most prominent interaction between the two countries since their bloody separation. It was also less than five years since their inaugural war, over the former princely state of Kashmir, which was divided in the process. Yet the visiting Pakistanis were feted by India’s government in Delhi (where they also visited the shrine in Nizamuddin) and by rapturous crowds. On a 36-hour train-journey across India, between Lucknow and Nagpur, Kardar, the Pakistani captain, wondered at the ‘hearty crowds’ that greeted his team at almost every passing station.
The governments of both countries talked of cricket healing their terrible hurt. ‘We hope,’ advised the government-owned Pakistan Times, ‘that on the cricket field will be forged new friendly ties that will help to bring two estranged neighbours closer together.’ The same hope has since been expressed almost every time the countries have met to play cricket. And it is easy to see why. The deep kinship between India and Pakistan is never more evident than on the cricket field.
Their players speak the same language, play cricket in a similar way, in the same conditions and before the same impassioned crowds. They are prey to the same team-wrecking rivalries. They also understand each other’s dreadful burden in carrying the fragile hopes of millions of cricket fans. It is not surprising that Indian and Pakistani players have traditionally got along well. Sunil Gavaskar and the Pakistani batsman Zaheer Abbas roomed together in Australia during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, while playing together for a Rest of the World side. They were said to have ‘shared the tension by consoling each other’.
As cricket fans, Indians and Pakistanis also have a great deal in common. They like the same feverish tamasha cricket and understand how it is played in Asian conditions. They have an instinctive grasp of each other’s cricket politics: an Indian cricket fan has an above-average chance of guessing not only what shot Muhammad Yousuf is about to play to the off-spinner, but also why his batting-partner is not speaking to him. Cricket has been by far the most prominent arena for Indians and Pakistanis to meet and rediscover their shared history and culture. Yet, blighted by politics, it has not led them to peace.
The uplifting 1952 Test series was won by India 2-1. The next two series, in 1954 and 1960, were held against a backdrop of rising tensions over Kashmir, and this was sadly reflected in the cricket. Terrified of losing, both teams played very defensively, producing ten consecutive and extremely boring draws.
The slandering of Buggy occurred during the second of those series, which was again held in India. It illustrated that for some Hindus, perhaps many, the loyalties of Indian Muslims were still deeply suspect. And India–Pakistan cricket contests now seemed to exacerbate their suspicions – because of a fundamental confusion over what they were. They were not, as chauvinists on both sides of the border thought, a continuation of the Pentangular in international form. Pakistan had scooped up only a little over half the Muslims of British India. And the Indian side were emphatically not the Hindus. In 1952 they included two Muslims, a Christian and a Parsi. Yet, despite this triumph for Indian secularism, the old habit of seeing cricket in communal terms persisted. ‘Unless we can bury once and for all the idea that the Pakistan–India sporting contests are as between Muslims and Hindus,’ warned the Parsi journalist A.F.S. Talyarkhan, who revealed the allegations against Baig, ‘we had better put an end to rubbing against each other.’
As it turned out, the 1960–61 India–Pakistan series was the last for 17 years. India and Pakistan returned to war in 1965 and again in 1971, and bilateral cricket ties were frozen meanwhile. They were resumed in 1978, when an Indian side led by Bishan
Bedi toured Pakistan.
The three-Test series that resulted, which Pakistan won 2-0, was also notable for the demolition of India’s famous spin attack. Bedi and his partners, Prasanna and Chandrasekhar, took 16 wickets between them at an average of nearly 68. Their chief tormenters were Javed Miandad and Zaheer Abbas, batsmen for whom spin held no mysteries. The new masters of subcontinental wickets were Pakistan’s fast bowlers: Imran Khan and Sarfraz Nawaz took 31 Indian wickets during the series at less than 28 apiece.
Between 1978 and 1989, India and Pakistan played 29 Tests. Pakistan won six and India just two. The rest were drawn, in the worst subcontinental fashion. They also played 38 one-day games, of which the Pakistanis won 24 and India 12. Regular cricket contests were a sign of a wider improvement in Indo-Pakistani relations – most obviously because Pakistan’s belligerent generals were too busy fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan to worry much about India. Pakistan’s cricketing superiority was a huge confidence boost to the Islamic republic. It was chiefly due to the brilliance of Pakistan’s fast bowlers, who had made their side one of the world’s best and were creating an enduring tradition. Sarfraz and Imran would give way to Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, then to Shoaib Akhtar, Mohammad Asif and many more. Armed with pace, Pakistan’s teams, although notoriously inconsistent, are almost invariably aggressive and exciting. Unlike the Indians, who have always been poor travellers, they can also be formidable in any conditions.
India has produced hardly any fast bowlers at all. This irks Indians a good deal, and the reason why is not obvious. One possibility, ventured by Vijay Merchant as early as 1952, is that Pakistanis tend to be bigger and stronger. The Australian scholar Richard Cashman lends support to that thesis: he found that the average height of Indian Test cricketers diminished significantly after 1947.
To this day, Indians continue to denigrate their cricketers’ physiques. According to Zaheer Khan, one of India’s few successful recent fast bowlers, ‘Indian bodies are not designed to bowl fast.’ This is a popular theory. When, in the 1990s, the south Indian Javagal Srinath – one of India’s few genuine pacers – proved to be an exception to it, the reaction was wryly self-deprecating. Srinath was hailed in India as ‘the world’s fastest vegetarian’. That sounds close to an admission that the problem lies, in fact, with Hindu bodies or at least with the Hindu diet. Zaheer Khan, after all, is a strapping Muslim.
This recalls an age-old Hindu bogey – the hulking meat-eating Muslim. During the Raj, the British encouraged that caricature. They labelled well-built Muslim Punjabis and Pushtuns as ‘martial races’ and recruited them into their armies. Tragically, the martial race theory lives on in Pakistan, where it has encouraged the generals to start three wars against their much bigger neighbour, none of which they have won. And theories of Hindus’ physical inability to bowl fast are on similarly shaky ground. The best explanation for India’s shortage of fast bowlers is not religious or physiological: India has 30 million Punjabis of its own and an awful lot of tall people. It is cultural. India’s biggest cricketing heroes have been batsmen, from Nayudu to Gavaskar and Tendulkar. Some see in this a continuation of the old British snobbery favouring gentleman-batsmen over working-class bowlers. But, at any rate, it is clear that Pakistan is different.
Pakistanis love cricket as fervently as Indians – maybe even more. Geoff Lawson, the former Australia fast bowler and Pakistan national team coach, told me he thought Pakistanis cared more about cricket ‘because there’s not a whole lot else for them to do. It’s either cricket or the mosque’. Above all, tearing in with their salwar kameez flapping behind them, Pakistani boys love to bowl fast.
An indication of this is a crucial innovation known as ‘tape-ball’, which is ubiquitous in Pakistani street games. It involves wrapping a tennis ball in masking tape to make it heavy enough to bowl fast, but not so heavy that it requires batsmen to wear gloves or pads. By loading one side of the ball with more tape than the other, a tape-ball can be made to swing. This makes tape-ball cricket a superb proxy for the real thing, and I have seen it played (and played it) across Pakistan, from the slums of Karachi to the battlefields of Waziristan. Yet I have hardly ever seen a tape-ball used in India.
Regular India–Pakistan cricket during the 1980s made life uncomfortable, once again, for Indian Muslims. Whenever India played Pakistan there were reports, from the small towns of north India and the slums of Bombay, of Muslims flying the Pakistani flag. Such displays caused outrage in the Indian press; though they were hardly treasonous. Indian Muslims remained as pacific and, by and large, uncomplaining as ever. Yet in cricket many let their imaginations wander.
Under its third dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan was prospering and also becoming increasingly Islamicised. In 1956 Pakistan was declared an Islamic Republic; under Zia, sharia law became an important part of its legal system. Conservative Indian Muslims liked the sound of these changes. They had no wish to move to Pakistan. Yet they idolised it, in the words of the historian M.J. Akbar, as a ‘psychological refuge’ from their daily cares. Some also attributed this feeling to a shortage of appropriate Indian Muslim role models.
This was explained to me by Javed Akhtar, a Muslim tailor well known in Delhi expatriate circles for stitching ill-fitting suits for gullible foreigners, such as myself. Javed, who was cricket-mad, wore his beard to his chest, his salwar trousers hoisted up around his ankles and had a shiny patch of dead black skin on his forehead recording his thousands of repetitions of Muslim prayer. He was also a thoroughly loyal Indian. A lifelong Congress voter, he had no relatives in Pakistan, no desire to visit that country and strongly disapproved of mixing Islam and politics. Yet since he had first started listening to cricket on the radio in the 1960s, Javed admitted that he had found it impossible not to support Pakistan’s team. ‘In my heart,’ he said, ‘I have to support my Muslim brothers.’ But what of Tiger and Baig and Salim? I asked. Javed shook his head. ‘Nawabs, filmy people – these are not Muslims.’
After a decade of relative cordiality during the 1980s, Indo-Pakistani relations dived. The cause, as so often, was Kashmir. In 1987 India’s intelligence agencies rigged an election in India’s richer portion of the divided region, to keep Kashmiri secessionists from power. This triggered an insurgency, which Pakistan’s generals, triumphant after thwarting the Soviets in Afghanistan, surreptitiously backed. By the early 1990s over 1,000 people were being killed in Indian Kashmir every year. I spent a few days there, in Srinagar, its lakeside capital, during this time. I vividly recall watching, from the veranda of the houseboat where I stayed, the nightly pyrotechnics, of gunfire and explosions, lighting up the dark sky across the lake.
Later that same year, in December 1992, Hindu zealots demolished the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, and Hindu–Muslim rioting ripped through north India. About 2,000 people were killed. Most were Muslims, the violence having been organised in many places by Hindu nationalist gangs, including a thuggish outfit in Mumbai called Shiv Sena.
The two crises – the fighting in Kashmir and the Hindu–Muslim riots – were unrelated. Hardly any non-Kashmiri Indian Muslims joined the insurgency. Yet Hindu nationalist politicians connected the two conflicts, and fed off them. And the violence proliferated. In March 1993, 13 bombs exploded in Mumbai, killing 257 people. The attack was perpetrated by Muslims as a reprisal for the Babri mosque’s destruction and its bloody aftermath, allegedly on the orders of one of the city’s Muslim dons, Dawood Ibrahim. Henceforth Hinduist demagogues openly questioned the loyalties of every Indian Muslim, especially ahead of India–Pakistan cricket ties. ‘It is the duty of Muslims to prove they are not Pakistani,’ declared Shiv Sena’s leader, Bal Thackeray, ahead of a big match. ‘I want them with tears in their eyes every time India loses to Pakistan.’
That happened rather often, because India–Pakistan cricket could no longer be mothballed when political tension arose. The growth of televised one-day cricket had made it too lucrative. During the ill-tempered 1990s there were only thr
ee India–Pakistan Test matches. But India played Pakistan in 45 one-day internationals, of which it lost 26 and won 17.
All but seven of those games – including the 1996 World Cup quarter-final in Bangalore – were staged on neutral ground. The venues included Singapore, Toronto and the Arab emirate of Sharjah, where the glitterati of both countries, socialites, tycoons and Bollywood stars, put aside their differences and partied. Mumbai’s Muslim mobsters, including Dawood, often joined them. A drug-dealer, gunrunner, bookmaker and Bollywood financier, Dawood loved his cricket. Sharjah was also only a short hop from his adopted home in Karachi. As a symbol of the gangster’s deep attachment to the game, Dawood’s daughter Mahrukh would later marry Junaid Miandad, the son of one of Pakistan’s greatest batsmen, Javed Miandad.
In the summer of 1998 the BJP formed a coalition government in Delhi and celebrated, just a few weeks later, by testing a nuclear bomb. Pakistan followed suit – albeit with a heavy heart, according to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (a former first-class cricketer of no distinction). This was the unpropitious backdrop to the first India–Pakistan Test series for a decade, which was scheduled to commence in January 1999.
Thackeray, Shiv Sena’s leader, said the Pakistanis ‘should not be allowed to set foot on Indian soil’. Only a decade before, he had been an irrelevant Maharashtrian oddball, a former cartoonist. Now his party was in coalition government with the BJP in Maharashtra and Delhi. It was also influential in cricket – the Sena chief minister of Maharashtra, Manohar Joshi, was a vice-president of the BCCI. The prospect of crowd violence, of the kind that had blighted the 1996 World Cup, loomed.
