Cricket Cauldron

The Turbulent Politics of Sport in Pakistan

Shaharyar M. Khan, Ali Khan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780760834
• eBook ISBN: 9780857733177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Pakistan is a country beset with politicised instabilities, economic problems, ethnic conflicts, religious fervour and crises of identity. It is also a country in which the game of cricket has become a nationwide obsession. How has that happened? How does a Muslim country, jealous of its independence and determined to forge a Pakistani identity, so passionately embrace the alien gentleman's game imported by the distant and departed former colonial masters? What do we learn of Pakistan from its attitudes and responses to cricket? This book sees Pakistan - its history, politics and society - through the prism of cricket. Shaharyar Khan and Ali Khan describe how cricket defines national identity and boosts morale even while Pakistan struggles to contain internal political conflict and the influence of the Taliban near and within its borders; they show how the game shapes the political, social and cultural landscape of Pakistan and its fractured relations with India. But with recent betting scandals and accusations of spot-fixing throwing Pakistani cricket into the global media spotlight, what does cricket tell us about condition of Pakistani society today?
The former Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, a man with an unparalleled insight into the establishment, Shaharyar Khan examines how this very Western sport came to embed itself in the psyche of Pakistanis old and young, transcending social and class boundaries. The authors illuminate Pakistan for readers by offering an unusual and highly original perspective - that in understanding the state of cricket in Pakistan, can we gain a deeper understanding of the state of Pakistan itself. Demonstrating how the turbulence around cricket has much wider political implications, this book will fascinate general readers and cricket enthusiasts, at the same time proving essential reading for observers of Pakistan, India and the South Asia region.

CHAPTER 1

CRICKET’S ROLE IN THE BIRTH OF PAKISTAN

In the nineteenth century, as the British presence grew in India, they brought with them the sports that they had developed at home – cricket, hockey, tennis, football, squash, badminton and even polo.¹ In India, British civilian and military officers drawn mainly from British public schools began playing cricket matches among themselves and built tennis and squash courts, especially in the garrison towns. They developed hockey, football, polo and cricket fields across India and encouraged tennis and squash ‘markers’ (professionals) – invariably Pathans who are hardy, lithe, mountain people with remarkable hand-eye coordination – to give them practice and maintain the courts. Similarly, at cricket they needed net bowlers and soon these low-paid professionals began to master the intricacies of their chosen sport.

During the nineteenth century organized cricket began to take root in India mainly in the port cities of Bombay, Poona, Karachi, Madras and Calcutta. Originally cricket matches were played between English settlers, but by the middle of the century the relatively affluent Parsi community comprising traders, businessman and technicians began to form their own clubs or gymkhanas.² The Parsis, descended from the Persian Zoroastrians, were a small but influential community who took to cricket with enthusiasm. After a while, the Parsi clubs felt strong enough to challenge English teams, and the Parsi community greeted their first success with elation. In 1895 and 1899 the Parsis sent teams to tour England but neither team set the Thames on fire. At the turn of the twentieth century, Hindu communities in these port cities started their own gymkhanas and began playing cricket, notably on the west coast of India. Soon the Hindus and Parsis were engaged in intense rivalry, their matches drawing fair crowds at the gymkhana grounds. The English still reigned supreme in the triangular contests but the communal gymkhanas were gaining ground on the British with every passing year. A decade or so later the Muslim community followed the Hindus by opening their own gymkhanas. The Muslims were encouraged to take to the sport by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the liberal Muslim educationist who had founded the Aligarh University that produced a number of fine sportsmen. By the early 1920s, there were four separate communities playing organized cricket across India – the English, the Parsis, the Hindus and finally the Muslims.

Cricket was given a significant fillip in India when Lord Harris – captain of England and the MCC – was appointed Governor of Bombay in 1890. Harris was a patrician who believed in demonstrating British supremacy in India through cricket. He invited his fellow county captain Lord Hawke to bring out an English team to India. Other English teams followed with stars like F. S. Jackson, Jack Hobbs and Wilfred Rhodes appearing for them. These teams successfully overcame the challenges of India’s, mainly communal, teams. Later another super imperialist and patrician, Douglas Jardine, led an MCC team to India in 1933 followed by Bryan Valentine’s MCC squad in 1936. By then India was beginning to produce outstanding indigenous cricketers like C. K. Nayudu (Hindu), Wazir Ali (Muslim), Amar Singh (Hindu), Lala Amarnath (Hindu) and Mohammad Nisar (Muslim).

The communal quadrangular matches that sprouted up across India attracted large crowds and provided financial gains to their sponsors and the players. Though vociferous in their support for their respective communal teams, the matches were played before sporting crowds with no communal incidents. Initially the key matches were played between the English and their budding rivals, the Parsis. Then the rivalry encompassed the Hindu–Parsi competitions. Later the Muslims entered the fray and as the Hindu–Muslim debate in India heated up, grudge matches were played between the two major communities of India.

In the late nineteenth century, the British establishment encouraged the Indian princes – Britain’s most loyal subjects in India – to take to cricket and promote the game. From their midst arose a genius – Ranjitsinhji – who almost set the Thames on fire. His batting exploits in England greatly romanticized the sport across the British Commonwealth. Ranji was followed a generation later by his nephew Prince Duleepsinhji and the Nawab of Pataudi, who toured Australia in 1932–3 as a member of Douglas Jardine’s bodyline team. All these princes scored centuries on their Ashes debuts. The Indian princes took to cricket with great fervour and became willing sponsors and employers of the game.

At the turn of the century, cricket reflected in India a mirror image of the class differences that existed on the cricket field in England. Members of the English high aristocracy, like Lord Hawke, Lord Harris, Douglas Jardine and Lord Tennyson, ensured that gentlemen (amateurs) and players (professionals) did not share the same dressing rooms and entered the cricket field from different gates. In India the princes joined the British establishment to run cricket wherever it was played.

In the influential P. J. Hindu Gymkhana, Palwankar Baloo – a low-caste Hindu but probably the greatest bowler India has ever produced – was not allowed to play for the Hindu team in the communal contests until a press campaign and influence from political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr B. R. Ambedkar pressurized the Hindus to include low-caste representatives. Even then Baloo and his brother Vithal were not allowed to take lunch and tea with their high-caste colleagues. More than in England where a social revolution was taking place, in India the spread of cricket was from the top downwards, the top being represented by the British establishment and the Indian princes usually acting in tandem. It was normal to find English selectors and umpires presiding over Indian teams. Sometimes in club matches an independent or ‘bolshi’ native umpire would be replaced mid-game as a result of pressure from the British bureaucracy.

Before India’s independence, three Indian teams toured England in 1932, 1936 and 1946. On these tours the Indian teams were led by Indian princes – the Maharajas of Porbandar (1932) and Vizianagaram (1936) – both of whom were at best club cricketers. In 1946, the English Test cricketer Nawab of Pataudi was appointed captain.

By the 1920s, India’s political scene saw the development of anti-imperialist movements under the leadership of the Congress party. Their slogan was ‘Swaraj’, meaning home rule, and initially the Congress party had the support of Muslim leaders like Jinnah and the Ali brothers. The Congress manifesto was secular and represented the voice of Indians from all communities, especially the two major religious communities: the Hindus and the Muslims. At that time Jinnah was an enthusiastic supporter of Congress’s multi-religious anti-British policy. Later Jinnah left the Congress and joined the Muslim League and took an increasingly antagonistic path from the ‘Hindu dominated’ Congress party.

It was inevitable that cricket should reflect the political climate of the times. Cricket matches between the communal teams and their English masters reflected the anti-colonial tenor of the political scene. There was, of course, a competitive edge in the matches between communal teams but these matches paled before the intensity and political fallout of matches between English and communal teams participating in the triangular and quadrangular Championships. By the 1920s English hockey teams had been overtaken by Indians who had shown remarkable ability to master the art of hockey and polo. In fact, India won all the Olympic games hockey gold medals from 1928 (Amsterdam) until 1960 (Rome). Cricket was therefore the only sport in India at which the English could demonstrate their superiority.

By the 1930s the communal triangular and quadrangular tournaments had flourished across India but Bombay began achieving centre stage in holding these popular tournaments, where they were played to full houses at the Brabourne Stadium. Inevitably politics had entered the cricketing domain as the Congress–Muslim League confrontation became more acerbic causing rioting in many Indian cities.

These opposing ideologies mainly affected Hindu attitudes towards communal cricket. Firstly, the Hindu team had to wrestle with their own internal problems of their caste system. Secondly, the Hindu team was put under extreme pressure by the secular Congress party to boycott the communal tournaments. Consequently, the Bombay Hindu gymkhana opted out of the communal tournaments between 1928 and 1933. The sponsors and players were opposed to the boycott claiming that the tournaments helped to douse the fervour of communal rioting that had spread across India due to Hindu–Muslim antagonisms.

Surprisingly these well-attended grudge matches saw no communal incidents between the throngs of rabid, partisan spectators. The teams also conducted themselves with dignity and with sporting spirit.

The Bombay Pentangular became an annual festival for the cricket-crazy Princely states, large and small. Train-loads of supporters would accompany the famous Maharajas and Nawabs from Gwalior, Indore, Patiala, Mysore, Bhopal, Baroda and the smaller states like Porbandar, Kurwai, Vizianagaram, Pataudi, Jamnagar, Dungarpur and Cooch Behar. They would occupy the famous watering holes of Bombay with their retinues of film stars, cricketers and politicians who would do the rounds in a carnival atmosphere. The Cricket Club of India’s Brabourne Stadium provided a fitting climax to this special sporting event, as it became the logical culmination of cricketing competition. So great was the interest in the Pentangulars that cricketers invariably recalled these matches as having the intensity of Test matches.

However, it would be an exaggeration to suggest that cricket played a significant role in the foundation of Pakistan that came into being on 14 August 1947. Yet cricket did have an influence – albeit a marginal one – in promoting Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s notion of his two-nation theory that became the basis of the movement for Pakistan. This two-nation theory was founded on Jinnah’s contention that the Muslims and Hindus of India comprised two separate ‘nations’, given their separate histories and identities, their differences of ethnicity, culture, language, food, custom and of course religion. As a separate and distinct entity, Jinnah claimed that the Muslims of India deserved equal treatment to the Hindus, iron-clad guarantees of their political, cultural and social beliefs. Jinnah’s two-nation theory was vehemently contested by the Hindu-dominated Congress party whose primary aim was self-rule in which all religious communities would participate as Indians and not as Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and other religions and castes. The Congress pointed to some distinguished Muslims like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad as leading figures in its anti-colonial movement. They also denied Jinnah his claim to represent all Indian Muslims since there were large tracts of Muslims in the Frontier Province under the Red Shirt leader Ghaffar Khan, the Kashmiri Muslim Sheikh Abdullah, the Bengal Muslim Fazlul Haq and the Punjab leader Sardar Shaukat Hayat, who opposed Jinnah’s two-nation theory and preferred to seek freedom under ‘one united all India’ banner.³

These competing ideas gained political momentum in the 1930s and 1940s as India’s anti-colonial movement began to reach its denouement. The Muslims, frustrated by Congress’s denial to grant them guarantees, began veering closer to Jinnah’s two-nation concept. At the time, the idea of Pakistan was more a chimera than a geographically defined entity; a bargaining chip for Jinnah, rather than a meaningful option to be pursued at the national level. In those days the two-nation theory drifted towards a vague separate entity of Pakistan that had no clearly defined geographic contours. This was probably deliberate, as defining Pakistan’s frontiers would undermine the morale and commitment of Muslims who found themselves outside its territorial limits. Moreover, the two-nation theory was aimed at reviving the glory of Muslim rule, especially under the Mughal Empire, which had been replaced by British rule for the previous 250 years during which the Muslims languished in a state of supreme decadence and a soporific nostalgia for the glories of the past. Jinnah appeared to revive the spirit of the Indian Muslim with his two-nation theory, leading to communal skirmishes often on the sporting field. For instance, the titanic battles in Calcutta on the football field between rivals Mohan Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting were seen as Hindu–Muslim clashes. The all-Muslim Bhopal Wanderers saw their frequent successes at hockey tournaments across India as being welcomed by the Muslim communities of Madras, Bombay, Lucknow, Delhi and Calcutta. The Sikh-dominated Khalsa college hockey team was similarly a proud representative of their community especially in the Punjab.

These communal skirmishes on the playing fields of India paled before the gladiatorial contests of the cricket arena. The Quadrangular and Pentangular cricket tournaments played in the port cities of Karachi, Bombay, Poona, Madras and Calcutta were brazenly communal and increasingly popular. They were played between Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and the Europeans. Finally, the Rest (comprising Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews and other religious minorities) joined the contests in 1937 as the fifth team in the Pentangular.

Naturally the communal teams attracted adverse comment from the Congress party leadership as being against the secular tenets of the party, which claimed to embrace all religious denominations. The Congress leadership saw the communal-based tournaments as a British attempt to divide and rule in India. More importantly the Muslim League saw the contests as an example of ‘parity’ between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Invariably whenever the Muslims won a tournament, Mr Jinnah would send a congratulatory message to the captain as the Muslims had helped to promote their credentials in Jinnah’s two-nation theory. So intense was the public interest in the Pentangular tournaments and so great their propensity to damage the Congress cause that its leaders Gandhi, Nehru and Patel intervened with the Hindu team to dissuade them from entering the tournaments. The Hindu team’s stalwarts like C. K. Nayudu, Amar Singh and Vijay Merchant, who were keen to continue to participate in the tournaments, claimed that the communal matches lowered community tensions and that no communal incidents had taken place during the matches. They added that the Pentangular provided a huge income for the players and for the organizers. Sensing the Hindu players’ reluctance to fall in line, the Congress leadership sought the intervention of the Maharajas – Indore, Baroda and Patiala – who were veering closer to the Congress than the British, the players’ employers, to stop them playing the Pentangular. Mahatma Gandhi wrote to the organizers of the Bombay Pentangular in the following critical terms:

My sympathies are wholly with those who would like to see these matches stopped … I would like the public of Bombay to revise their sporting code and erase from it communal matches. I can understand matches between colleges and institutions but I have never understood the reasons for having Hindu, Parsi, Muslim and other communal elements. I should have thought such unsportsmanlike divisions would be considered taboos.⁴

The Congress intervention succeeded on two occasions but the Hindu team continued to resume playing in succeeding years as a result of popular demand, to the chagrin of the Congress party and its supporters and to the delight of the Muslim League. In response to the Congress leaders and the press campaign against the communal tournaments, Vijay Merchant defended the Pentangular in the following terms:

Communal feeling between Hindus and Muslims is a product of politics not of sport. Cricket and communal series brought them closer together than any other aspect of life.⁵

Other prominent cricketers like C. K. Nayudu, Wazir Ali, Mushtaq Ali and BCCI Chairman A. S. De Mello supported Merchant’s contention that the communal Pentangulars should continue.

The other teams in the Pentangular also continued to participate. In particular, the Parsis continued because despite being a small minority they established their credentials as an educated, anglicized and progressive community. The Rest team underlined the fact that several problems did exist with the minority communities.

The results of the Bombay Quadrangular saw the Muslims defeat the fancied Hindus in 1934 and 1935. The Hindu press ascribed their loss to the factions and disunity in the Hindu team. Apart from the habitual caste problem the critics felt that making the Maharaja of Patiala – a Sikh allowed to play for the Hindus – captain of the Hindu team was highly damaging for team unity, especially as stalwarts like C. K. Nayudu and D. B. Deodhar were available. Conversely the less fancied Muslim players were united and showed remarkable team spirit.

In 1936, the Hindus defeated the Muslims in the semi-final and went on to win the trophy against the Europeans who had the services of the fearsome England fast bowler Harold Larwood employed as a coach by the Maharaja of Patiala. He played only one match and returned home unable to adjust to the heat, dust and dull pitches of India. The Quadrangular become the Pentangular in 1937, as the Rest team had been admitted to the tournament. At the 11th hour the Hindu team withdrew, ostensibly because they had not received their fair share of tickets, but in fact the raging controversy against the Hindus taking part in the communal championship, abhorred by the Congress, had taken its toll of the players and organizers. The Muslims won easily against the Parsis who had earlier knocked out the Europeans in the first round. In 1938 the Hindus were back with a bang, led now by the charismatic C. K. Nayudu, but the Muslims again beat the Hindus in the final through a tremendous team effort. The result was reversed in 1939 when the Hindus comfortably beat the Muslims to general acclaim from those elements that supported the holding of the communal Pentangulars.

Figure 1 1936 Indian touring team to England. The two stalwarts of the Bombay Pentangular – C. K. Nayudu, captain of the Hindus, and S. Wazir Ali, captain of the Muslims – are seated second and first from the left.

By 1940 World War II was raging in Europe with wide repercussions across the globe. The Congress party refused to support the British war effort unless Britain made an immediate commitment to Indian independence. The British declined. The Congress leadership including Gandhi, Nehru, Azad and Patel were sent to jail for leading their ‘Quit India’ movement. The Muslims, led by Jinnah, passed the Pakistan resolution in Lahore in 1940 and generally cooperated with the British in opposing the Nazi and Japanese threat. The schism between the Congress and the Muslims raised the political temperature several notches, sparking anti-British riots as well as communal disturbances. In spite of ...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Imran Khan
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Cricket’s role in the birth of Pakistan
• 2 The call
• 3 India’s path-breaking tour of Pakistan – March/April 2004
• 4 Woolmer enters the fray
• 5 Urgent issues facing the Pakistan Cricket Board
• 6 Climbing up the international ladder under Woolmer
• 7 International and bilateral cricket diplomacy
• 8 The controversial face of Pakistan cricket
• 9 The reasons for Pakistan’s controversial image
• 10 2006 – The fateful year
• 11 The Oval Test and its aftermath
• 12 Conclusions
• Notes