Showcasing Pakistan

In 2001, a few months after 9/11, I was in Washington DC with some teenagers who asked me if Pakistan was a country in Eastern Europe. Within a year, however, Pakistan would forever lose that sense of anonymity and, rather than being ignored, it would be covered endlessly by hordes of foreign correspondents.

Cordoned in expensive hotels, limited largely to Islamabad and meeting only taxi drivers and super-elite hosts, these correspondents produced pieces (and later books) on Pakistan which were relentlessly critiqued and satirised for how clueless they were.

Yet recently when I was asked to mention my favourite books on the country, my two choices were both written by foreigners. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Pundits from Pakistan and Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus are based on very disparate topics – one is about a historical cricket tour and the other a history of a grand river – yet their outsider status allows both authors to see coherence to Pakistan that we often fail to see ourselves. What they also seem to have in common is a genuine love for the country, which doesn’t seem to dull their objectivity as serious authors. The books have lovely anecdotes such as Bhattacharya telling former Pakistani cricketers about their own records and legends, and Albinia explaining to tribesmen how Alexander the Great travelled down the same valleys they are traversing. In effect, they display the ability to show Pakistan to itself.

Peter Oborne, the author of Wounded Tiger — A History of Cricket in Pakistan, is certainly similar in having crafted a wonderfully original narrative of the history of Pakistan, one underpinned by a meticulous approach to research but motivated by a passionate desire to reframe how the cricketing world looks at the country. A small, and immensely satisfying, glimpse of this approach can immediately be seen in the preface, where Oborne tackles the rather Orientalist views espoused by Indian diplomat and politician Shashi Tharoor in an earlier book, Shadows Across the Playing Field. Oborne’s deconstruction of Tharoor’s claims is done using facts rather than opinions, and his detailed rebuttal feels definitive, and long overdue.

The book is divided into four separate parts. The first two, The Age of Kardar and The Age of Khan, follow events in a chronological manner. The latter two, The Age of Expansion and The Age of Isolation, are organised thematically, with essays on topics such as Reverse Swing and Match Fixing which go back and forth across time to tell the story.

I found the part covering the period from Independence to 1975 most enjoyable and revelatory. At first I thought this was a consequence of the fact that I knew little of that era before this book, but this is also the longest part (more than a third of the book’s 624 pages) and the one where Oborne spends considerable time in developing the socio-political context of cricket in Pakistan.Famous stories from partition, like Fazal Mahmood’s near escape or the Mohammad family’s travails, are important ones that needed repeating.

But it is tales such as the intrigue which led to Pakistan’s first captain getting replaced before the country played its first official Test (Mian Mohammad Saeed replaced by A H Kardar) which are both wonderfully recounted and furnished with exhaustive research. It is also a very enlightening section, since there are some stunning similarities between the chutzpah and daring of Pakistan’s early successes and their latter moments of glory. From inspired spells and match-winning centuries to dropped catches and humiliating collapses, Oborne works hard to establish the genesis of the legend of Pakistan cricket as a whole. He shows how the ‘mercurial’ tag that came to define Pakistan is a result of luck, difficult political conditions and a ferocious desire to prove doubters wrong.

Interestingly, for an author who contributes to some of the UK’s most conservative newspapers, Oborne’s other theme in this section, and for much of the rest of the book, is an evisceration of British condescension towards Pakistani cricket. His recollections of the shameful ‘ragging’ of a Pakistani umpire by a touring Marylebone Cricket Club side in the 1950s ends up taking more space than later discussions on match-fixing and the 2009 terrorist attack on Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. While some international reviewers have seen this as proof of Oborne’s bias, it is also indicative of the shameful way Pakistan was and is treated and written about on the world stage.

The remainder of the book unfolds at a more hurried pace, as there are a huge number of matches and events to cover and the author cedes the control of the narrative to these. The quality of research remains just as exemplary, but the narrative becomes drier. The switch over to the theme based essays helps address some of these problems, but it doesn’t quite reach the reading pleasure of the first part, where Oborne takes more time to draw out characters and establish subtexts.

And that perhaps is one thing I would critique about the book. After having established the early history so wonderfully, the reader is left asking for more in the latter pages. Events such as the 1992 World Cup are not quite done justice to and often seem to rush past without being fully appreciated. Yet that could be a conscious decision, since so much literature already exists on these subjects. The same logic could be extended to issues such as fixing and terrorism, which (thankfully for me but perhaps disappointingly for others) he gets through quickly, even if assiduously.

Ultimately, Oborne’s triumph, and strength, is to shed light on the lesser known areas. The essay on Women’s Cricket in Pakistan – to give one example – is not only revelatory, but dramatic and disillusioning in equal measures.

In the end, perhaps the greatest testament to Pakistani cricket is Oborne himself. Reading the book and his impassioned appeals for the country to be viewed differently and more sympathetically, you come to realise that he made all this effort to understand our society purely because of the love and excitement Pakistani cricket generated within him. It is a noble and romantic effort, and makes you wonder why more of us can’t do the same.