History’s Greatest Series

In our home there was a book I loved.

It was Ajit Wadekar’s My Cricketing Years and my mother had wrapped it in brown paper. Though the pages had yellowed by the early eighties, the book smelled new. The first plate, in black and white, showed Wadekar playing the lofted hook. He was tall, very thin and very elegant. He wore a cap and his gloves had their padded protectors delicately marked out in black, giving him not the martial appearance of today’s gladiators, helmets, arm protectors, chest guards, thigh guards bulging, but something more refined and graceful.
Wadekar was left-handed and for many years when English commentators would speak of the elegance of Gower, that picture appeared to mind again – and it still does. As do other moments from the book. Gavaskar wearing a tweed jacket and walking down a cobbled street in the rain sharing an umbrella with Wadekar; Dilip Sardesai, Rohan Kanhai and Garry Sobers in their twilight.

There was no mediocrity about the characters of that book. They seemed giants. On its pages, Wadekar described his conquest of the West Indies in the 1971 tour, during which India’s greatest batsman burst out on stage. Seven hundred and seventy four is a number many of my generation remember with a nod.

That was India’s cricketing moment: Triumph abroad in a tough, full-blooded engagement. Not for me the world cups and the one-day stands, with their 30-yard circles and their one-bouncer rules.

Till last week, that was the biggest achievement of Indian cricket. How then will we remember this tour of Pakistan?

How will we describe the teams?

Punjabi, Gujarati, Pushtun and Urdu spoken on one side; Punjabi, Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and Haryanvi on the other. There was a Christian and a Hindu doing battle for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, one crossing himself as he crossed 50; the other touching dirt to his forehead as he began a new spell.

The newspaper Nawa-e-Waqt is the keeper of the Pakistan ideology, the guardian of the Two-Nation theory. Its Sunday edition during the Multan test had a full page feature on the one player in the contest that the editor picked as a good Muslim. The man said his prayers all five times and spoke of the peace and calm that came over him when he entered the ground after kneeling to God.

That player of course was Irfan Pathan, the man from Gujarat, wearing the India colours.

“Who are they? They look like Indians,” said my host in Lahore before the commentator identified Irfan’s maulvi father and hijab-clad mother, on camera sitting in the VIP stand with hennaed beard, Jinnah topi and full burqa. And they did look foreign, amid the suits and the jeans of the rich Pakistanis; stoic, expressionless as their son was out for 49 in Lahore.
When India won a test and almost took the series against Australia, we celebrated our standing up to the greatest team in the world, perhaps the greatest team ever. India was shining in the world then. But this was much more. This was the victory of India over Pakistan, not one team over another.

So in Pakistan we celebrate the triumph of our nationalism. But how do we separate ourselves from Pakistan? The colours of moderate Islam got thumped by secular democracy in the cricket match, yes that is true.

In the murky skies over Islamabad on Day 4, however, this clarity was missing. Who was the ‘we’ that beat ‘them’?
For me, Pakistan was a foreign country.
Visitors to Pakistan will be shocked at how they have kept their cities and their airports. They are truly world class. India can never be this efficient or clean.

Lahore is paradise. It has huge gardens splashed through the middle of its roads. An enormous canal glides through the middle of a thoroughfare.
Indians will also be amazed with how much at ease the Lahauri is with his culture and how little this culture has to do with religion.

To me that culture is alien because it is Punjabi, not because it is Muslim.
To me, the groups of Sardars walking again in the streets of Lahore’s old city with the kirpans by their side and the shopkeepers at their elbow, seemed to belong there. They were Lahauris.

But for all of Pakistan’s foreign-ness, it had everything that we pride India for. It was pluralist, it was joyous, it was tolerant. In the colourful Indian crowds, clapping, shouting, shopping, Pakistans also discovered something perhaps foreign to themselves and perhaps something of themselves.
This was the greatest series ever played in the history of cricket, perhaps because it was not about cricket at all. Cricket was not the winner here; cricket was not even in the running.

With their teams in the vanguard, the legions of India and Pakistan met in an embrace half-combative, half-friendly, fully emotional.

People will cite Douglas Jardine’s Bodyline series as the defining moment of cricket, when it matured into an aggressive modern sport from being a gentleman’s leisurely pursuit.

It is a white man’s world, but if ever a series was historic, it was the one we just won.

This series was a conversation and a debate between the pluralism of modern, irreligious India and the pluralism of modern, Islamic Pakistan.
I’m not sure who won that.

Many years later, seeing Wadekar in person, as coach of India’s team, he seemed not half the man he was in his book. He was a stammering, inarticulate figure, incapable of doing the mighty deeds his writings described.
How will we remember the teams that played out this contest?
I have a feeling that they will be recalled warmly, for their talent, their discipline, their unity and their faith.

These teams are what India and Pakistan should be, should aspire to be and perhaps will never be.