Sounds of sport and
touches of poetry
by Syed Badrul Ahsan
Life may not exactly be cricket or be all about cricket. But cricket does sometimes inject some much-needed verve into life. That is the approach one can take to the way Rahul Bhattacharya describes it all. No, it is not about the history of cricket that he speaks about. Neither is it the usual commentary on the game that we get to experience in Pundits from Pakistan. What we do get is a clear feeling that although cricket does not have to be played by everyone or even observed by everyone, it can surely be read about by many. And especially when the matter is one of a match or string of matches between India and Pakistan, life somehow comes to a standstill even as the adrenaline begins to flow all over the place.
Bhattacharya sub-titles his work as ‘on tour with India, 2003-4’, which on the face of it is not saying much. But, wait! Given the entirety of the political mistrust the two countries have regularly gone through, the very fact that Indian cricketers were able to make it to Pakistan and play some enthralling games there (the enthralling bit came from the Pakistani side as well), it makes sense to argue in defence of Bhattacharya. It is not every day that people get to write about cricket matches in book form. But then, the question you could ask is whether Bhattacharya writes about raw cricket here. He does, most certainly. But then he adds a whole lot of spice to the game, to his narration of the events that precede and straddle the matches. Begin with his pursuit of the visa he needs to travel to Pakistan. Anyone who is conversant with the way the subcontinent works —- and it works slowly and ponderously, despite all that endless talk of the SAARC spirit —- knows how strenuous an exercise it is to come by a visa to visit a country that once was part of the same land. That is what Bhattacharya necessarily goes through. The visa arrives and finally he is in Pakistan, where he bumps into people curious to know what an Indian actually looks like. If there is anything of a legacy the 1947 partition has left behind for subcontinental men and women, it is the sheer weight of nostalgia they go through nearly every day of their lives. The writer is accosted by men who tell him of their Indian background; and then there are those who, despite being Pakistanis, pretend to be Indians, in that pre-1947 sense of the meaning.
Rahul Bhattacharya brings to his telling of the story (it is actually a string of stories, all woven on a single, charming thread) the kind of wit that one does not generally come by. His meetings with Pakistani cricket officials are at once sessions in garrulity and exercises in ego. But Bhattacharya is not content to confine his narrative to mere explications of cricket. The pundits he runs into or writes about stretch all the way from cricketers to politicians to military rulers. For any Indian, Pakistan has always been a fascinating study. There has been the constant resolve in an average Pakistani to prove to an average Indian that the latter can be bested in anything of significance in life, and that includes cricket. And yet there are the obvious hints of camaraderie in cricket, as in the huge banner depicting the Indian and Pakistani flags with the bold message, Pyar To Hona Hi Tha. That, incidentally, is a song from one of the more modern (it all depends on what you mean here) movies produced in Bombay. But in cricket, it does its useful bit. Music and message apart, Bhattacharya goes into a refreshing bit of intellectual history vis-à-vis cricket in the subcontinent. He notes that the first two decades after 1947 found Indian and Pakistani cricket defined by equal Oxbridge representation (think here of Abbas Ali Baig and Pataudi for India and Kardar and Javed Burki for Pakistan). In diminished form, the tradition was carried into the 1980s by a couple of Pakistanis, the cousins Imran Khan and Majid Khan. Jahangir Khan, Majid’s father, in the old days played cricket on an all-India basis and went to Cambridge. And then, of course, is the non-Oxbridge generation in Pakistan, typified by none other than Javed Miandad, who took quite something of perverse pleasure during the English county matches by sauntering up to the Englishmen, turning around and breaking wind. So are there any class differences in the composition of the Pakistani cricket canvas? Bhattacharya puts the question to Arif Abbasi, whose answer is cheerfully shocking: ‘Basically, everybody is illiterate, so it’s not a problem.’
Read on and feel the hilarity of the tales spun by Bhattacharya. He commits a bit of a faux pas when he asks Irfan, post-match, if he has any relatives in Pakistan. After all, the Muslim Indian is in Muslim Pakistan. The player replies tersely, Nahin, Hindustan Ka Hi Hoon —- no, I am from India. The Pakistani named Tanveer claims he has friends in Tendulkar and the poet-director Gulzar before producing photographs showing him in their exalted company.
And then the drive to Wagah, where Pakistan Zindabad and Allahu Akbar are sounded in a state of near delirium. Stepping into India, Bhattacharya suddenly has his eardrums pierced by the Pakistani number Dil Dil Pakistan. Cricket is over. It is time to be back to politics as usual.Rahul Bhattacharya brings to his telling of the story (it is actually a string of stories, all woven on a single, charming thread) the kind of wit that one does not generally come by. His meetings with Pakistani cricket officials are at once sessions in garrulity and exercises in ego. But Bhattacharya is not content to confine his narrative to mere explications of cricket. The pundits he runs into or writes about stretch all the way from cricketers to politicians to military rulers. For any Indian, Pakistan has always been a fascinating study. There has been the constant resolve in an average Pakistani to prove to an average Indian that the latter can be bested in anything of significance in life, and that includes cricket. And yet there are the obvious hints of camaraderie in cricket, as in the huge banner depicting the Indian and Pakistani flags with the bold message, Pyar To Hona Hi Tha. That, incidentally, is a song from one of the more modern (it all depends on what you mean here) movies produced in Bombay. But in cricket, it does its useful bit. Music and message apart, Bhattacharya goes into a refreshing bit of intellectual history vis-à-vis cricket in the subcontinent. He notes that the first two decades after 1947 found Indian and Pakistani cricket defined by equal Oxbridge representation (think here of Abbas Ali Baig and Pataudi for India and Kardar and Javed Burki for Pakistan). In diminished form, the tradition was carried into the 1980s by a couple of Pakistanis, the cousins Imran Khan and Majid Khan. Jahangir Khan, Majid’s father, in the old days played cricket on an all-India basis and went to Cambridge. And then, of course, is the non-Oxbridge generation in Pakistan, typified by none other than Javed Miandad, who took quite something of perverse pleasure during the English county matches by sauntering up to the Englishmen, turning around and breaking wind. So are there any class differences in the composition of the Pakistani cricket canvas? Bhattacharya puts the question to Arif Abbasi, whose answer is cheerfully shocking: ‘Basically, everybody is illiterate, so it’s not a problem.’
Pundits From Pakistan
On Tour With India, 2003-4
Rahul Bhattachaya
Picador
ISBN 0330 43979 0
These are poems you can use to whip up the political animal in you, assuming of course that you are political and you have the animal instinct in you. Nadeem Rahman, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, calls the collection Politically Incorrect Poems. It is quite easy to see why. He runs through an entire gamut of modern history (you might even describe it, if you wish, as post-modernistic times) and almost appears to fling his anger and his sarcasm at his reader. Watch the tone in True Brits:
There will always be an England / As long as there’s Scotland / True Brits would not be English / if not for Scotch whisky . . .
The poem is in essence a recapitulation of British history, and it includes the colonial bit of it as well, through a combination of wit and a certain exasperation with English mores. If that is the way Rahman observes Britain, he does nearly the same in his cheerfully caustic survey of America, which for him represents the best and the worst and everything else besides:
America is an ethnic sandwich spread / between two deceptively thin slices / of white bread . . .That is of course preceded by his concept of two Americas, one of which has irretrievably been lost (and that is the America of the founding fathers). The other is, you may have guessed it, the giant, fearsome military machine, increasingly lengthening in shadow, that it has turned out to be. The poet speaks here of the wonderful opiate of power. The politically incorrect is surely at work. Or you could say that it is largely irreverence that comes through the poetry. When Rahman dwells on a now dead and buried, depending on how you view the consequences of Gorbachev’s politics, ideal of socialism, his tone is of the clearly mocking kind. As a prelude to Comrades, he invokes memories of Che Guevara and has Fidel Castro call attention to the guerrilla’s heroism. The logical next step is for the poet to go through the long trajectory of socialism’s rise and fall, adding to the story the chronology of the movement, before speaking of the power of the masses to rise anew. You do not quite know if the optimism at the end of the poetry rises from within the heart or is a swansong masquerading as new inspiration. Here is what you hear from the poet:
. . . never doubt / our resurrection / we’ll meet again / comrades . . .
The theme of post-war internationalism, with all its attendant fears, is what Nadeem Rahman brings to the poetry. His preoccupation with global politics as it has shaped and reshaped itself, sometimes even mutating into unimaginable shapes, is palpable enough. His introduction to his poetry on the Cold War begins with a restating of a message dispatched by a State Department official to John Kenneth Galbraith: “To understand this world you must know that the military establishments of the United States and the Soviet Union have united against the civilians of both countries.” That is the kind of erudition Nadeem Rahman brings to his poetry, an instance of which comes through once more in his reflections on the state of the Mohajir, or the refugee. He asks the question: What is a Mohajir? And then he answers it in tones that highlight both the arrogance and the plight of the refugee:
The mohajir is he / who is a perennial refugee / not content to be a second class citizen / . . . a fugitive, in search / of his lost dignity . . .
The poet courses down through time and arrives at the point where Bangladesh deals with the huge question of its freedom fighters. For him, it is all the story of a woman who did not lose her husband or son to the war, but who has nevertheless been losing out on life for as long as she can recall. And yet the struggle for freedom, for this woman, for citizens like her, has been one of a search for an end to poverty:
She did not die / on the battlefield / but under the wheels / of your bourgeois / status symbol . . . / she was the quintessential / freedom fighter, dreaming / of freedom, from hunger
Much of the poetry comes touched with huge dollops of irreverence, interspersed as it is by spoonfuls of wit. Rahman’s Open Letter to God is a refreshingly tragic account of man’s inhumanity to man through the ages:
I wasn’t there / when they set ablaze / temples and tabernacles / nor have I trod their / desecrated sod / I am neither / Gentile nor Jew / only an infidel / but where / the hell / were you / God!
There are the soft touches, through all the anger and irritation, that sometimes shine through the poetry. The spirit of poetry is a luminosity Nadeem Rahman does not miss. Hear him sing in Akhri Shama:
The lamp is dead / the bulbul fled / and all is silent / Urdu has come / and gone, like a song / of Ghalib’s . . .
Politically Incorrect Poems
Nadeem Rahman
Academic Press & Publishers Library
ISBN 984 08 0167 8
— Syed Badrul Ahsan
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