On so few will so much rest. Tomorrow, India will commence their full cricket tour of Pakistan. At Karachi’s National Stadium, when Shoaib Akhtar steams in to bowl to Sachin Tendulkar — weather and fitness permitting — the entire subcontinent will pick up the threads from that March 1, 2003, South African safari when the Little Master won the round. Ominous predictions of a contest between Indian batting and Pakistani bowling will echo through the days ahead. For some this will be a stirring reminder of Javed Miandad’s pre-tour psy-op. Others will gently hark back to 1954, to India’s first tour of Pakistan, when Abdul Hafeez Kardar opined that the Indians were afraid of fast bowling. Take your pick, or take both. This is a much awaited tour, and it will afford the subcontinent a rare opportunity to justify the ‘‘great claims’’ made for the noble game. International cricket, they say, is in crisis. There is too much cricket going around these days. Magnificent profits from television rights and the International Cricket Council’s globalising mission are draining fixtures of charm, magic and significance. The players too realise this. That is perhaps why Australian vice-captain Adam Gilchrist recently mooted the idea of a new Tendulkar-Waugh Cup, to be scheduled on January 26, coincidentally India’s Republic Day and Australia’s Independence Day. It’s a thought more than worth considering and it points straight to a keen rivalry’s key ingredient: context. And in contemporary cricket, context is the quality Indian and Pakistani cricket have first claim to. Social historians have long agonised over both cricket’s deep hold on the national imagination in certain lands and its tame reception elsewhere. Ever since the British carried the game beyond their isles as part of their imperial agenda, on the field it has facilitated split narratives. For the British, it was yet another expression of the cultural superiority of their ways, it was offered as yet more proof of their civilising responsibility. Hence, Lord Harris, as governor of Bombay, assisted in the spread of cricket in India but blithely held that in the matter of patience Indian batsmen stood not a chance. For their colonial subjects, however, the cricket field became a symbolic site to assert their legitimate claim to equality and self-rule. This is why even now Brian Lara imbues the current England tour of the Caribbean with political content and asserts the importance of beating their former colonial masters. It is thus that in historian Ramachandra Guha’s reckoning Palwankar Baloo — and not K.S. Ranjitsinhji — was the first great Indian cricketer. Through his life could be read the social and political transformation of India in the years leading up to 1947. It is thus that the Ashes, traditionally cast as the most intense cricket rivalry, is losing its charm. True, England are too easily defeated these days, especially Down Under; but in that part of the world much historical and political meaning has been leached from the England-Australia match-ups. Australia is increasingly being drawn toward Asia and the phenomenal interest in India’s tour this winter could be seen as a reflection of both a more salient challenge as well as a reflection of a new international order. Where, at what crossroads, does this place the India tour of Pakistan? It was not always so, but at this moment in time cricket is the one activity that turns a critical gaze on the entire gamut of India-Pakistan relations. Specifically, in the detailed preparations for this tour, it has provided the first non-political expression of renewed bilateral goodwill. It has employed the full depth and breadth of the architecture of diplomatic engagement that is being resurrected. Proposed border crossings are testing the visa-issuing capacities of the now strengthened high commissions and the slim schedules of revived air, road and rail links. Facelifts in Lahore’s bazaars and hiked tariff cards in Rawalpindi’s hotels reflect the enormous enthusiasm about people-to-people contact revived by Prime Minister Vajpayee’s peace initiative. And coordination between security officials of the two countries is an uncommon public acknowledgement of a joint stake in beating the designs of terrorists. Cricket, then, provides a shared idiom for India and Pakistan. There is so much cultural space, so many other arenas, where interaction would be beneficial and entertaining. In exploring the subcontinent’s wellsprings of musical and literary endeavours, in documenting the architectural heritage of north India, archaelogical excavations and linguistic continuities. In so much else. For whatever reasons, however, cricket is the most inclusive activity today. The sport has always thrived on paradoxes. Here’s a relevant one: it will over the next six weeks interrogate the circumstances for bilateral engagement, and in turn it could be the catalyst for diversified cooperation. For that, cricketers will have to take ownership of the competition. Cricket writer Gideon Haigh has bemoaned the fact that the huge reservoirs of heroism and good faith accumulated by older players have been expended by contemporary sportsmen — by their seeming focus on commercial returns and whispered allegations of cricket’s most sinful crime, match-fixing. Once upon a time, a Douglas Jardine stopped his fielder from running out the non-striker when Lala Amarnath was celebrating his century. Amarnath, in turn, as manager of the team that toured Pakistan in the mid-1950s, was alert to the larger objective of bridging gaps and ‘‘bringing the two countries closer’’. No one in this age would expect cricketers to moonlight as diplomats — the scrutiny of each and every action of theirs is too intense, the demand for victory too vociferous. But. For the series to come truly alive, for Saurav Ganguly and Inzaman-ul Haq’s boys to take possession of a precious contest, they will have to enlarge their hearts and place entertaining cricket above defensive strategies and the understandable fear of failure.
