It's a lovely story to illustrate the extent and reach of the passion for India's real national sport (despite all the General Knowledge quiz books that instruct students that India's national sport is hockey, the marketplace has voted decisively for cricket). But that was not the only reason I quoted it.
In reproducing the tale, I omitted the name of the cricket-chauvinist camel driver. Mr. Park does not make much of this, but it was Amin Khan. This committed fan of the national team, with his “disparaging remarks” about the players from across the border, is a Muslim.
It should hardly be worth mentioning. After all, 13 percent (perhaps 14) of our population follows both the Islamic faith and the fortunes of our national team. But it is a sad commentary on our times that the loyalty of Indian Muslims to India's cricketing success should have been questioned by certain elements in our country. It has long been one of the favorite complaints of the Hindutva brigade that Indian Muslims set off firecrackers whenever the Indian team loses to Pakistan. This is one of those “urban legends” that acquires mythic proportions in the retelling, even though the evidence for the charge is both sparse and anecdotal. Certainly some Muslims may have behaved in this way, but the percentage of the community they represent is minuscule. The camel driver, it is clear, would have been astonished at such conduct: even he, illiterate and poor, knows where his home is, and therefore where his loyalties lie.
But then those who identify the nation with a specific religion would themselves not expect devotees of other faiths to share their feelings. Their unseemly triumphalism after India's victory over Pakistan (a victory achieved by a team including two Muslims and a Sikh, and captained by a Hindu with a Christian wife) was unseemly precisely because it took on sectarian rather than nationalist overtones. And reports came in — perhaps exaggerated — of clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups within India in the aftermath of the defeat of Pakistan. What on earth, I wondered, would prompt petty bigots (on both sides) to reduce a moment of national sporting celebration into a communal conflict?
Cricket in independent India has always been exempt from the contagion of communalism. Despite the religious basis of Partition, Indian cricket teams always featured players of every religious persuasion. Three of the country's most distinguished and successful captains — Ghulam Ahmed, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, and Mohammed Azharuddin — were Muslims, as was our best-ever wicket-keeper, Syed Kirmani. Perhaps more important, so were two of the most popular cricketers ever to play for the country, Abbas Ali Baig and Salim Durrani. Who can forget the excitement stirred by Baig's dream debut in England in 1959, when he was conscripted out of Oxford University by an Indian team in the doldrums (“Don't be vague,” an English commentator declared, “call for Baig!”) and promptly hit a century both in his first tour match and on his Test debut? Or that magical moment when, as Baig walked back to the pavilion in Bombay after a brilliant 50 against Australia, an anonymous sari-clad lovely ran out and spontaneously greeted him with an admiring (and scandalously public) kiss? The episode is part of national lore; it has been immortalized in Salman Rushdie's novel The Moor's Last Sigh. Who cared, then, in those innocent 1960s, that Baig was Muslim and his admirer Hindu? Who in the screaming crowds that welcomed his appearance thought of Salim Durrani's religion when they cheered themselves hoarse over that green-eyed inconsistent genius with the brooding movie-star looks? I will never forget the outrage that swept the country when he was dropped from the national team during an England tour in 1972; signs declaring “No Durrani No Test” proliferated like nukes. I do not believe there have been two more beloved Indian cricketers in the last fifty years than Baig and Durrani — and their religion had nothing to do with it.
Which is as it should be. Apart from the great Muslim players I mentioned, India has been captained by Christians (Vijay Hazare and Chandu Borde), Parsis (Polly Umrigar and Nari Contractor), and a Sikh (Bishen Singh Bedi). Mohammad Kaif may be leading India before the decade is over, just as he captained the national youth team to spectacular success a few years ago. Cricketing ability and sporting leadership have nothing to do with the image of your Maker you raise (or fold) your palms to in worship. When India wins (or loses), all of India wins (or loses).
The degradation of public discourse that has accompanied the rise of religious nativism in our country since the late 1980s must not be allowed to contaminate our national sport.
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So it was with some trepidation that I declared, on the strength of his early performance in Test cricket, that Irfan Pathan was already well on the way to being my favorite player in what, in 2003–4, seemed an extraordinary Indian team. My enthusiasm might partly have been explained by being the father of twin sons who were then nineteen, and the sight of the nineteen-year-old Pathan bounding down to hurl his thunderbolts filled me with that mixture of pride and awe that I think of as typically paternal (admiration for what is being done, suffused by wonder that this youngster is doing it).
But that was not the whole story. After all, the Indian team was full of stars who deserve greater encomia. And yet — what had Pathan brought to the Indian team? Raw youth? We already had that in wicket-keeper Parthiv Patel, a year younger than Pathan; but Pathan's was a youthfulness raw only in its energy and enthusiasm. His conduct had a maturity that belied his nineteen years, and it was allied to a temperament his elders should value. Pathan was constantly striving, trying new angles, outthinking the batsmen, and he was always seeking to learn, to improve, to educate himself. Pathan had heart, and he also had a head. His English was not yet as ready-for-prime-time as his telegenic looks, but in his interviews he had already spoken of figuring out the difference between bowling in Australian conditions and in those of the subcontinent. Irfan Pathan was old enough to command a place in the team as a matter of right, and young enough to know that he still had a lot to learn.
But since I am not a sportswriter, there was another aspect that thrilled me about Irfan Pathan playing for India. And that lay in the simple fact that his very existence was a testament to the indestructible pluralism of our country. He hails from Gujarat, a state in which many — many with loud voices and great influence — have sought to redefine Indianness on their own terms. Neither his religion nor his ethnicity would have qualified him as Indian enough in their eyes. He is a Muslim, and not just a Muslim but the son of a muezzin, one whose waking hours are spent calling the faithful to prayer. Worse still, he is a Pathan, whose forebears belong to a slice of land that is no longer territorially part of India. To be a Gujarati Muslim Pathan might be thought of as a triple disqualification in this Age of Togadia. Irfan Pathan had not just shrugged off his treble burden, he had broken triumphantly through it.
And he had done so without apology for his identity, or his faith. Interviewed after his 3 for 32 in the last one-day international clinched India the series, Pathan told Dean Jones of his happiness that India had won “after” (not “because of”) his bowling, and attributed this success to his Maker. “God is with me. I knew with God's help I'll bowl well. I had that confidence in God.” So the muezzin's son had invoked Allah's blessings on his team, oblivious to the fact that its opponents were playing under the green banner of an Islamic Republic. What a wonderful reinvention of Indian secularism.
So when Irfan Pathan beamed that dazzling smile after taking yet another wicket for the India he so proudly represents, he filled my heart with more than cricketing pride. He reminded me that he represents a country where it is possible for a nineteen-year-old from a beleaguered minority to ascend to the peak of the nation's sporting pantheon; and even more, that he represents an idea, an immortal Indian idea, that our country is large enough and diverse enough to embrace everyone who chooses to belong to it. This is an idea that no one, however well-connected politically, has the right to deny. The pluralist palimpsest of Indianness can never be diminished by the killers of Gujarati Muslims and the evil men who incited them. Irfan Pathan is their standing, leaping, glorious repudiation.