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Tomorrow, at exactly 9:30 am Saint Lucia time, I will give up my fifteen years of loyalty to the Indian Cricket Team.

Image from Espn Cricinfo

Ever since I was introduced to cricket as a child while visiting my grandparents in Peshawer, I have followed Team India with undying passion. The irony lies in the fact that my fondness of them began at a time when they were anything but a powerhouse in the world of cricket. Pakistan, the country where I was introduced to the game, however was at the peak of its glory. The great Wasim Akram was leading them to victory after victory. Yet, there was something indescribable about Team India that immediately drew me. It was such a powerful attraction that for the next fifteen years I remained a faithful supporter.
And what fifteen years they have been! For almost half of those years, I had no idea what the majority of the players on team India looked like because I followed the broadcast of the games on a weak signal of All India Radio that I was magically able to receive in Kabul. When India played the 1999 World Cup in England, I followed the games late into the night. Sleeping in the same room as three of my siblings, I would pull the quilt over my head and hold the radio close to my ear, enjoying every minute of the commentary that switched back and forth between Hindi and English.(Headphones were a rare commodity in Kabul those days.) The only pictures of players I ever saw until 2001 were those printed in Pakistani newspapers that made their way to Kabul in tomato crates.
From 2001 onwards, after the fall of the Taliban, I was able to watch certain matches on TV at a relative’s house who owned satellite television. I would go through enormous pain to produce an original excuse so my father would allow me to sleepover. As soon as I arrived at their house, I would dash to their living room and turn the TV on. For the rest of my stay their, my eyes would be glued to the screen, taking in every minute of the beautiful game with sheer pleasure.
During the earlier part of the past fifteen years, Team India lost match after match, blew opportunity after opportunity. When, for once, they came close to winning a World Cup under Saurav Ganguly, they meekly submitted to Australia in the final as if to say they were unworthy of the progress they had made. The paradox of Team India was always that it was a team full of supertars, yet not a superstar team. From a hardcore fan’s point of view, this was always incredibly frustrating. But despite the ups and downs (mostly downs in the early years), I never gave up on Team India and I always prayed for the slightest of victories.

In the recent past, the picture has been different. Team India has emerged as force in the World Cricket, both on and off the field. Under Captains Gangully, Dravid, and Dhoni India has won most of their overseas tours and continued to dominate at home. Today, sitting at the top of ICC rankings, the young team believes in its itself and  promises glory. But it is at the height of their glory that I leave Team India.

For all these years, I have supported India because the participation of my home country, Afghanistan, in world cricket was only a dream. Tomorrow, however that dream turns into reality and I will have the only legitimate reason to shift loyalty.
In the past two years, the rise of Afghanistan into a serious cricketing nation has been unprecedented and unbelievable the least. Within two years, they have bulldozed their way through four divisions of ICC and announced themselves at the gates of the major powers such as India and South Africa. Their qualification for the ICC World T20, taking place in the Caribbean, and their acquisition of ODI status brings them head to head with the top nations in world cricket.

Tomorrow, Afghanistan plays its first game of World T20 against India. When Captain Nawroz Mangal walks out for the toss, it will be the first time that I will wish against India. When the coin is tossed and the game has begun, many Afghans around the world will be in tears for sure, because no one would have imagined seeing Afghanistan compete in the largest arena of world cricket so early in its recovery from war

A NYT piece by Akash Kapur observes that India’s growing prosperity has crowded out the arts and humanities:

As India grows richer, its culture is changing. The question is whether that culture will be defined solely by the nation’s new prosperity — whether a nation in the midst of a consumerist frenzy can maintain noncommercial islands of intellectual and cultural endeavor, and whether a population determined to get rich can appreciate pursuits whose returns are less immediately tangible.

As Columbia professor Sheldon Pollock recently pointed out, the opposite was true throughout much of India’s history. The mastery of the Sanskrit language was considered a crowning intellectual achievement, one of the worthiest goals of human life. Sanskrit works were circulated — in Pollock’s own words — as “precious literary commodities”. Sanskrit culture was not restricted to a class of elites but pervaded India’s social, political, and cultural thinking. And of course, Sanskrit literary productivity was astounding; there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of times as many manuscripts in Sanskrit as there are in Greek and Latin combined.

However, all is not lost. With the glut of qualified humanities PhDs in the United States, India can expand its humanities offerings simply by increasing higher education funding and hiring young professors directly out of graduate school, when they are most willing to relocate. Given that India’s colleges currently accommodate only a small fraction of the country’s student population, it is strong educational policy as well.

The hardest part, of course, is convincing young Indians that the humanities matter.

Recently, Pakistani cricket has been in doldrums once again. Seven senior players (four of them former or current captains) have been either fined or banned without the slightest of

Image from the BBC

transparency in the process.  While no cricket follower will find the chaos of Pakistani cricket a surprise since the PCB has a rich history of controversy, the recent punishments have been unprecedented.

Amidst such chaos, I wondered about the last time that a sense of order and calm prevailed at the PCB. My curiosity lead me to the period between 2003-2006 when Shahryar Khan, a former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan was at the helm—a year before their coach Bob Woolmer was murdered during the World Cup 2007. The suave diplomat-turned-cricket-administrator brought the rival nations of India and Pakistan closer by arranging matches across the border after years of severed ties. However, that accomplishment seems secondary to the herculean task of ridding Pakistani cricket from infighting.

Last week, while attending a talk by Barbara Metcalf at the South Asia Institute, I realized that even that brief period of calm almost did not happen. For Shahryar Khan wasn’t meant to be the Director of PCB, but the Nawab of Bhopal, one of the princely states of India. Had his mother, Abida Sultan, not given up her right to the throne at the time of India’s independence. But that’s precisely what she did when she crossed the border with young Shahryar and settled in Pakistan in 1950.
Even more interesting is the fact that  Shahryar would have been only the second male Nawab in the history of the state of Bhopal in over a century.

In 1819, Qudsia Begum took over the throne of Bhopal after her husband’s assassination. With her began the reign of the Begums. While she was accepted as an anomaly, no

Image taken from Wikipedia

one could have imagined that Bhopal would be ruled by women for the rest of its years as a state. Qudsia Begum, however, made sure that would be the case by fighting to establish her daughter, Sikandar Jahan, as her successor.

The most outstanding of the Bhopal begums is Nawab Shah Jehan, Shahryar’s  great-great grandmother. Not only was she a prolific author and poet, but

also a strong promoter of Islamic rule over a state that only had Muslims at a small minority. But most interesting is her status as a social rebel, going against the accepted traditions of her time. “In 1871, she made a radical second marriage, a break with respectability and family custom – which she justified as Islamic.” Despite taking such socially radical steps, she managed to rule over a princely-state made up of anti-British jihadis and a large Hindu majority.

No doubt, Shahryar Khan inherited some of his leadership skills from his ancestors, the Begums of Bhopal!

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