An insider and an outsider give a spin to one of sport’s great rivalries — India versus Pakistan on the cricket field
There probably isn’t such a thing as an unbiased historical account. Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece Rashomon tells one story from the point of view of four different witnesses, their contradictory versions leaving the viewer to put the pieces together. Whether by design or by chance, Shadows Across the Playing Field: 60 Years of India-Pakistan Cricket will probably leave you with similar, if less intense, emotions.

If you strip it down to the basics, the book consists of two essays on the history of one of sport’s great rivalries — “Fantasies and Realities” by Shashi Tharoor and “Rivalry and Diplomacy” by Shaharyar Khan. As separate tales, both have certain shortcomings: Tharoor’s clarity of thought is enviable, and his ability to see the big picture, and put it in words, keeps one turning the pages. But he does seem to get caught up in the numbers — match scores, series results — that slow down the narrative considerably. Khan’s account, on the other hand, starts off sluggishly, as he spends a fair number of pages on what comes across as a slightly irrelevant, even if fair, attack on the Indian caste system.
But put together, the book offers not just a string of memories, happy and sad, uplifting and infuriating, but also an intriguing study of how differently the same set of events can be viewed.

Both Tharoor and Khan talk, for example, of the Bombay Pentangular, but their takes on the tournament — played between the Europeans, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Parsis and the Rest — are diametrically opposing. Khan makes a connection between the Pentangular and the future Pakistan state. “The Muslims were enthusiastically in favour of the Pentangular, as Jinnah had consistently maintained that the Muslims of the subcontinent were a separate nation,” he writes. Tharoor, on the other hand, mentions the Pentangular only to reject that very theory: “Religion was simply seen as one way of organising Indians for social purposes.” Both, quite evidently, sit on either side of the thin line separating the community from the communal.

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