Forgotten heroes – the true story of India

In his history of the people who helped make India today, Sunil Khilnani (The Guardian) set out to complicate western stereotypes. He ended up also challenging the prejudices and stories Indians tell themselves about their past

 

Bhutanatha Lake, Badami, India. Photograph: Chris Lisle/Corbis

Years ago, I scored a ticket to the first cricket Test match to be played in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat: India versus a West Indian 11 that included the peerless Viv Richards. I had expectations of an epic match as I joined other fans pushing into the brand new ground. But by the end, it was the performance of the spectators, not the players, that had staggered me. As the West Indians took the field, loud monkey-whoops filled the air, and banana skins rained down from the stands. The pelted players – probably the greatest West Indian team in history – stood there in their flannels, stunned.

Indians are rightly sensitive about racism directed at them; an Indian student beaten up in Australia, say, will swiftly become national news. Yet some Indians can be unthinkingly at ease with their own contempt for people of darker skin – a contradiction that warps both our present and our sense of the Indian past. As I travelled across India exploring the contemporary afterlives of 50 important historical figures spanning 2,500 years for Incarnations, my new book and 50-part BBC radio series, I heard dozens of young Indians extoll the bravery of Shivaji, the 17th-century Maratha warrior who defied the Mughals and serves today as a symbol of Hindu pride and resistance to Muslim rule. But when I mentioned a fierce resistor of Mughal expansion who came before Shivaji, young eyes went blank. For that forgotten leader doesn’t fall into any of the standard narrative silos of Indian history – Hindu, Muslim or European. Rather, he was an uncommonly clever and adaptive Ethiopian who had been shipped to India as a teenaged slave.

The rise and historical eclipse of the most powerful African in Indian history, Malik Ambar (1548-1626), is just one of the effacements and distortions I explored in Incarnations. I intended my book to complicate reigning western stereotypes – of India as a land of mystical but not intellectual traditions; of the Indian agrarian poor as meek and passive; of a culture and an economy only recently woken up to globalisation. But I wanted to wrestle as well with how Indians’ own prejudices and stereotypes – regarding race, faith, gender, caste and respect for individuality itself – contribute to the murky way Indian history gets told. Clarifying the story of Malik Ambar might be a good place to start.

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We usually think of the African slave trade as running from east to west, but there was a thriving, little-remembered traffic that sailed eastwards to India, too. Indian rulers, particularly on Western India’s vast Deccan plain, acquired their human chattel from Arab traders in exchange for luxurious cloth. Kings and sultans, perpetually battling each other for territory and treasure, prized the African slaves as warriors. Thus in the mid-16th century, Malik Ambar was among the adolescent cargo offloaded on the Konkan coast.

Sold into slavery as a child by his impoverished parents, and converted by Muslim masters, the teenager arrived on the subcontinent having acquired an arsenal of non-martial skills – multiple languages, irrigation engineering, administration and accounting among them. As he passed through the hands of Deccan potentates, he became recognised not just as a soldier, but as a military and political strategist. Finally freed upon the death of a master whose power he had helped secure, he quickly amassed power of his own. Leading a mercenary army of crack horsemen that ultimately grew to a force of 50,000, he became a lethal accessory to Deccan rulers hoping to resist the expansionist aims of Mughal emperor Akbar and his son Jahangir. Through guerrilla tactics and night-time raids in the craggy, ravined landscape of the Deccan, Malik Ambar severed Mughal supply lines, stopped their southward thrust and gained control over large swaths of the region.

      
Malik Ambar

Emperor Jahangir, frustrated by his inability to defeat the powerful Ethiopian, actually took to commissioning gruesome miniature paintings in which he slayed his nemesis on paper. Jahangir might have been chuffed had he foreseen the future, which secured the elimination of Malik Ambar he so furiously sought. Malik Ambar wasn’t a Hindu native defending some ancient motherland. He was a dark-skinned, Muslim outsider, and thereby destined to be diminished. Descendents of African slaves now live poor and ghettoised, many of them in Gujarat, where I saw the legendary West Indian cricketers mocked as monkeys. And children growing up in those shunned communities will find no mention in their schoolbooks of a self-made power entrepreneur whose skin colour and lineage they share.

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Both Indian and western approaches to the subcontinent’s past tend to ignore the experiences of individuals who don’t fit into grand narratives: stories (in India) of national uplift, religious unity or cultural cohesion, and (in the west) of a herd-like, prayerful and sometimes petulant nation just shaking off the hangover of colonisation. The misconstruals leave many people, inside and outside the country, with what is, at best gloss, a young-adult version of Indian history. To my mind, India’s real history is something like the Malik Ambar story writ large: unpredictable, eccentric, internationally connected and compelling fresh attention – not least for what it tells us about India now.

We have seen what happens when cultural biases run against a historical figure. So what if the biases run in the figure’s favour? That individual often gets turned into a demi-god, while the experiences of the actual, inconsistent human being fall away. As I chased down historical lives in far-flung communities, at archaeological sites, and in archives and texts, I sometimes noticed an almost comical gap between the superhero guises some figures are forced to wear today and their own self-critical sensibilities. One such was India’s first global guru, who brought yoga to the west: the baby-faced, proselytising monk known as Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). Nowadays in India he is portrayed as the heroic personification of modern muscular Hinduism, a man insistent about the superiority of his religion over all others. (He is also a personal hero of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.) Less well remembered is the Vivekananda who could be a perceptive critic of Hindu society.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Swami Vivekananda

Vivekananda’s fame derived from lectures on Hinduism that he delivered in flamboyant, saffron-robed style across America and Europe in the 1890s. But even as he took those audiences by storm (“I give them spirituality, and they give me money,” he wrote with a wink to one of his Indian patrons), he was deeply shaken by his first encounters with an egalitarianism and social progressiveness that his fellow Hindus lacked. Visiting a Massachusetts women’s penitentiary, he was astonished by the dignity even criminals were afforded. “Oh, how my heart ached to think of what we think of the poor, the low in India,” he wrote to a friend back home. “They have no chance, no escape, no way to climb up … They have forgotten that they too are men. And the result is slavery.”

The contradictions lacing Vivekananda’s speeches and letters – on whether caste was integral to Hinduism, on the validity of certain Hindu rituals and customs – intimate the depth of his intellectual struggle, and one of his greatest internal conflicts was with the effect of his faith on the powerless. “No religion on earth preaches the dignity of humanity in such a lofty strain as Hinduism,” he would write, “and no religion treads upon the necks of the poor and low in such a fashion as Hinduism.” But such contours in Vivekananda’s personality and intellectual life got flattened during his conversion into a laminated image: that of righteous Hindu nationalist avenger of the Muslim and colonial conquests of India, ambivalent about nothing at all.

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In modern India, writers and historians have been intimidated – and libraries and bookshops ransacked – when they have dared to treat vaunted figures as historical beings. By insisting that favourites from India’s past be preserved in memory as godlike, full of certitude and above human consideration, we don’t just deny them their real natures, we sabotage their exemplary force.

Indian sexism being even more deeply rooted than racism, I can’t claim I was surprised to find that there were far fewer historical records for significant female lives than there were for their male counterparts. But what I saw more clearly is how an absence of documentary sources plays into our ridiculous cultural tendency to turn real women of intellect, judgment, fallibility and bravery into goddess-types

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The Accession of the Queen of India, 1858. Illustration: Print Collector/Getty Images

Consider Lakshmi Bai (1828-1858), the Rani or Queen of Jhansi, who gained mythic status in the colonial and nationalist Indian imagination because of her resistance to British rule during the uprising of 1857. Today, Indian schoolchildren know her for a single iconic image: astride a leaping horse, sword raised high, with her adopted son clinging to her back. The British military are about to conquer her fort, and instead of surrendering, she is making a dramatic midnight escape from the ramparts.

When I looked down from the fort walls she supposedly leapt from, only one word came to mind: “Splat.” An itinerant priest hiding in her fort at the time described a more plausible exit scenario: down a back staircase and into the night-black hills. For their part, the British preserved the queen in memory as a tempestuous 19th-century villainess. “This Jezebel Ranee”, as a British officer termed her, has since animated a host of adventure and romance novels.

Neither western nor Indian tales leave much room for the actual, practical, Earth-bound person who ruled over a mid-sized kingdom around 400km south of Delhi. So it is a relief to gain, from the priest’s observations, a glimpse of the sort of woman rarely seen in royal Indian annals. This strong-willed queen is athletic (weightlifting, wrestling and steeplechase were just her pre-breakfast routine); indifferent to regal trappings (in contrast to her crossdressing husband); and hands-on as a ruler (so much so that she punished criminals herself, with the whack of a stick).

Following the death of her husband, the land-hungry British annexed Jhansi under a doctrine that enabled them to snaffle up princely states. Lakshmi Bai tried to get her dominion back through a series of frustrating negotiations, but when diplomacy faltered, she decided that rebelling sepoys marching from the north in 1857 might help strengthen her claims. After she harboured them in her fort, though, they massacred British officers and their families, upon which the British bombed her fort, then breached the walls. Two months after her escape, they killed her.

To ascribe to Lakshmi Bai motivations more complex than protonational ones, or escapes that chime with the laws of physics, isn’t to cut her down to size; it is to acknowledge a woman whose independence and unconventionality are qualities more relevant to contemporary women then supposed supernatural powers.

Given how little documentation we have of powerful women in the pre-independence pantheon, what is lost when we turn away from real historical evidence is painful. Take a 20th-century icon from a different realm: the magnificent south Indian classical singer MS Subbulakshmi. Born in 1916 into the Devadasi tradition – a lineage of temple courtesans, whose job was to entertain and serve rich and upper-caste men – she built a career that took her from Madurai temple custom to film stardom to the embodiment of independent India’s national culture

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 MS Subbulakshmi

Standing in her modest childhood home, on an alleyway near a temple, I mentally tallied the series of steely calculations that launched the stigmatised, artistic child of a single mother into the Indian cultural canon. Once her prodigious gift was recognised, she broke with her mother and her home town, took a renowned musician and then a canny manager as lovers, and sought out the musicians she admired most, to help develop her talent. The few letters of hers not destroyed by image keepers are rife with attitude and passion. But her public persona was, and remains – she died aged 88 in 2004 – that of a demure housewife whose accomplishments were simply visited upon her by the gods. As in other stories of exceptional, hard-working Indian women, volition and ambition are denied their rightful roles.

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A different narrowing of historical understanding happens when an individual is turned into a representative emblem of his group. Take Bhimrao Ambedkar, who was born an untouchable (as Dalits were formerly known) and then made himself one of the most educated men in India. Acquiring PhDs from the LSE and Columbia University, where his professors included the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, Ambedkar returned home with a vision of India’s future unique among his mostly upper-caste nationalist contemporaries. Invited by them to play an important role in writing the Indian Constitution, he managed to implant within it some of its most radical ideas, including the principle of affirmative action.

In my travels I heard people of higher castes described Ambedkar as “the big boss” of the Dalits– as if Ambedkar was of no particular concern to other Indians. That chiselled-down identity made me wince, because he is also one of the 20th-century’s great, cranky public intellectuals, of any nation– India’s Tocqueville, really, with enduring insights into the structure and psychology of democracy in general. Where India’s nationalist elite put faith in parliaments and political rights, economic development, or social and cultural reform, Ambedkar saw educational equality as the essential bedrock of a truly democratic society. He understood the limitations of constitutions, and, in a prescient analysis, he argued that without the parity and fraternity created by making education equally accessible to Indians of every background and caste, social barriers would prevail and all efforts at reforming society (including radical ones) would founder.

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British imperialists liked to suggest Indians were indifferent to their history, and inept at independent thinking to boot, because of their attachment to doll-like gods and caste rituals. This was a self-justifying analysis, of course, given that the Raj was pillaging the subcontinent’s historical wealth with the same voraciousness as it had plundered the teakwood and tea. Still, it was a longstanding colonial habit to picture the empire’s jewel as a congeries of religions, castes and languages: in effect, a black hole of community belonging and identity, from which few flickers of individuality escaped.

A procession held in 2015 to mark the anniversary of the birth of Bhim Rao Ambedkar in Mumbai, India. Photograph: Rafiq Maqbool/AP

And weren’t those minimally individuated Indians gentle and spiritual as they waited for their next karmic promotion? I was therefore delighted, visiting Mysore, to hold a tray bearing a palm leaf manuscript from around the turn of the Christian millennium that, when rediscovered a century ago, summarily exploded such cliches. The Arthashastra, a detailed treatise on statecraft and the art of government, gave counsel to kings that made Machiavelli’s look milquetoast (one gets a hint from the chapter titles, which feel as if they were written this year, perhaps by a parliamentary investigative committee: “Establishment of Clandestine Operatives”, “Pacifying a Territory Gained”, “Surveillance of People with Secret Income” and “Investigation through Interrogation and Torture”). The author was a man known as Kautilya, and, though all we have of him is this text, it gives a tantalising rebuttal to suggestions that ancient Indian interests were primarily spiritual.


As I worked, I was moved by how many of the 50 lives I studied posed pointed challenges to the Indian present

As does another work of analytic intellect, by the 5BCE master of the Sanskrit language, Panini. In what amounts to a mere 40 pages, he created the most complete linguistic system in history. This masterwork, known as The Ashtadhyayi, helped make Sanskrit the lingua franca of the Asian world for more than 1,000 years. Today, Panini’s system would be called a generative grammar, something modern linguistic philosophers such as Noam Chomsky and his students have been working for the past half century to develop. It is arguably from the Sanskrit tradition – whose logic Panini helped explain – that India’s present-day century software revolution emerged. And then there’s Ramanujan, the young mathematics prodigy whose century-old notebook scribblings are, as we speak, helping other scientists unravel the nature of the universe. Perhaps there’s something mystical there, in the postulates of quantum physics; though I don’t think it’s what the colonialists had in mind.

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Other western misperceptions still present themselves on a daily basis – for instance, the notion that social conditions are uniformly dismal across India. Consider the unaddressed crimes and daily oppressions against Indian women, which have rightly provoked international outrage. Draw closer, and you will see that the outrage obscures telling differences between the opportunities for women in northern India and women in the more progressive south, where child marriage and fertility rates are far lower, and female literacy and work participation rates far higher. Some of that divergence has to do not with culture, but with reform-inspired historical crusades – including one led by a Tamil primary-school dropout known as Periyar (1879-1973).

He was an atheist and rationalist (beliefs that can get you killed in India today), and from the 1920s waged an intellectual campaign against the upper-caste northerners dominating the national movement. Setting himself up as the anti-Gandhi (wearing black, to counter Gandhi’s habit of dressing in white), he pressed for equal treatment of the lower castes, greater recognition of southern culture and language and, above all, greater freedoms for women in a country where wagons were still circled around the patriarchal family. For almost half a century, he advocated women’s rights and unhindered access to contraception. The further I delved into his story, and those of other social reformers, the more strongly I was reminded of how, under sustained pressure, even rigid societies can be changed.

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Occasionally, walking through slum or village lanes to research Incarnations, I overheard teenagers cheerfully explaining to their friends what I was up to – it went along the lines of: “He’s telling the story of how India became number one.” Indeed, it is a habit of national histories to justify the present as the perfect and necessary outcome of what came before. But as I worked, I was moved by how many of the 50 lives I studied posed, like Malik Ambar’s life, pointed challenges to the Indian present.

Mahatma Gandhi with his two granddaughters in 1947. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Through religious collisions, and philosophical and ethical explorations, those individuals were part of intense arguments that have kept going for millennia: about what kind of life is worth living, what kind of society is worth having, which hierarchies are morally legitimate, what role religion has in the political and legal order, what kind of love is valid, who owns the water and land, and what kind of place India should be. A civilisation able to produce a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Mirabai, a Birsa Munda, an Amrita Sher-Gil, a Muhammad Iqbal, an Ambedkar and a Gandhi is a place open both to radical experiments with self-definition and productive arguments about what a country and its people should value. That creative energy is worth recalling at a time when some in India seek to transform a ferment of ideas into a singular religious concoction.

Despite the current, cramped political climate, or maybe because of it, it seemed to me an essential moment to push for a deeper discussion of the Indian past – and not for the benefit of Indians alone. We are done now with the age in which what happened in India was considered peripheral to what used to be called the first world. Back then, those who wrote about the country had to make arguments for its relevance to, for instance, the larger story of democracy. Meanwhile, some of the most compelling minds from India’s past were forced to exist in splendid isolation, instead of being recognised for what they really were: figures engaged with other individuals and ideas across time, across borders. Today, India, in both its positive and negative aspects, is becoming central to discussions about the world at large. So it is time to reconsider not just the stories Indians like to tell themselves, but also the stories the world tells about us.

We need a new language to talk about the economy - With determined effort, the terms in which policies get discussed can be changed.

Tom Clark in The Guardian

The images used by politicians can simplify difficult theories, but they are also being used to mislead us

 

‘The big ideas that might make a difference – targeting higher inflation, printing money, or ploughing public funds into infrastructure – remain too contentious for politicians to voice out loud.’ Illustration: Ben Jennings


Banks trembling, shares tumbling and gathering fears of a new slump. The start of 2016 has been chilling for a global economy that has still to shake off the crisis of 2008. Worse, there is no agreement on what to do should the worst happen again. The big ideas that might make a difference – targeting higher inflation, printing money to give consumers something to spend with, or ploughing serious public funds into infrastructure – remain too contentious for politicians to voice out loud. That is a shame, because history suggests that the words they use matter.

 Of course policies and theories have to pass muster, but just as significant in determining which ones end up being pursued are the language in which they are discussed. A smart metaphor can do more to shift the sense of the possible than the negative interest rates that increasingly desperate central bankers are relying on to alter the mood.

From economics seminar rooms to rage-pumped Donald Trump rallies there is a consensus on one thing: we need to do better next time. The last recession was followed by years of anaemic growth and squeezed pay, and taxpayers saddled with the bill for bailing out the banks. Nobody is going to be thrilled with that mix, but the despair is most acute on the left.

A crisis caused by footloose finance and preceded by decades in which the rich had raced ahead of the rest might have ushered in a new order of stability and fair shares. Instead we have quantitative easing – which puffs up asset prices for the haves and renders homes less affordable for the have-nots – and fiscal austerity, which makes the poor poorer and also leaves them more exposed, by knocking down the old storm defences of the welfare state. In the US, the top 1% grabbed more than half the total growth in the first five years of recovery, while in the UK, George Osborne, a chancellor who saw no choice to imposing the bedroom tax, still found room to trim the tax rate on top incomes.

None of this should have been possible, but it was successfully sold as necessary. To understand how, we must reckon with the deep foundations of economic orthodoxy in our culture, especially the language.

It was, RH Tawney explained, the genius of the Reformation, the ideological revolution that readied the way for capitalism, to reimagine the “natural frailty” of human greed “into a resounding virtue”. Whereas poverty, in medieval religious theory at least, had been next to godliness, early modern thinkers from Hobbes to Smith equated wealth with worth. Trade became respectable, and lending money for profit, which had been sinful usury, became a fruitful outlet for thrift. Credit became interwoven with honour and pride, while debt was shot through with weighty moral obligations.

These are the orthodox financial prejudices that have, with brief exceptions, held sway ever since – in Gladstone’s red box as much as Thatcher’s handbag. When the 2008 economic storm hit (a metaphor which itself does ideological work, implying an act of nature rather than a crisis of human folly) the then shadow chancellor Osborne reached for a tried and tested script. “The cupboard is bare,”he sternly announced, likening bankrupt Britain to an over-indebted home.

Economists have objected to lazy comparisons between domestic and national finances for the best part of a century: governments can tax, grow or even print their way out of debt, three important escape routes not open to individuals. In the 30 years after the second world war there were deficits in all but six. But far from this leaving Britain’s cupboard bare, the national debt dwindled from 250% to 50% of GDP.

So the household metaphor is deeply misleading but it remains irresistible to politicians and powerful with the public. It offers a way to make sense of the otherwise baffling billions in national debt through analogy with everyday experience. Furthermore, explains Jonathan Charteris-Black, an expert on rhetoric at the University of the West of England, it embeds “one of the most widely used of all political images: the nation as family, with the government as responsible parent”. 

It is all so familiar that only restless, malcontent minds will argue back against the claim that There Is No Alternative. But the awkward squad should not lose heart: with determined effort, the terms in which policies get discussed can sometimes be changed. One modest example was the one-off charge made on the utilities soon after Labour came to power in 1997. Few taxes are popular, but by being badged a “windfall levy” this one came to be seen as a fair way to share good fortune that had dropped into the lap of these firms.

Looking further back, Keynes was a master of the disruptive metaphor. He described the “animal spirits” of investors whose rationality he questioned, and dismissed the self-styled “wolves and tiger” of industry as pathetically “domesticated” beasts. He was even credited with livening technical debate about the efficacy of monetary policy in a liquidity trap by talking of “pushing on a piece of string”. Keynesians across the Atlantic, such as Lauchlin Currie, rationalised the deficits of Roosevelt’s New Deal as “pump priming” the economy. The image here is of an old-fashioned well, where you have to pour in a little fluid to clear air from the valve, which then allows you to pump out a far larger volume of water. It had intuitive appeal for the very many Americans who had then been raised on farms, but hydraulics remains a promising source of imagery. Where orthodox economics and the moralising that goes with it emphasises solid “stocks”, assets and liabilities of particular values – a nasty debt, a nice nest egg or indeed an empty cupboard – the real economy operates through continuous “flows” of payment and activity.

John Maynard Keynes with Harry Dexter White in 1946. ‘Keynes was a master of the disruptive metaphor.’ Photograph: Thomas D McAvoy/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

The engineer-turned-economist Bill Phillips illustrated this insight by building a marvellous machine that shunted coloured water about to illustrate how the components of national income related to one another. But there is no need to go to the lengths of constructing a physical metaphor to make the point about how the bubbling stream of a healthy economy can wash away the debris of debt. Or, indeed, how decisive interventions can be required to clear blockages in the arteries of finance.

The question endlessly put to the Labour opposition is whether it can put together a “credible, costed package of alternative economic plans”, and doing that will, of course, have to be part of the answer – but only part. For no such programme, whether it stacks up or not, will compete with Osborne’s until the public can be persuaded to talk about the economy differently.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, has put great effort into assembling brainy economists to help refine his detailed commitments, but the results of their deliberations will likely attract even less attention than his one rhetorical flourish to date – “socialism with an iPad”. A creative writing competition might do more to help him prevail in the battles ahead.

Saeed Ajmal - an inspiration in rehabilitation

An interview with Nagraj Gollapudi in Cricinfo



'Earlier the batsmen were scared to face me. Now there is a contest'

Saeed Ajmal talks about learning offspin afresh, how he plots dismissals with his remodelled action, and how ready he is for a Pakistan recall


"I watch my videos after every match to check if I have bowled any balls that are suspect. Ninety per cent of my deliveries are good"



Can we say in the last one and a half years you have had to learn offspin totally afresh?

I have relearned everything. Even with my body, I have had to start new exercises. Then I followed that up by bowling with a heavy ball. Everyone knows my right wrist is broken [in a bus accident]. The wrist bone protrudes out and my whole arm flexes. To get this under control, because it is already ten degrees, I have learnt to bowl with a heavy ball. To keep the wrist taut, my biomechanist, Dr Paul Hurrion, suggested I bowl with a heavy ball. I worked really hard. I bowled 12,000 deliveries during the rehab before coming back. I am developing those muscles. Initially I didn't have the pace, but thankfully my pace is up to 90kph.

From the time my action was called and till it was cleared, I have bowled at least 100 balls a day. When I had to clear my action I did a lot of bowling in that time. My body weight would fall on one side, my left leg would come up during the delivery stride. To avoid doing that, I strapped weights to my ankles so that the foot doesn't rise and come down flat upon landing.

Have you learnt new things about offspin that you didn't know before?

Definitely. I learnt a lot of things. I learnt that you can bring everything from your fingers if you are willing to work hard. At 38 I have learnt something that I probably never did in my 15 years as a cricketer. I had to become a child - like the first time I went into the academy as a ten-year-old. So I had to look at it like that again over the last year.



Bowling with a remodelled action during a match against Kenya in December 2014, a few months after he was banned © AFP


After you were banned, Saqlain Mushtaq was appointed by the PCB to work with you. Do you recollect the first delivery in the nets? Did you have to show Saqlain your action? 

He knew what my action was before. Working along with Saqlain bhai, I changed my action eight times. Initially he would like the action for a while, say for a month, but then he would change it. After ten days he would be impressed with a different action, but then say it is not proving to be effective. He would keep liking it but was not totally convinced. It reached a stage where one day, I just said I would leave it [bowling]. But Saqlain bhai said, "Himmat na haar." [Don't lose hope.] One day it will come.

I kept doing it. Then I started bowling well and gained confidence. I am not saying I have become zabardast [great] once again. But with the matches I am getting to play, the crowds are coming, I am enjoying bowling under pressure, and one day I will be available to play for Pakistan.

How difficult is it to unlearn something you have known all your life?

I was bowling with my earlier action for 22 years. Even now, when I see videos of my old matches, different things come to mind. Batsmen's legs used to shake, every batsman used to think twice before stepping out to hit me, lest the ball bounces or turns. I can't forget those memories. Now when a batsman stares back at me I get angry. I think: till last year he used to cry, but why is he staring back now? To bring that back I have worked hard in the last six months to make my action effective and get back my pace. Now my pace is really good. Also my doosra, even though it is not as big as it used to be, is still there. There is topspin and it moves out a little bit. I am happy that I'm bringing that back.

Do you ever feel in a situation, physically, that your action might go back to the old one? You have played county cricket, bowled long spells. An old action is a habit.

No way. I will leave cricket with this [new] action. If I am not effective, I will step aside and leave. What I have done, I am happy with. I have been bowling about 90% with the new action. The odd ball might have exceeded 20 degrees, but I work hard immediately to rectify that. I watch every video of my matches. Ninety-nine per cent of my deliveries are under control. Since I have not played international cricket I will need to continue to work on how I bowl under pressure. I also need to work on how I bowl when I am relaxed.

I will be back, and that day is not far. I have spent a lot of time outside and it hurts me when Pakistan loses.

What I have learnt is that to learn anything new you have to believe in yourself and believe your Allah. There is nothing in this world that man can't learn. I learnt the doosra by myself. All I did was watch videos of Saqlain Mushtaq and in one month I had learnt it. I wanted to try it out in the next domestic season and I did.

To come back to international cricket, I need new variations, so I should be able to spin from the side, from down here, from the top, so I can deceive the batsman and let him know that I am now here.

Your weapons have changed. Now you don't do big spin, for instance?

In the last six months I have played 100-plus club matches [back in Pakistan] where I was also hit for many sixes. I was starting to understand at what pace the batsman was hitting me. I played club tournaments, local tournaments, a few outside. Slowly my confidence was coming back. In my mind I started thinking, "Now I am delivering my hand in the correct fashion." Earlier I had doubts, it was in my mind that I was chucking. It took me nearly a year after the ban to get rid of the fear and khauf [dread]. Now it is out and if you noticed my bowling in the last domestic T20 tournament in Pakistan and now in this, there is a big difference.

Has there been a difference in your mental approach towards a batsman with the new action?
My ability against the batsman has remained the same. I am mature enough to understand how to play the batsman. I understand where the ball will go if I press this finger and this finger [points to different fingers on his right hand]. I have taken a year just to master these fingers, only to get my confidence back so that one day when I return to the Pakistan team I don't want to feel that I am finished or that I have come on somebody's sifaarish[recommendation]. I don't want to feel like a liability. If I feel I am finished, I will retire.

Are the variations the same as you used to have?

There is a little bit of change. Earlier my deliveries used to have a lot of bounce. Now I have killed the bounce somewhat. Because of the high arm, my hand used to drop, so to stop the wrist from falling, I have now locked that wrist, so the spin is less. Earlier my right wrist used to fall away due to the bone injury. Now I have locked the wrist at the time of delivery. Consequently, the spin and bounce have reduced. But my variations remain the same. I have also learned to deliver with a low bounce against a tall batsman who stands and hits, or moves back to hit. In these matches, you will see a better version slowly.



"Working with Saqlain bhai, I changed my action eight times" © ESPNcricinfo Ltd





Do you still bowl the doosra?

Definitely. I have cleared the doosra during the ICC testing process. Even against Karachi Kings I got Saifullah Bangash with a doosra. I bowled a few to Iftikhar Ahmed. Out of 18 deliveries I bowled six doosras. Once again, with the doosra, there has been no difference in pace. The only difference has been with the spin and bounce when I deliver the doosra and the topspinner. I still rely on the doosra. I know it is a weapon that unnerves a batsman. With time my hand speed will get faster, as it was before. Then the doosra will become more effective.

Of the deliveries that were banned, which is the most difficult to change?

The offspin. My wrist used to drop, and as soon as it used to drop - for the doosra it is fine - for offspin I had to lock the wrist and when I let it go, it did not break. Because the wrist remains locked now. So I found it really difficult to spin the ball. People think it is very easy, but for me it is really hard because my wrist bone is broken. I always need to ensure that the wrist does not fall. Now the ball has started breaking, and as an example I got James Vince lbw [against Karachi] with the offspinner.

Did you ever think about your bowling as much as you have done in the last year?

The biomechanist Paul Hurrion has really helped me. To control the wrist it took a lot of time. I never thought about it. Earlier I would think, "This is Chris Gayle, or Pietersen, no problem." Now I have to think about where to pitch it, how to get the batsman out. Earlier the batsmen would be scared to face me. Now there is a muqabla [contest].

Muscle memory is an important constituent of any learning process. It can't be built in a year. How do you deal with that challenge?

I agree. But muscle memory is built when you start as a youngster. I am a mature spinner. It didn't take me that much time again because I know how to put the ball in. I already had the memory of where to bowl to what batsman and from where to deliver. My focus was just to clear my action. I cleared it very soon. I am very happy that I have developed the memory so quickly. I had almost lost hope. But I have this belief inside. I believe that everything I can put my head to, I can achieve.


You said you put some weights on your ankles. Can you talk about that? And also bowling with a heavy ball?

Saqlain bhai would strap my wrists with 1kg bands on both wrists. He did not want my front arm staying to the side and the bowling wrist high and locked. I also strapped 2.5 kg weights on my [left] leg to make sure it did not go high and the head did not fall down sideways. The head needed to be straight and relaxed. I would then deliver with a heavy ball. It took me three months just to get used to it, to develop muscle.

Do you reckon it is difficult for bowlers to innovate within the numerous stringent restrictions imposed by the ICC, as opposed to batsmen, who have the freedom to keep innovating and improvising?

Perhaps it is easier for the fast bowlers, considering they have two new balls in ODIs. It has become very difficult for spinners. Why did the spinners start chucking, bowling faster? Heavy, broad, big bats, a mishit would go for a six; Powerplays, four fielders outside the circle, five inside in the ODIs. Pitches have changed. What can spinners do in such a setting? Spinners had to learn something new, and so started bowling faster. Earlier if you flighted the ball, you would get respect. Abhi agar hawa mein do toh hawa mein jaata hai. [Now if you toss it up in the air, it disappears into the air.] With the playing conditions changing, spinners started to learn to bowl fast and the chucking issue became prominent.

Fingerspinners can't survive in international cricket, especially in ODIs and T20 cricket. The guy who does not have variety will be hit. You have to have variations, and for that you have to work hard, otherwise you are out.



"I have this belief inside. I believe that everything I can put my head to, I can achieve" © Getty Images





Can you succeed as a spinner without throwing?

I have already given reasons as to why chucking started. There is nothing for the spinners. The ICC should allow spinners some relaxation. I said it to the ICC but it didn't make a difference.

Can you talk about examples where you enjoyed bowling after your action was cleared?

Last county season, I was playing for Worcestershire in a home one-day match against Leicestershire. Former England left-arm spinner Richard Illingworth, who played for Worcestershire, was the umpire. He asked me how I was going to get the batsman out. I told him I would bowl a whole over of offspin. He would push me to the leg side. Next over I would bowl the doosra and he would get caught at slip. So I bowled only offspin in the first over and the batsman played me to short midwicket. Next over, first ball, I bowled the doosra and he played it to the slips. Illingworth was astounded. I told him, this is cricket. I looked at what he was trying to do, and if he wins, it's fine. But what I was doing to him, that is in my control. I was making him play on my terms, not his.

So one thing that has not changed is how you out-think the batsman? 

That cannot change. Against Karachi, bowling to Iftikhar Ahmed, I knew he plays to midwicket. So I was playing with him. First up, I bowled him a doosra. It was a little outside off stump. I know he does not step out, and he was beaten. I bowled him another doosra which pitched on the same spot. He went for a big hit and was beaten. I then bowled offspin from the very same spot. He was beaten again and he stared back at me.

I look for cues in a batsman. Kamran Akmal straightens his left leg to hit over midwicket. Sarfraz [Ahmed], if his shoulders are bending low, he is going to play the sweep. If he is standing normal and straight, he will not sweep. I have to pick this. Kevin Pietersen can hit a six by stepping out or by standing inside the crease. So I know to bowl it wide, so even if he hits, it might go high up in the air. I have learnt all this by playing for long, by playing with the batsman's mind, by learning to watch what the batsman is doing. You need to do your homework. You need to read the pitch, to understand how much bounce there is on the pitch. So you will need to figure out whether to flight it or not and such stuff.

How far away are you from playing international cricket?

I am ready. There is a big difference from the time when I played in the Bangladesh series last year after I was cleared. At that point I had the fear on the inside. Now I have removed that fear by working hard.

This EU referendum doesn’t matter. But the next one will

Simon Jenkins in The Guardian

In 532AD the city of Constantinople was torn between two parties, the blues and greens. Everyone, aristocrat or slave, belonged to one or other. In January a chariot race between the two erupted into riots. Destruction was appalling. Half the city was gutted by fire, including the great church of Hagia Sophia. A green emperor was chosen to replace Justinian, who backed the blues and butchered 30,000 greens in response. That decided it.

Britain’s EU referendum is looking much the same. At first the pros and antis argued over tariffs and sheep meat premiums. Then they argued over top tables and “influence in Europe”. Now they pit salvation against damnation, national glory against famines, locusts, boils and immigrant hordes. The nation examines the entrails of heirs to the throne, actors and London mayors. Prince William,Emma Thompson and Boris Johnson claim meta-wisdom. On Friday the chariot race starts, and all hell breaks loose.

On Europe there is clearly no compromise between black and white, between yes and no. Yet the shallowness of the argument is shown in the antis’ neo-nationalism and the pros’ “Project Fear”. The antis are in denial over how to reconstruct a workable framework for a free-trade area after a no vote. The pros, notably the business community, have nothing to offer but “remaining in a reformed EU”.

David Cameron has laboured valiantly to deliver that reformed EU, but it was never in his gift. Nor has he done what he promised, which is materially to alter Britain’s relationship with Europe. He has probably won all that the EU could plausibly offer. But given the terms of the debate, I do not see how the reformed-EU party can honestly vote yes. The EU is unreformed. If politics were about truth, Cameron would stun the nation tomorrow by backing no.

To me the referendum as such is not the issue. The issue is the aftermath. I suspect the long-term outcome of the vote will be much the same either way. Two adjacent modern economies cannot co-exist without mutual accommodation, reflecting political and economic reality, not ideology.

During Scotland’s 2014 referendum, “independence-lite” drew ever closer in argument to “devo max”. However Scotland voted, there had to be a new deal between London and Edinburgh. The British government, threatened with losing the union, conceded half a deal, and won.

The EU cannot negotiate nimble-footed, as London did in 2014. It is too big and cumbersome, with too many national insecurities and battling lobbies. It cannot even control its borders. Already split by the eurozone, the EU could not stand more exceptionalism. Programmed to ever greater union, it has no gear-shift to “ever less”. Like Britain’s NHS, it has a dinosaur in its DNA.

Certainly a yes vote would change nothing. All that would result is that any future British government, seeking to resist Brussels power, will be hogtied by the result. The threat of Brexit, which Cameron has struggled to mobilise this past six months, will evaporate.

Instead a furious Conservative party would make the government behave ever worse towards Europe. Britain would continue to fend off immigrants, fawn on China and flog everything to east Asia. It would side with America in foreign and defence policy. Irrespective of Europe, its banks would launder money and evade tax with abandon. Britain would stay semi-detached.

On the other hand, a no vote would certainly be traumatic. It would send Britain’s pro-EU establishment into the mother of all huddles with a panic-stricken Brussels. Half of Europe’s democracies know they could lose an EU vote just now. No one really wants Britain to depart.

The dreaded article 50 of the Lisbon treaty on renegotiation would be activated. Fat-cat thinktanks would argue the Norwegian, Swiss, Australian, American and rest-of-world options. Euro-panic would morph into Euro-conspiracy. Power hates rebellion. Deals would be done.

My reading of lobbyist literature from both sides suggests that Britain would probably emerge from all this with a diluted version of associate EU membership. To ensure trade continuity – which is in everyone’s interest – it would accept much of the present EU regulation. It might even contribute to the EU budget. The UK would gain some discretion in picking and choosing. In return it would lose its present much-cited (though never specified) “influence”, through losing its vote in the council and parliament. The balance of advantage is here too opaque for anyone sensibly to call.

But if the outcome does not matter that much, what does? The answer is disruption versus inertia. Here the argument defaults to tribe. The yes tribe is composed of the insiders, the metro-progressives, the established order averse to change. The no tribe consists of the outsiders, the provincials, the instinctive radicals. On the left this is a divide between the old-style statist socialism and the new left of perpetual dissent. On the right it separates the “natural party of government” and the professional class from the grassroots, the insecure and the dispossessed.

Neither tribe is happy with the present EU, as it fails in its core purpose of holding together a disparate continent in the cause of liberal democracy. It made one mistake, the eurozone, and now faces another problem, the growth of rightwing separatism across south and east Europe. It has humiliated a British prime minister into traipsing round the capitals of Europe, pleading for help in a domestic election. It is a mess. This is the EU that would sigh with relief at a British yes vote.

A no vote would not “isolate” Britain from mainland Europe, whatever the howls of “Project Fear”. But it would traumatise EU complacency. It would press the reset button. A no vote would force the EU, or at least countries outside the eurozone, to seek a new balance between supranational regulation and free trade. However arrogant it might seem to others, Britain would have precipitated reform. That is surely what everyone wants.

There would have to be a new treaty between the EU and Britain, on whatever suite of options would emerge from negotiations. It would be tough. But since such a treaty would probably qualify the decision to withdraw, it would merit a new referendum. That is the referendum that really would matter.