Loneliness was a theme not just of Hanif Mohammad’s batting but also of his career and life
Osman Samiuddin11-Aug-2016Abdul Hafeez Kardar did not get it wrong. Hanif Mohammad’s 337 to save a Test against the West Indies, an epic contemplation in defiance built over three days in January 1958 in Barbados, he felt, was of a kind not to be seen again.As it was conceived on the third afternoon just under an hour before tea, it was already submerged in defeat. Pakistan had been bowled out in their first innings for 106, in reply to West Indies’ 579. No thought was given to the future, to a result, any result, for a long time. Hanif only knew that he had to bat again. For much of that afternoon, he surfed along on the adrenalin of Imtiaz Ahmed, his opening partner; Imtiaz’s hooking and Roy Gilchrist’s bouncing – then thought to be the quickest bowler in the world – set fire to the afternoon and by the day’s close Pakistan had raced to 162. Imtiaz went ultimately for 91, to an atrocious LBW decision. Hanif was still there, unnoticed on 61, a nice little bit of pluck everyone thought but by far not enough.The next day was the difficult one, for it was here that a little hope began to seep through. Pakistan added 178 to their total, still trailing by 133, but lost only one wicket – Alimuddin – in doing so. Hanif added an even 100, going past his own highest Test score. These milestones were petty ones. ‘In the course of this day’s batting,’ Hanif remembered in ,’ that is, that it is something he came into the world with. ‘I used to play ball-to-ball only,’ he says, a simple deconstruction to explain it all and yet explain nothing, said in a way that suggests there can be no other way. ‘Sometimes I used to pray while batting – say the , or the . As the bowler was coming in to bowl, it would automatically start. After playing the ball, I would twirl my bat and start again.’
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Hanif came to Karachi a few months after Partition, from their original home in the princely Indian state of Junagadh, with his extended family, including those of his paternal and maternal uncles. The family nearly moved to Sukkur in Sind – and who knows whether Hanif would’ve found his way out from there – but decided to move into a hall which was used as a Hindu temple in Karachi; houses were proving too expensive to rent. The family would remain there till 1954.His father had served in the Indian army but was an enterprising sort, working in a salt factory as well as running a hotel. The family had lived well in Junagadh. Thus Hanif was old enough when he arrived to remember the sense of loss. ‘We had left everything in India – we had hotels, shops, petrol pumps, many things,’ he remembers. ‘We had a guesthouse, our own house. But we lost everything.’
Each time he went out to bat was also a private occasion for him, a pursuit unto his own self: an inner meditation perhaps
He would lose his father soon after, though the real influence on the five brothers, including Hanif, was the mother, a towering matriarchal figure and an accomplished sportsperson herself: Ameerbi was adept at badminton and carom, urging her sons to bring home trophies like she had done. ‘My mother, when she won two cups in Junagadh in India, she told me that when you play cricket, I want you to fill the room with cups. I always had that wish that my mother would be happy.’Hanif, it seemed, arrived on this planet fully conceived as batsman. That, at least, was the opinion of Alf Gover, the renowned English coach, upon setting eyes on him in 1951. ‘I am not going to try to coach this boy and my tip is that you don’t let anybody else try this either,’ Gover gushed, before adding the cherry. ‘He has got everything. He is a natural. He is a smallish chap with an ease of movement and completeness of technique that were Bradman’s. If he continues to develop normally, he can be one of the very great players.’What he wasn’t born with was homespun. As children in Junagadh, Hanif and his brothers would play ‘Test’ matches at home and a tree-filled guesthouse across the road. Against a bouncy tennis ball, and rules that decreed rebound hits off trees were out, Hanif decided that least risk lay in strokes that stayed as low to the ground as possible. On Sundays, the ‘Tests’ would be played from ten till sunset, young Hanif patting back ball after ball, minute after minute, hour after hour, time whiling over idly, knowing already what newspaper would conclude of him later, that it ‘pays to wait for runs’. He was, at school in Junagadh, already a keen player.The formative shaping came from a tireless coach. ‘I was playing a school or club match at the fire brigade ground (in 1949) and there was this big, strong guy watching me,’ Hanif recalls. ‘I made a fifty and kept wickets. The guy came to me and asked what I was doing and then said, come to our school and meet the principal. We will take you on tours, give you a free education… that man was Master Aziz.’ The name is unveiled after a pause and with relish, indication of the high regard Hanif holds him in. ‘I used to play all sports, hockey, cricket, football, kites, , all kinds, depending on the weather. But Master Aziz told me to just stick to cricket.’Aziz – or Abdul Aziz Durrani – was himself an able pre-Partition wicketkeeper-opening batsman, a wanderer who played cricket in Karachi in the Sind Pentangulars and for Jamnagar, the capital of the princely state of Nawanagar. Here he rubbed his broad shoulders with the narrower ones of the great Ranji and Duleep, winning a Ranji Trophy title along the way. He moved back to Pakistan after Partition – he was born in Jhelum, near Rawalpindi – though his family stayed back; Hanif says the separation from his wife was one of his life’s great distresses. One of his sons, Salim Durrani, played for India, but many more of his students in Karachi played for Pakistan.Two Little Masters: Sunil Gavaskar (left) and Hanif at the 2005 India-Pakistan Test in Bangalore•Associated PressAziz pulled Hanif into the Sind Madressah, and worked on little things, hurling golf balls at him to get him to hook and pull, ensuring he got to bat longer in school matches by not giving him out as umpire, getting him to miss classes so he could play. He encouraged him to move off the back foot and come forward more, ironing out his feet movement when driving. ‘He spent all his money on his students,’ Hanif wrote in his autobiography. ‘He bought us shoes, gloves, bats and anything any of us needed. Sometimes he was left with no money in his pocket, and then he would ask us to get him something to eat. For us he was like a father figure and like an angel. I have yet to meet anyone like him.’School cricket in Karachi was where Hanif’s legend began. On a schools tour to Lahore in the late 1940s, Hanif first revealed his curious, un-boyish love for batting long and big. Lahore’s school-kids were suitably impressed, none more so than Yawar Saeed, a strapping fast bowler then, soon to be an English county player, and much later to be a stern-looking manager of a number of Pakistan sides. He invited Hanif to dinner to meet his father, Mian Mohammad Saeed, Pakistan’s first captain in unofficial Tests. ‘Remember one thing,’ Saeed told him. ‘Never be boastful when you score runs. Never raise your collar and behave as if you are a gift from the gods. Always remain humble, respect people, respect the game and keep on playing even harder.’ Through this meeting the name was tentatively lowered into the national cricket pool, gentle ripples now heading outwards.The force gathered momentum when Hanif made 305 in the final of the Rubie Shield, and the coverage newspapers then gave to the tournament – full reports, big pictures and interviews – meant the little boy was now being chewed over breakfast, discussed in offices, mulled over in coffee and tea houses and wondered about over a good time in Karachi’s hotels and bars. Hanif affords the innings as much thought as he might to a swig of water – ‘it was a good innings,’ he says – but others, Kardar among them, took it more seriously. Kardar insisted on picking him for a flood-relief game between Karachi and Punjab in September 1950. Besides taking 12 catches as wicketkeeper, he made 93 as opener in the second innings, winning the game off the last ball. Months later, in February, came the innings that convinced Hanif of what many others were already sure of: that he was something special. It came during the Sind Pentangulars, in a run of form in which he hit three hundreds, in a game between Sind and Karachi Muslims and a strong Northern Muslims side, with an imposing attack that included Fazal Mahmood, Khan Mohammad, Israr Ali and Miran Bux.’We played on a matting wicket at Karachi Gymkhana and Fazal was there, and we all knew what he was like on matting,’ says Hanif. ‘I had never even seen Fazal then, I’d only heard about his leg-cutters. But mentally I was prepared I had to play these guys. Always before a match, one day before it, I would start to mentally prepare for the challenge ahead. I made 158 in nearly eight hours and gave no chance, playing Fazal as if I played him every day. I was surprised myself. I read all bowlers from the hand. That innings gave me a lot of confidence.’He was gifted a bicycle by a businessman after the innings, as well as some cricket kit. Months later he was offered a full-time job in the Public Works Department, allowing him to become, essentially, a full-time batsman.
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The solitary nature of Barbados was not an accident, but a deeper pattern of Hanif’s career and life. With the greatest respect to the men with whom he put on four successive century stands there, and the team environment in which cricket places the individual, Hanif was effectively alone for those sixteen hours, just as he would stand alone for Pakistan through much of the latter half of his career.
Hanif’s triple hundred was a subverted monolith, not just against the opponent and hostile and bored crowds, but against his own youth and even against his own game. It was the grandest inversion
Self-contained is probably the best way to describe and understand Hanif (imagine a bubble existing inside a bigger bubble), both in the sense that he was and is a reserved character and also that in a team of eleven, he was a complete, independent unit in and of itself. Though every one of his ninety-seven innings was played for a collective cause, each time he went out to bat was also a private occasion for him, a pursuit unto his own self: an inner meditation perhaps.These days there is a touch less patience than during his playing days. Old age is the likely culprit, as could be sixty years of life in the public eye, or sixty years with Pakistan’s cricket, which grants many things but not more patience. But it is difficult to really know, for Hanif is at one level moated: not many can access beyond a point. He is one of the most recognized men in all of Pakistan, part of a big, successful family, with a vast, varied circle of friends and yet being alone is how he seems happiest, in mind at least if not actuality. He can be aloof and is unlike his brothers, particularly Mushtaq and Sadiq, both gregarious souls and at their best among company.The loneliness was a tangible state. After making 187 at Lord’s in 1967, as an old captain of a young, new side (Pakistan were 99 for 6 and 139 for 7 in reply to England’s 369, before Hanif, with some help from Asif Iqbal, took them to 354), the picked up on the solitariness.’As was his habit during times of strain on a tour beset by problems, he returned to his hotel room to listen to sitar music, the beauty of which is a mystery to most Western ears,’ it wrote in selecting him as one of the five cricketers of the year in 1968. ‘He brought twelve tapes of it with him from Karachi as if aware that his philosophies about both captaincy and batsmanship could lead to loneliness.’This, and the nature of his batting, created a peculiar star. An older generation of fan can jokingly recall radio commentary of the day. ‘Hanif… forward. Hanif… forward again,’ and on and on and on. It is meant to capture the dreary monotone of Hanif’s best work, dour match-saving hundreds where ball after ball, session after session, day after day, Hanif reached forward and dead-batted everything that came his way; days such as at Lord’s when he took over three hours to score 20; days such as in Dhaka when he spent all day making 64.There is still an obvious air of such blank equanimity around Hanif that it all kind of makes sense, the big scores, the concentration, the long hours. One minute, one run, one day, you imagine, easily turns over into another in his world, Hanif like a buoy in rough seas, bobbing around, essentially unmoved, watching noiselessly water and air in stern congregation.Hanif doesn’t quite know what to do with this popular image. It’s not hurtful or disparaging; actually, over time, as Pakistan has struggled to produce batsmen similarly equipped, Hanif has come to represent a gold standard of classical batsmanship, evoked often on last-day batting failures in alien conditions.(From left): Hanif, Mushtaq and Sadiq Mohammad during the 1967 tour of England•PA PhotosBut at the time crowds did often slow-clap and jeer him and reaction could be mixed. That Lord’s hundred, a weekend’s worth of work beginning on Friday evening and ending Monday afternoon, prompted ‘contradictory critical appraisal’ not seen since the war, noted the . ‘Press comment along the way embraced the full spectrum of colourful opinion: from the outraged puce of those writers who regard themselves as the guardians of sporting entertainment to the purplest prose that could be mustered by others who acclaimed it one of the batting masterpieces of their time.’The method was borne not from desire but need. ‘Before, there were no batsmen who could stop and play long,’ he explains. ‘I could, Alimuddin could and maybe Waqar [Hasan] or Wazir [Mohammad, his elder brother]. Most batsmen were hitters – Imtiaz [Ahmed], Maqsood [Ahmed], Kardar. I used to get orders from Kardar to just stay at one end, whether or not runs are coming. Once the captain gives order, you have to listen, don’t you, especially if you are a schoolboy?’I had all strokes, from late-cuts and sweeps. On the 1954 tour to England, there was a fastest century prize. We played against a Combined Services XI where I got to 87 off 60 balls, really going for it before I got out. In the second innings I made 60-70 also – where there wasn’t a need I would play my attacking game. Otherwise I would play to the team’s needs. And if I couldn’t bat fast I wouldn’t have made 499 in one innings, would I?’It’s true. That innings, for Karachi in a Quaid-e-Azam trophy game in January 1959, was made in less than eleven hours, beginning at tea on the first day and ending by the close of the third. He scored 230 runs on the second day and 244 on the third, a fair pace on any surface in any era. He took a little time to get to his first hundred (160 minutes) but raced to his second in 102. On the third day alone he hit 33 boundaries, an on-drive taking him past Don Bradman’s 452 to become the highest first-class score ever. He remembers only two strokes hit in the air throughout, one a cut on 94 which was a chance at point, the other a lofted straight drive.(A digression, related: The advent of the reverse sweep is often credited to Hanif and though it wouldn’t be a surprise, it isn’t true. It is, at least, a familial invention. ‘It was actually Mushtaq who first played it in England,’ Hanif corrects. ‘I picked it up from him and played it later but he was the one who tried it first.’ That was in a game for the Cavaliers – a kind of touring exhibition side in England – against Middlesex in 1964. Fred Titmus, the English off-spinner, had tied him down bowling on middle and leg and Mushtaq could only maneouvre to midwicket or square leg. Ever keen to push on, Mushtaq eyed a gap between cover and point and reverse swept, much to the horror of Titmus who immediately assumed the shot to be illegal.)
“Kardar would always discuss the game with me, the situation of a match. Whenever a partnership was building or wickets weren’t coming, he would come to me: ‘Master, ? Show some way'”Hanif Mohammad on his captaincy
But Hanif’s perceived dourness never prevented him from celebrity or reward and he was, in the truest sense, a star. In the sense that he made a living in the age of amateurs entirely from playing cricket, he was also Pakistan’s first professional cricketer. He did well for himself, even if he now says, ‘I hardly got anything as a result of my cricket.’ Hardly anything, that is, other than the land on which his bungalow is built in honour of the 337, some land before that, cars in the UK, jobs with two solid public institutions that paid him enough to just concentrate on cricket. In the 1954-55 series against India, for scoring a hundred, he was given various cash awards of Rs 2,000, as well as fine carpets and cycles. So much was on offer, in fact, that the board had to issue a public announcement asking patrons to not make such gifts until the series was over.Attaining celebrity at the time was both easier and more difficult. There weren’t as many avenues for exposure, but a little usually went a long way. Newspaper pictures and radio imagery of heroic deeds far away built lovely myths, potent mixes of reality and imagination. And these were sturdier myths. Hanif was one of the first, getting enough attention, enough space for voice to be heard and face to be seen. His face was used to sell products and endorse much else besides; as early as 1955, a newspaper ad for an Indian film, (starring Johnny Walker and Kalpana Kartik), put up a sketch of the boy wonder and piggy-backed shamelessly: ‘As Hanif smashes all previous records by scoring century so does our funtoosh Taxi Driver smashes [sic] all records.’Maybe it helped that he was a – that vast body of Muslims who migrated to Pakistan at Partition from India – and that he came with little except the restless immigrant trait of wanting to make it. Kardar was too haughty for hero worship. Fazal Mahmood was born a hero. Hanif, on the other hand, represented one idea of Pakistan; a young Muslim who presumably might not have made it in India (a big presumption admittedly, but the very premise of Partition), choosing Pakistan, and making something of it himself. That he was young and the kind who could come over with his parents and young girls could serve tea to, nervously smiling in the hope he says yes, helped too.By his second tour to India, in 1960-61, his celebrity was already approaching a strange peak. On arrival in Bombay from Poona (where incidentally he had fancied his chances of making a rare triple hundred in one day), Hanif was thronged by fans at the station. They wanted to shake his hand. Many did. One, Hanif remembers, cut his finger with a razor while doing so. Later, during the Bombay Test, Lata Mangeshkar, the great film playback singer, wanted an audience, and invited Hanif and family to a song recording. So big was he, in fact, on that tour that it became an issue. ‘I was scoring runs and my photo used to come in the papers. Some players were jealous and in the dressing rooms, they would crumple up those newspapers with my pictures in it and stamp on it. I reported it and nothing happened at all about it.’After he retired, his whole persona was used to set up and establish Pakistan’s first and most sellable cricket publication, , in 1972. Riaz Ahmed Mansuri, who published the magazine and ran it for thirty-six years, had been impressed particularly by the name of Sir Pelham Warner as editor on an old issue of the (English) , and so decided to rope in a big name. Asif Iqbal was approached first but he was still playing and recommended Hanif instead. It took, Mansuri reckons, thirty meetings to convince Hanif. It was worth it, for as was later noted by Omar Noman in , ‘not many people were going to refuse an ad for a magazine brought out by Hanif Mohammad’.
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As well as being a sharp fielder in the covers and a more than capable wicketkeeper, Hanif was also ambidextrous. He could – and often did – bowl with both arms in first-class and Tests. In a tour game against Somerset in 1954 headed for a draw, for instance, Kardar decided to liven up proceedings by bringing Hanif on.Hanif during his half-century at Trent Bridge, 1954•PA Photos’Hanif had never really taken up bowling seriously and was being greeted with jeers from his colleagues, when he bowled with both, left and right arms. Hanif had bowled in the first innings also in an over consisting of 4 balls with the right arm and two with the left. Amusingly enough with the first left-arm delivery of the over he bowled [Roy] Smith and broke the seventh-wicket stand of 47 runs.’More notably, though less successfully, Hanif switched to his left arm on the third ball of his over in the third Test against the West Indies in Jamaica not long after the 337. At the other end, on the verge of greatness on 364, was Garry Sobers. ‘Hanif, not a bowler of note, asked the umpire if he could bowl left-handed, as I just needed that one run for the record. The umpire, in turn, asked me and I said that it was all right and he could bowl with both hands if he wished.’ Sobers pushed out to the covers, took a single and took the record for the highest individual Test innings.These were quirks of prodigy. He led Pakistan for nearly three years between 1964 and 1967, which given his nature and the nature of the job was probably the most impressive string in his bow. The tenure has never attracted particular scrutiny or reaction, instead overlooked equally without fondness or scorn. Admittedly Hanif is beyond captaincy in a sense, his importance carrying far broader repercussions as the face at the forefront of a new nation. And ordinarily two wins, two losses and seven draws is just the kind of middling record that makes the non-reaction understandable.But given the crunch on resources he oversaw, it is more impressive than that. In his first Test as captain, for example, against Australia in October 1964, he led no fewer than six debutants; none of Imtiaz Ahmed, Kardar or Fazal, the troika on whom the side was built in the 1950s, was there. His opening bowlers in that Test were Asif Iqbal and Majid Khan, both debuting and both actually batsmen.Of course his aloofness led to claims that he was too authoritative, but it narrowed the focus of his batting even more: in 11 Tests as captain, Hanif averaged over 58, with four hundreds, including two of his highest scores after the 337. ‘When you play for your country, you’re always thinking of what your team needs,’ he explains. ‘My thinking power wasn’t bad. Kardar would always discuss the game with me, the situation of a match. Whenever a partnership was building or wickets weren’t coming, he would come to me: “Master, ? Show some way.” I always used to think and analyze what was in front of me and a few times my ideas worked. Players can be as big as they are but often you can’t tell another player’s weakness. Some average players though, can pick it up in others.’The effect of his leadership, or at least the manner of it, is best gleaned from a performance in only his second match as captain. It could also be taken to be the most conclusive proof of his genius as batsman and of Gover’s assessment of his completeness. It came in Australia, historically the toughest country for subcontinent batsmen to adjust to; the greater bounce and pace in the surfaces there almost diametrically opposite to what most batsmen come to grow up on in the subcontinent.
“I am not going to try to coach this boy and my tip is that you don’t let anybody else try this either”Alf Gover on a young Hanif
Barely a month after that one-off Test at Karachi Pakistan flew to Australia for their first official trip there. In the only Test at Melbourne, the visitors introduced three more debutants to follow the six in the previous Test. Six of the eleven were playing either their first or second Test. It was, for the challenge, a ludicrously inexperienced side. In the only warm-up game of a short tour in Brisbane against Queensland, Hanif provided a glimpse of what was to come, with a fluent 95.But the pitch at Melbourne was green, or green enough to concern Pakistan. Hanif foresaw not only immediate problems but those that would persist forever. ‘During the nets, we had realized how difficult it was to play any ball falling short of a length on the hard and bouncy wickets,’ Hanif remembered in his autobiography. ‘[And] I briefed my boys that they had to be very careful in playing the pull and hook shot, or they would end up getting caught in the slips or gully.’Hanif’s fears were confirmed as early as the first over of the opening morning, after Bob Simpson had won the toss and put Pakistan in. The skies were overcast and the third ball from the deceptively fast if mild-mannered Graham McKenzie shot up high on Abdul Kadir, hit him on the gloves and was gobbled up by the slips. In the preceding Test on a slower, lower surface in Karachi, Kadir had batted serenely for nearly five hours in making 95 on debut. Here, with swing and bounce, a potential nightmare was awaiting merely a script.Hanif though came out like a sponge and absorbed everything, Australia’s attack, the steep bounce, the clouds – this, remember, was only his second innings on Australian soil – the match situation; he inhaled long and deep, sucked in all the heat and breathed out an accomplished, soothing three-hour hundred. He took a particular liking to David Sincock, a left-arm chinaman spinner making his debut, taking 19 off one of his overs.Watching from the slips was Ian Chappell, also on debut. ‘He was an incredibly good player and I was impressed by the ease with which he played,’ Chappell remembers. ‘He had plenty of time and was unworried by the extra bounce even though McKenzie was pretty sharp. He was one of those players who surprised you when you looked at the scoreboard and saw how many he was on. That way he made batting look pretty simple.’At the time he became only the third visiting player outside of England to make a Test hundred on his first appearance in Australia, after Sobers and the South African Eddie Barlow. Only two Pakistanis have emulated him since, though both Ijaz Ahmed and Saeed Anwar had played in plenty of one-day games in Australia before their first Test there.There was more to come; eighth man out, Hanif then kept wicket in place of Kadir, the regular, whose thumb had been fractured by McKenzie. ‘Mohammad Ilyas was tried on the second day in the ground, but was found wanting so I decided to keep wickets myself,’ Hanif wrote. Knee operations earlier in his career made the constant crouching onerous, but he ended up taking four catches, including three off the medium-pacer Arif Butt. That was of particular relief because Hanif had, unusually, backed his gut in selecting Butt for a debut: ‘simply because he was a very religious, pious kind of guy and I had a gut feeling that he would invoke some kind of divine blessing for our team.’ Divine or not, Butt took 6-89.Then, under the burden of a 161-run deficit, Hanif arrived in the second innings, as he had done so many times, to save a game. In just over three hours he did, only denied a second hundred by an umpiring error. ‘Hanif was strolling to another hundred when he was given out stumped by [umpire] Colin Egar,’ recalls Chappell. ‘He wasn’t actually out because the ball bounced and hit [Douglas] Jarman on the wrist and passed just over the stumps while Jarman’s gloves went forward and took the bails off.’ Jarman apologized to Hanif for appealing. The Test, with the help of rain, was still saved.Hanif’s tactical leadership was criticized, but it missed the context. ‘I was not there to lose a match. I had to protect my players, most of whom were new to Test cricket.’ His batting, however, won plenty of praise. Ray Robinson compared him to the Australian great Lindsay Hassett. At a post-match dinner, Hanif met Sir Don Bradman, whose first-class record for the highest innings he had broken. Bradman had heard about Hanif and imagined him to be a tall, strapping man. ‘In his opinion,’ Hanif recalled in his autobiography, ‘I had great command over the game and must have immense reserves of concentration.’The pair met again ahead of a final tour game against South Australia in Adelaide, before Pakistan left for New Zealand. Bradman told Hanif he had come to see him bat. Hanif obliged with an unbeaten 110, completing a tour of Australia in which he made two hundreds and two nineties in four innings. No one else came close, an imprint not just of the tour but of a time in which, if indeed genius was glimpsed, it was as a lonely curse.