Shadows Across the Playing Field 75 Years of India-Pakistan Cricket
Shashi Tharoor and Shaharyar Khan, Edited by David Page
Shashi Tharoor, a former UN Under-Secretary-General and man of letters, is a passionate outsider, whose comprehensive, entertaining and hard-hitting analysis of seventy-five years of cricketing history displays a Nehruvian commitment to secular values, which rejects sectarianism in sport in either country.
Shaharyar Khan, a former Pakistan Foreign Secretary, is very much the insider, who writes compellingly of his pivotal role as team manager and then Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board at a time when cricket was in the forefront of détente between the two countries.
In their essays, the two authors trace the growing popularization of cricket from the days of the Bombay Pentangular to the Indian Premier League. They show how politics and cricket became intertwined and assess the impact it has had on the game. But above all the book is a celebration of the talent of the many great cricketers who have captivated audiences on both sides of the border. If politics and terrorism can at times stop play, cricket is also a force for peace and healthy competition.
Shashi Tharoor worked for the United Nations in various humanitarian, peace-keeping and management roles
for nearly thirty years and was Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information during
the tenure of Kofi Annan. Currently a Lok Sabha MP representing the Thiruvananthapuram constituency, he
is an acclaimed novelist, author and newspaper columnist. His non-fiction titles include An Era of Darkness
(2016), The Paradoxical Prime Minister (2018) and The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, and
what it means to be Indian (2020). He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian cricket, which he has followed
avidly from afar, and has played in such cricketing hotbeds as Singapore and Geneva.
Shaharyar Khan had a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, retiring as Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary in
1994. He had earlier served as Ambassador to Jordan and France as well as High Commissioner to London.
On retirement, he was appointed the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Rwanda. He was born
in Bhopal and educated at Cambridge University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston. He
has had a lifelong interest in cricket and over the past ten years has played a pivotal role in cricketing relations
between India and Pakistan. He was manager of the Pakistan cricket team that toured India in 1999 and served
as Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board from December 2003 to October 2006. He is the author of The
Begums of Bhopal (1999), The Shallow Graves of Rwanda (2000), Cricket: A Bridge of Peace (2001) and
Bhopal Connections (2017).
About the Editor
David Page took his doctorate in history from Oxford University and worked for more than twenty years as a
writer, editor and manager in the BBC World Service. He is co-director of the Media South Asia project at the
Institute for Commonwealth Studies at London University, and is the author of Prelude to Partition (1999) and
co-author of Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and the Public Interest (2001).
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