A WARRIOR AND A GENTLEMAN

Imran Khan is an example to the flabby New Britain,

writes Ian Buruma

To set the cause above renown, To love the game beyond the prize, To honour, while you strike him down, The foe that comes with fearless eyes.

Henry Newbolt, 'Clifton Chapel'

ON MY flight back to Hong Kong, I sat next to a stout Englishman with pale blue eyes and a little moustache. He had a job in Shanghai, he informed me without being asked, in an 'engineering situation'. The Chinese, he said, were 'shrewd, subtle, devious'. He was the kind of bore whose every word sounds like a poke in the ribs. When I feigned sleep, he tried to wake me by tapping my shoulder. When this failed, he turned to his other neighbour, a dark- haired young man. 'The West is decadent,'

he said, a propos of nothing. 'Even in cricket, our own game, we are being humiliated by foreigners. . . I opened one eye. The young man looked utterly non-plussed. I later heard that he was a Frenchman of Tunisian ancestry, planning to start a restaurant in Brisbane.

The bore's remark, echoing the cliches of our time, would have passed through the other ear, had I not been reading a few things on this very topic — the decadence of England, that is — which still exercised my mind. First of all there was Nirad C. Chaudhuri's article in the Daily Telegraph, entitled 'Why I mourn for England'. Chaudhuri, a learned Bengali in his nine- ties, mourned the illiteracy of the New Britain, the lack of mental backbone, the flabbiness of will to achieve anything but state-fed wellbeing. He believes that Great Britain reneged on her great mission to civilise modern India by shutting down the empire too soon. He is, indeed, one of the last surviving advocates of the Raj. C. L. R. James, a West Indian of almost exactly the same age as Chaudhuri, is a Marxist and a lifelong opponent of col- onialism. Yet, in his marvellous book, Beyond the Boundary, suffused in its way with the same eclectic scholarship as Chaudhuri's works, he comes to a rather similar conclusion. Cricket, he argues, is not just a game, but an art, reflecting the ethos and aesthetics and politics of the societies in which it is played — or should I say performed? As historical circumstances change, so does cricket. A chapter on the negative drudgery of modern Anglo-Saxon cricket is aptly entitled: `Decline of the West'. This decline started, in his opinion, in 1914 and by 1929 the rot had truly set in. Another chapter dealing with the mediocrity of professional cricket in Eng- land today is called `The Welfare State of Mind'. Gone is the ethos of W. G. Grace and Tom Brown's Schooldays; instead we have the boring hack who can't be bothered to put up much of a show, let alone win it.

Finally there is Imran Khan's new book, All Round View. Unlike Chaudhuri or James, Imran Khan cannot be described as a scholar, Keble College, Oxford notwith- standing. Nor does he pretend to be. His book is a conventional cricket autobiogra- phy, interesting mainly to cricket enthu- siasts, of whom I am one. Nevertheless, the Pakistan captain has caught the im- agination of the English public in a way hardly seen since Prince Ranjitsinhji, `the Black Prince', performed heroics for Cam- bridge, Sussex and England in the 1890s.

Imran Khan is of course remarkably good-looking, though slightly less exotic than the Black Prince, who sported ex- quisite silk shirts, buttoned up to the wrists, when coming in to bat. But good looks is not all. Like `Ranji', a fairy-tale artistocrat in a bourgeois age, Imran repre- sents something the New Britain has lost: he is the consumate gentleman sportsman, the product of the smartest public school in Pakistan and the martial pride of his Pathan ancestors. In him two romantic fancies of the Raj come together, the nobility of the so-called warrior race and the education of Tom Brown's morality in India. The warrior races were of course much admired by British empire-builders, much more so than the far more cultivated Bengalis. The Pathans were precisely the foes with fearless eyes that one struck down, while honouring them.

Pathans, traditionally, laid great stress on physical courage, leadership, the com- pany of males, but also, discreetly, on sexual prowess with women. Imran's flat in London appears to reflect these qualities in an almost caricatural form. The hall and downstairs room is filled with pictures of the great warrior's sporting feats; here a photograph of Imran tearing in to bowl a hostile outswinger, there a picture of Im- ran smashing the ball to the boundary. No less warrior-like is the bedroom, arranged like a kind of chieftain's tent, the ceiling draped with billows of silk. On the wall are paintings of fierce-looking tigers. But it is, as I said, the combination of all this with an old-fashioned British educa- tion that is interesting. Imran went to Aitchison College in Lahore, a grand 19th-century school with palatial Victorian buildings and grounds. J. A. Mangan, in his book The Games Ethic and Imperial- ism, describes what such schools were like in Ranjitsinhji's time (Ranji went to Raj- kumar College at Rajkot). Ranji's head- master, Chester Macnaghten, used to read the Indian princes under his charge a passage from Tom Brown's Schooldays, in which the Captain of the Eleven kept his team steady in a cricket match crisis. This was followed by the exhortation: 'In hours so spent you will learn lessons such as no school instruction can give — the lessons of self-reliance, calmness and courage. . .

Ishowed Mangan's book to Imran and asked him how much had changed in his schooldays. He laughed and talked about his headmaster, `A mad Pathan, educated at Oxford. Every morning we would get sermons about responsibility and honour.' There were, I was told, also `real' English- men teaching at Aitchison.

Imran's own book shows the lessons he learnt. He judges players not so much by their skills — those are taken for granted — as by their attitudes, their courage in a crisis, their capacity to take pain without flinching, their leadership, in short, their sense of responsibility and honour.

I watched Imran in action a few weeks ago in a one-day match in Northampton. The remarkable thing was not just that he was top-scorer for his side, Sussex, and by far the most dangerous bowler, but that he seemed to be the only one who really wanted to win the game, while his col- leagues were simply doing their jobs, because that is what they were being paid to do. And that was of course precisely the difference: he was the gentleman, they were the players. `I enjoy cricket,' he says himself. `If I had been a British player, having to play every day like a nine-to-five job, I would have lost my enthusiasm for cricket long ago. They don't even bother to watch. They sit inside the dressing room playing cards.

Imran's description of the old county pros, resentful of new talent, distrustful of any innovation, rings all too true. When playing for Worcestershire, Imran got bored bowling at medium pace: 'I didn't want to be just a work horse.' So he experimented with bowling fast. His coun- ty colleagues advised him against this. Why bother? It will never do. Don't put on fancy airs, and so on and so forth. Imran does not come right out and say this, but there is doubtless an element of class involved here, the envy of the rank and file against the privileged public schoolboy who has the time and means to enjoy himself and try something new.

The interesting thing is that the last gentlemen in cricket are almost all for- eigners. Just as the last defenders of the values propagated under the Raj are most- ly former subjects of the British empire. Think, for example, of `Harry' Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister of Singapore. Like Nirad Chaudhuri, he is forever be- moaning the loss of British backbone. He did this once to George Brown during a garden party in Singapore. 'Harry,' replied Brown, `You're the finest Englishman east of Suez.' Also like Chaudhuri he is admired for this by some English conserva- tives who tend to gloss over the fact that Harry's favourite legacy of empire is his liberal use of emergency powers to lock people up without trial.

There is, Lee's use of power notwith- standing, something to be said for all this. The New Britain is a trifle flabby. And the old public school code is not all humbug and pampered privilege. Indeed, as Im- ran's case so clearly shows, gentlemen are often more competitive than old pros. After all, the whole point of Thomas Arnold's (not to mention Thomas Hugh- es's) vigorous Christianity was to mask ruthless competition with good manners, indeed to strike down while doing honour. It might also be pointed out that the most ruthless England captain was Douglas Jar- dine. It was he, a gentleman to the core, who ordered the decent old pros, Larwood and Voce, to bowl at Australian heads. Ironically it was an Indian aristocrat, the Nawab of Pataudi, who protested most vigorously.

Can the competitive British spirit be revived by bringing back the gentlemen, or, not to mince my words, by putting the upper class in power again? It is interesting to see how a peculiar kind of snobbery is creeping into the most varying opponents of `asset-stripping Thatcherism'. One for- mer left-wing activist was telling me the other day how she wished those people with posh accents were in charge again, instead of those jumped-up airline pilots and greengrocers. Somehow, I don't think this will work. The time for ruthless paternalism is over. I hardly believe the English upper class is up to the task anyway. And besides, the spirit of the Raj involves attitudes which are as defunct as they are undesirable, such as racial arro- gance. What Thomas Arnold believed innocently cannot be revived cynically.

There is perhaps one way in which British backbone could be considerably stiffened, but that would not have many takers either, apart from the few, such as Bernard Levin, who have already sug- gested it. This would be to allow massive immigration of former colonials. Let the Hong Kong Chinese kick life into Liver- pool. Let Singaporeans take over the City. Let Indians and Pakistanis run the hospit- als. Infusion of new blood is after all what kept America young. In Little England this is unlikely to happen, however. For one who wishes the England cricket team well, this is a pity. A combination of Indian spin, Carribean speed and South African bat- ting, even if hobbling on one leg, could start winning matches again. The England captain most likely would be a Pathan.