It was the end of June, and a sunny day in London. The poppy-red fields of Flanders had been peaceful for over a decade, and Hitler was no more than a dark cloud upon the horizon. And in distant India, once-wealthy India, an English king was emperor. But in London, bright that summer morning, eleven men from India had travelled over the seas to walk out before an audience of 24,000. They were eleven men, kitted out in their whites, and they were in Lord’s to play their country’s maiden Test match, against their colonial rulers.
India lost that 1932 Test, and it would be forty long years before it would defeat England in England (Pakistan managed it at The Oval in 1954). But in that match the seeds of South Asia’s obsession with cricket were sown. Players who, fifteen years later, were divided between the two successor states of India and Pakistan played a sport that captured their countries’ imagination. In a very real sense that Test, on July 25, 1932, was the debut match for Pakistan as well as for India. And the very first ball that morning was bowled by a man who, though he played in only six Tests, would later be considered one of India’s finest fast bowlers. Mohammad Nissar faced one of England’s most promising opening pairs: H Sutcliffe and P Holmes, who had managed a partnership of 555 runs only days before.
On the first ball of Nissar’s second over, Sutcliffe was bowled out. And on the last ball of that same over, Holmes’ stumps went flying out of the ground. In that moment, as the stump cartwheeled out of the earth and into history, South Asian cricket was born. “In my mind’s eye, I saw the news flashing over the air to far flung places,” wrote Neville Cardus, the great cricket journalist. “To Punjab and Karachi, to dusky men in the hills, in the bazaars on the East, to Gandhi himself, and to Gunga Din.”
And India never forgot. To this day, Mohammad Nissar is celebrated in India as the man who bowled the first Indian Test ball, who took the first Indian Test wicket, who was the first Indian to take five wickets in an innings, all in the same match. At a ceremony hosted by the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in Mumbai, Nissar’s son Waqar Nisar came to accept an award in his father’s name: a piece of turf from Lord’s, the only award of its kind in Pakistan, given to all those who took five wickets or scored centuries at Lord’s for India.
Mohammad Nissar was born in Hoshiarpur in the Punjab in 1910. He came to Lahore to study, where at some point he became interested in cricket, then a young sport in the subcontinent. He played “ shalwar kameez cricket” in Minto Park, and was selected for his college and the Punjab University teams. His pace and skill led him to be selected for India in the maiden Test of 1932, where he was joined by the medium-fast bowler L Amar Singh. Amar and Nissar soon became good friends, and their bowling attack is still considered unmatched in Indian cricket. Sadly, neither had a long career. Amar Singh died aged only thirty, and Nissar’s career was cut short by World War II. Nevertheless, in his six Tests, Nissar thrice took five wickets in an innings.
Nissar’s pace was key to his success. For the batsmen facing him it must have been terrifying: a big man running up from the length of two cricket pitches away, with the ball coming from overhead at a speed that, according to CK Nayudu, said to be the only batsman able to withstand him, could be greater than Harold Larwood’s. Indeed, Nissar’s intimidating bowling may well have helped the development of Larwood’s infamous Bodyline bowling in England’s subsequent series against Australia. With this devastating speed (in an era when injury was not uncommon) and his ability to swing the new ball, Nissar achieved the best strike rate yet in Indian cricket, with a wicket every 48 balls. His pace, his contemporaries told Waqar Nisar, was such that “anyone who could keep his wicket, his hands were black and blue hands at the end of the day”.
And yet Mohammad Nissar was a gentleman. In a match against the Hindus in 1939, the Muslims captain Syed Wazir Ali asked Nissar to bowl bouncers to the injured Vinoo Mankad. Nissar refused – it was not, he felt, in the spirit of the game. At the time Wazir said nothing, but Nissar was not asked to bowl another over. Another time, the Maharaja of Patiala offered Nissar a village if he would bowl a bouncer. Again Nissar refused. “There is no such village in the Punjab,” he replied.
After partition Nissar came to Pakistan. By now he had joined the Railways (with references from his cricketing friends, the rulers of Pataudi, Patiala and Vijayanagar) and was married, with young children. His days playing Test cricket were over. Some wondered whether Amar Singh’s premature death had led Nissar to gradually abandon active play. Whatever the reason, Nissar’s indirect involvement continued. After partition he captained the Commander-in-Chief’s XI against Ceylon, and was amongst the first selectors for Pakistan’s fledgling team. Once, when the Nissars were posted to Multan around 1961, there was a sports awards ceremony at school. To everyone’s excitement the all-rounder Lala Amarnath himself came to present the awards. “Lala Amarnath, being Lala Amarnath was famous,” Waqar recalls. “But he refused to give awards when my father was there. My sister, when she heard that, was confused. We never had any idea about his cricket career, because he never spoke of it.”
After his early death in 1963 the Railways inaugurated an annual Nissar Cup in his memory, which was contested through the sixties. Gradually, however, this historic player faded from Pakistani memory, so that when Waqar Nisar was invited to India, he found that Pakistani sports journalists had never heard his name. Indeed, Waqar only found out that the CCI had been searching for Nissar’s family during a casual web browse. Reading a Calcutta newspaper online he learned that the president of the club, Raj Singh Dungarpur had been refused a visa to Pakistan. He had wanted to come to search for Nissar’s relatives.
Where, then, is Mohammed Nissar in Pakistan’s memory? When Waqar Nisar went to collect the award, he was overwhelmed by the reverence with which the bowler was remembered. “Everyone knew about him, people wanted to take my autograph for his work,” he recalls. Not a cricket buff himself, and only eight when his father passed away, Waqar found himself buffeted by the names he had heard through his life. “After I received the award, Muhammad Azharuddin came to congratulate me. All the great cricketers – Kapil Dev, Bedi, Gavaskar – came themselves to greet me in my father’s memory.” Those who remembered the Bombay Presidency matches between the gymkhanas became quite emotional when they met Waqar. “One old gentleman, he was the president of the Islam Gymkhana, and his father had been the president before him, came to see me in tears. He was determined that I visit my father’s home ground at the gymkhana.”
And yet, for all the rousing welcome in Bombay, for all the media coverage in India, in Nissar’s own country he is nearly forgotten. None of the players who made their mark for undivided India’s team are remembered in the successor state of Pakistan, not even the Muslims who opted to come to the new nation. Realising how his father is still respected in India, Waqar is bitter that a man who considered himself Pakistani is forgotten in Pakistan. If Pakistan was created as a homeland for Muslims, he argues, “Muslims [before the Partition] should be honoured and considered Pakistani cricketers. Instead India has taken full ownership of their talents.”
And, bitterly, Nissar’s family has come to accept this. They have kept safe much of the memorabilia from Nissar’s career, including the signed stump that was ripped out of the ground at Lord’s. Now they plan to donate it all to the CCI, to preserve it in the museum at Mumbai’s historic Brabourne Stadium. It is “more deserving than any other place,” Waqar feels. “In Pakistan there is no recognition for people who are no longer alive. There are not even any enclosures dedicated to him.” And if Pakistani cricket fans cannot make even such a small gesture, what worth will pre-partition memorabilia hold for them?
This nation, younger by far than its own history and with an astonishing talent for selective recall, has a knack for ignoring its own heroes. Mohammad Nissar is only one of the cricketers who left their team-mates in India to come to live in this new nation, yet who are removed from our history. Pakistani cricket began, let us not forget, on a sunny June morning seventy years ago, when a tall man from the Punjab began his historic runup to propel himself and his sport into the popular imagination of a subcontinent.
SOURCE: The Friday Times, Nov 14-20, 2003