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himself, captained Pakistan. As a rule, the Khans were intensely loyal, if not fanatically so, to their adopted country. They invariably spoke Urdu, not English, and were openly contemptuous of the kala sahibs (‘black masters’), the members of the Pakistani professional classes who shamelessly aped the mannerisms of the departed British. Taken as a whole, both the Niazis and the Burkis were formidable examples of the Pathan tribal ethic, whom training and instinct had taught to be tough, capable and self-sufficient even as they assimilated into modern urban life. The children of such people aren’t apt to be weaklings.
He was born Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi on 5 October 1952, not, as recorded in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack and elsewhere, on 25 November. It was both traditional and somehow appropriate that there would be an ‘administrative foul-up’, Imran recalled, when he came to obtain his first passport, resulting in an official filling in the wrong date. Fitting, too, that he would be called Imran (which means ‘construction’, or ‘prosperity’), and be known by his monosyllabic paternal surname, with its tersely assertive ring. In Pathan culture, each tribe has a ‘khan’, meaning ‘lion’ or ‘chief’, at its head. The word is thought to come from the Turkish khaqan, which has the specific connotation of being a conquering warlord. Since Imran himself has dabbled in astrology and isn’t above consulting a clairvoyant before making a major decision, it might be added that he’s a Libra, and thus said to be freedom-loving, refined, idealistic, sincere, broad-minded, truth-seeking, expansive, flirtatious and virile, among several other virtues. Being both precocious and male (one sister preceded him, and three followed), he seems to have been doted on as a small boy. Without wishing to descend too far into the abyss of psychiatry, biographers always seem to recall Sigmund Freud’s line on these occasions: the dictum that ‘a man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror’ was undoubtedly true here. The young Imran was also something of a loner, by all accounts. At family gatherings his mother and others would sometimes notice him ‘drift[ing] apart from the crowd’ of relatives. Aged only three or four, a cousin told me, ‘he would always be off stargazing by himself’.
Imran’s birth preceded that of Pakistan’s international cricket by just 11 days. The national team played its first ever Test, against India at Delhi, in October 1952. The Indians won by an innings. Pakistan had also just embarked on its long and continuing history of political turmoil. The founding father and Quaid-e-Azam (‘great leader’) of the modern state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had died in 1948, some 13 months after independence. His hand-picked successor, Liaquat Ali Khan, was fatally shot by a Pathan fanatic at a public rally in Municipal Park, Rawalpindi, in October 1951. (The former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated just outside the same park 56 years later; the first medical worker on the scene was the son of the doctor who had tried to save Liaquat’s life.) Elsewhere, it was the era of the Korean War, H-bomb tests and Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe. In London the talk was of the perennial balance of payments crisis, as well as more pressing issues such as an electrical workers’ strike, pickets and power cuts. Agatha Christie’s stage adaptation of her radio play The Mousetrap made its West End debut in the week Imran was born half a world away.
Imran later told an English friend that he hadn’t had a particularly happy, or unhappy, childhood. Instead he described it as secure and serious. One assumes he meant secure in the family sense, because he was born into a world of violent change. The state of Pakistan was just five years older than he was, brought into being after the end of British rule, when two new countries were created to form predominantly Muslim West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) with Hindu-majority India wedged in between. Even at the time, many observers had feared that the amputation of the subcontinent along religious lines would result in wholesale administrative chaos. It did. What ensued was some way short of a textbook example of smooth decolonisation. An estimated 700–800,000 people died in the riots that followed Partition, which also created some 14 million long-term refugees. It would be fair to say that, to many Indians, the very creation of Pakistan was seen as a violation of India’s geographical, cultural and religious boundaries. The two nations would enjoy an at best strained relationship, not least in the disputed sub-Himalayan outpost of Kashmir, and pursued differing alliances around the world. While India looked to the Soviet Union as a strategic ally, the Pakistanis sought support from the Americans by portraying themselves as tough anti-Communists with a British-trained military, based only a cannon’s shot away from the southern Russian border. In October 1952, President Truman spoke to a joint session of Congress of ‘halt[ing] Red expansion by helping develop the resources of the third world’, which he proposed to do by committing an initial $210 million-worth of military hardware and training, a somehow familiar-sounding gesture today.
By 1954 Pakistan had manoeuvred its way into both the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) and the South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), two US-sponsored consortiums designed to prevent ‘Red expansion’ in the region. (They were to prove of limited use in Vietnam.) Pakistan also soon adopted that unique combination of democratic procedures, military interference and Islamic ritual that still distinguishes the country. In April 1953 the state’s governor-general Ghulam Mohammad dismissed the elected civilian government and replaced it with a military ‘cabinet of talents’. A succession of governors-general, presidents and army chiefs were to remove a further nine civilian governments over the next 21 years. The 35 years since then have been characterised by direct military rule.
Nor is there any simple distinction between law and religion in Pakistan, and consequently, as the West has recently come to see, the clerics often perform a political role. In 1953, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), the largest and most articulate of the nation’s religious parties, began a concerted campaign to purge the community of what it deemed blasphemous or ‘fetid’ behaviour, and to establish a fully Islamic state. The ensuing violence brought on the imposition of martial law and the first of Pakistan’s recurrent constitutional crises. Although the details varied, the essential pattern of coups, military rule, violent deaths and ethnic strife came to characterise, if not define, the entire 62-year period from Partition to the present day. By the time Imran was old enough to take an interest in his surroundings, the struggle over the character and soul of Pakistan was well under way.
As we’ve seen, he had the good fortune to be born into a society which traditionally favours boys over girls, the latter of whom then rarely even bothered to attend school: an officially estimated 23 per cent of females over the age of 15 were classified as ‘functionally literate’ in 1952, compared to 47 per cent of males. In a patriarchal culture like Pakistan’s, the birth of a son represents a potential source of income in old age, whereas a girl will eventually marry and leave. The Khan family were also well positioned in the Pakistani caste system, whose extremes were marked out by a small number of plantation-owning millionaires and morally flexible politicians at one end and the untouchables at the other. Of this latter category, rock bottom was represented by the humble domestic cleaner. There simply was no lowlier status in the Pakistan of the 1950s, and in those days no one would willingly marry a cleaner except another cleaner.
Imran, by contrast, grew up from an early age in a gated community of substantial redbrick houses with neatly manicured lawns that took its name from his own great-uncle, Zaman Khan. It was as if ‘the most bourgeois part of Dulwich had been dumped down in Lahore’, I was told. Immediately outside the gates was a setting more familiar to generations of ordinary Pakistanis. The town of Lahore spread out around a number of bustling squares in a haphazard jumble of shops, bazaars, tenements, bungalows and garishly painted billboards. Most people travelled by public transport, or if they were lucky by either rickshaw or bicycle. The distinctive item of male dress was the bright-red ajrak, a flowing shawl worn over a knee-length shirt and baggy trousers. To this ensemble many men added an embroidered cap decorated with tiny mirrors. The women were generally veiled. To relieve the monotony of daily life, there were frequent melas, or fairs, in which a merry-go-round was usually erected in the market square and a travelling circus displayed dancing bears and monkeys. The Basant festival, unique to Lahore, took place each spring and featured elaborate kiteflying competitions with an added touch of the hyper-gamesmanship so integral to much of Pakistani life. What brought drama to the event was that at least on occasion the kite strings would be coated with ground glass, with the idea of disabling rivals’ kites by cutting through their