The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 did more
than draw new borders. It created two states, India and Pakistan, while giving
Pakistan an extraordinary geographical and political structure: two wings
separated by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory. West Pakistan
contained the principal centres of political and military power; East Pakistan,
despite its demographic weight, increasingly found itself struggling for an
equitable place within the new state.
Sport developed within this unequal landscape.
Cricket was one of the more curious inheritances of British
rule. A game introduced by the colonial elite might easily have been rejected
in the nationalist atmosphere that accompanied independence. Instead, it
survived the empire that had brought it. In India and Pakistan alike, cricket
was gradually appropriated, nationalised and transformed into an expression of
prestige. Eventually it would become something still larger: a diplomatic
language through which two hostile neighbours could occasionally communicate
when conventional politics failed.
Yet within Pakistan itself, cricket developed along
strikingly uneven lines. While Karachi, Lahore and other western centres
rapidly became the institutional heartlands of the game, East Pakistan spent
much of its existence trying to prove that it belonged to Pakistan's cricketing
map at all.
A Game That Had Lost Its Patrons
Cricket was not unknown in Bengal before Partition. The
region possessed a cricketing tradition nurtured by aristocratic patrons,
educational institutions and enthusiasts. But 1947 disrupted those networks.
The disappearance from East Bengal's cricketing landscape of influential
figures such as the Maharaja of Natore and Sarada Ranjan Ray deprived the game
of some of its old patronage.
At precisely the same time, another sport was capturing the
imagination of Dhaka.
Football had received an enormous psychological boost in
1937, when Dhaka District defeated the touring Islington Corinthians. The
achievement acquired almost mythical significance because of the visitors'
remarkable record in India: they won 36 of their 38 matches, with their defeat
in Dhaka standing out spectacularly. The result helped transform football from
merely a popular sport into a mass urban spectacle.
For decades thereafter, football—and to a lesser extent
hockey—occupied the emotional territory that cricket would claim much later.
But cricket did not disappear. It survived at a more modest
level, sustained by clubs and enthusiasts rather than powerful institutions.
Journalist and politician Muhammad Kamruzzaman later recalled that although
organised football and cricket leagues were interrupted around Partition, clubs
continued arranging friendly cricket during the winter. Grounds associated with
the Dhaka DSA, Wari, Victoria and East End preserved a fragile cricketing
culture through a period of uncertainty.
By 1948, organised league cricket was beginning to return.
It was not yet a renaissance. It was survival.
Building an Institution
The early 1950s brought the first serious attempt to give
cricket in East Pakistan an institutional foundation.
Feroz Khan Noon, the Punjabi politician who would later
become prime minister of Pakistan, was among those associated with the effort
to establish an East Pakistan cricket organisation in 1951. Masood Salahuddin,
a former Indian all-rounder who had played in unofficial Tests against
Australia in 1935–36 before later moving to Pakistan, also became involved in
developing the game.
This mattered because East Pakistan's fundamental cricketing
weakness was not necessarily an absence of enthusiasm. It was the absence of a
structure capable of converting enthusiasm into elite players.
An unusual visit from Burma around 1951 illustrated both the
possibilities and the limitations. Financed privately by a West Pakistani
businessman, a Burmese side travelled to Dhaka and played friendly matches at
the DSA ground. The tourists hardly behaved like a hardened international team:
contemporary recollections describe coloured clothing, straw hats and even
players smoking on the field.
The cricket itself may have lacked seriousness, but its
symbolism did not.
East Pakistan had hosted a foreign cricket team. In a region
increasingly intoxicated by football, simply having international visitors
playing cricket mattered.
Kardar and the First Signs of Awakening
A more important moment arrived after Pakistan's historic
1952–53 tour of India.
Pakistan's captain, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, was already
becoming one of the central architects of the country's cricketing identity. On
returning from India, members of the West Pakistan side visited East Pakistan,
where matches were arranged in Chattogram and Dhaka.
The encounters were modest in format—two-day matches rather
than major first-class contests—but their significance lay elsewhere. East
Pakistani cricketers were being placed directly against players belonging to
Pakistan's emerging elite.
A 16-member East Pakistan side was assembled under ATM
Mustafa. Among the local players to attract attention were Dr Mazharul Islam
Damal and wicketkeeper Qazi Mohsin. Both were subsequently included in an
All-Pakistan party travelling to Burma, although their opportunities arose
partly because of injuries to West Pakistani players.
That qualification was revealing.
Even at this early stage, East Pakistani cricketers were
often close enough to national cricket to be noticed, but rarely secure enough
within the system to be selected on equal terms.
Kardar nevertheless recognised that something important had
begun. Writing in *Dawn* in 1954, he reflected on the emergence of the game in
the eastern wing. The seeds had been planted.
The question was whether Pakistan's cricket establishment
would allow them to grow.
Dhaka Stadium and the Geography of Pakistani Cricket
Infrastructure began changing the equation.
The construction of Dhaka Stadium in the mid-1950s—later
known as Bangabandhu National Stadium—gave East Pakistan something it had
desperately lacked: a venue capable of placing Dhaka on Pakistan's
international cricketing circuit.
Its symbolic arrival could hardly have been greater. On 1
January 1955, Pakistan began a Test against India in Dhaka.
For East Pakistan, hosting Test cricket was transformative.
The world's elite game was no longer something belonging exclusively to Karachi
or Lahore. International cricketers could now be watched in Dhaka; local
youngsters could see at close quarters the standards they were expected to
reach.
Dhaka would subsequently host touring sides and important
matches, making the stadium a bridge between local cricket and the
international game.
Yet there was a paradox at the centre of this progress
East Pakistan could host Test cricket long before it could
reliably produce Test cricketers.
That contradiction would define much of the next sixteen
years.
Thirteen Teams, One Uneasy Cricketing Identity
Between the 1954–55 and 1970–71 seasons, no fewer than 13
first-class teams representing East Pakistan in various forms participated in
Pakistan's domestic competitions, principally the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy and Ayub
Trophy. An East Pakistan Governor's XI also played a first-class match against
the touring International XI in 1961–62.
On paper, this suggested integration.
In reality, the picture was considerably more complicated.
East Pakistani teams frequently struggled against the
established cricketing centres of the western wing. Karachi and Lahore
possessed deeper playing pools, stronger club structures and greater access to
high-level cricket. East Pakistan was attempting to build a first-class culture
while simultaneously competing against regions where that culture was already
entrenched.
There was also an uncomfortable question of representation.
Several accomplished West Pakistani players represented East Pakistan sides at
different times. The situation became almost absurd in 1966–67 when East
Pakistan defeated Hyderabad-Khairpur-Quetta, only for the losing side to
protest that six members of the East Pakistan team were actually West Pakistani
and therefore should not have been eligible.
The episode exposed the contradiction within the system.
Administratively, East Pakistan possessed first-class teams. But if those teams
required substantial reinforcement from the West, how much was being done to
create an indigenous pathway for Bengali players?
The Players Who Broke Through
Despite these limitations, East Pakistan produced cricketers
of genuine quality.
Abdul Latif emerged as one of the outstanding performers of
the 1960s and captained East Pakistan teams on several occasions. His most
remarkable sequence came for East Pakistan Greens in January 1968, when he
combined three centuries with extraordinary leg-spin returns, taking 24 wickets
for 97 runs across two consecutive matches.
Javed Masood produced one of the defining individual innings
in East Pakistan's first-class history, scoring 215 against Hyderabad in
1962–63—the highest first-class score for an East Pakistan side.
Shamim Kabir played 15 first-class matches for various East
Pakistan teams. His significance would extend beyond 1971: in January 1977, he
captained Bangladesh in its first representative match against the touring
Marylebone Cricket Club.
These men represented a transitional generation—cricketers
whose careers began under one national flag but whose legacy would ultimately
belong to another.
And then two names became inseparable from
the final years of East Pakistani cricket: Abdul Halim Chowdhury Jewel and
Raquibul Hasan.
Jewel and Raquibul: Talent at the Edge of Selection
By the 1960s, cricket had begun gaining ground among
students and young athletes in East Pakistan. Dhaka's wickets and club
competitions produced a generation less willing to accept that sophisticated
cricket belonged naturally to the western wing.
Jewel was admired for the freedom and aggression of his
strokeplay. Raquibul possessed the technique and temperament to challenge
higher-level bowling. They belonged to a wider group of talented players that
included Khawaja Mohammad Athar, KM Omar, Amirullah Munni, KM Hasan, Sohrab
Khan and others.
Their emergence changed the argument.
Previously, the weakness of East Pakistani cricket could be
explained by inadequate infrastructure and limited competition. Increasingly,
however, talented individuals were appearing. The question became why so few
were progressing into Pakistan's national side.
That question was politically explosive because cricketing
exclusion increasingly mirrored a much broader Bengali grievance.
One Test Cricketer—and the Politics of Representation
The statistics were difficult to ignore.
Across the entire period before Bangladesh's independence,
Niaz Ahmed was the only cricketer representing East Pakistan's cricketing
structure to play Test cricket for Pakistan. Crucially, he was not Bengali.
His selection therefore acquired a political meaning
extending far beyond his individual ability.
Former diplomat and later Pakistan Cricket Board chairman
Shaharyar Khan would offer a particularly severe assessment of the episode,
arguing that Niaz was repeatedly kept around the Pakistan side partly to create
an impression that East Pakistan was approaching meaningful national
representation. In Shaharyar's interpretation, the appearance of inclusion
concealed the reality of institutional neglect.
Whether every selection decision should be reduced to
politics is debatable. West Pakistan unquestionably possessed a stronger
first-class system and a much larger concentration of established cricketers.
But the imbalance was too persistent to dismiss entirely as
a matter of merit.
East Pakistan contained the majority of Pakistan's
population. It hosted Test matches. It competed in national first-class
tournaments. It had clubs, administrators and increasingly talented players.
Yet Bengali representation at the highest level remained
virtually nonexistent.
The problem therefore was not merely that East Pakistan
produced fewer elite cricketers. It was that the system provided remarkably
little evidence that developing them was a national priority.
Opportunity Without Equality
The experiences of promising cricketers reinforced this
perception.
Sohrab Khan and Amirullah Munni, for example, earned
selection for a Pakistan Eaglets tour of England. Such a tour should have
represented an important developmental opportunity. Yet they reportedly
appeared in only two matches during a programme of roughly twenty.
For a young player, selection without meaningful playing
time could become almost as frustrating as non-selection.
This was the deeper structural weakness of East Pakistani
cricket. The eastern wing was periodically acknowledged but rarely empowered.
It received matches, occasional tours and representation in domestic
competitions, but the pathway from promising Bengali cricketer to Pakistan Test
player remained extraordinarily narrow.
Cricket therefore began reflecting the central political
contradiction of Pakistan itself: formal membership without an equivalent share
of power.
Cricket in the Age of Bengali Assertion
This cannot be separated from the political transformation
occurring in East Pakistan.
The Language Movement of 1952 fundamentally altered Bengali
political consciousness. The deaths of protesters demanding recognition for
Bangla became symbols of a larger struggle over culture, representation and
political equality.
Sport was not isolated from that atmosphere.
Every contest between East and West Pakistan could carry
meanings beyond the scoreboard. Every Bengali player who succeeded against an
established western side became evidence that the eastern wing possessed talent
when given an opportunity. Every omission from national selection could be
interpreted within the wider vocabulary of discrimination.
Cricket did not cause the political estrangement between the
two wings.
But increasingly, it reflected it.
1971: When Cricketers Became Freedom Fighters
By March 1971, the political argument had moved beyond
cricket.
Pakistan descended into war, and the sporting structures
that had connected its two wings collapsed alongside the state itself. Bengali
athletes were drawn into the Liberation War like the rest of society.
The fate of Abdul Halim Chowdhury Jewel gave cricket's
history in East Pakistan its most tragic symbolism.
Jewel exchanged the cricket bat for armed resistance and
joined the struggle for independence. He was captured and killed during the
war, becoming one of Bangladesh's martyred freedom fighters. His memory
subsequently occupied a place larger than his statistics could ever have
provided.
Raquibul Hasan survived and became one of the bridges
between the cricket of East Pakistan and that of independent Bangladesh.
Their generation had begun by trying to earn recognition
within Pakistan.
History gave them an entirely different task: helping create
the sporting identity of a new country.
Independence Did Not Immediately Make Bangladesh a
Cricket Nation
There is a temptation to tell Bangladesh's cricket history
as though 1971 inevitably led to today's cricket-mad nation.
It did not.
After independence, football remained the dominant mass
sport. Through much of the 1970s and 1980s, the great Dhaka football clubs
commanded enormous crowds and emotional loyalties. Cricket had to rebuild
institutions, grounds, competitions and international relationships in a
country devastated by war.
The connection with the pre-1971 period, however, had not
disappeared.
Shamim Kabir's captaincy against the MCC in January 1977
provided an almost perfect historical bridge. A man who had played first-class
cricket for East Pakistan now captained Bangladesh in one of the fledgling
nation's most significant early matches.
The old structure had vanished.
The cricketers remained.
Over the following two decades, Bangladesh slowly built the
foundations of an international cricketing nation. The process culminated in
increasingly significant international exposure, the 1997 ICC Trophy triumph,
entry into One-Day International cricket's elite competitions and, eventually,
Test status in 2000.
By then the hierarchy of Bangladeshi sport was changing
decisively. Cricket was overtaking football.
From Imperial Inheritance to National Possession
The history of cricket in East Pakistan is therefore about
considerably more than the development of a sport.
It is a story of survival, institution-building, unequal
opportunity and national identity.
Cricket survived Partition despite losing many of the
structures that had supported it. It survived the overwhelming popularity of
football. It acquired an association, domestic competitions and an
international stadium. East Pakistani teams entered Pakistan's first-class
structure, and talented cricketers gradually emerged.
Yet the final breakthrough remained elusive.
The most revealing statistic is not the number of matches
played in Dhaka or even the thirteen East Pakistani first-class teams that
appeared between 1954–55 and 1970–71. It is that, throughout Pakistan's united
existence, meaningful Bengali representation in the national Test side never
materialised.
That failure cannot be explained by discrimination alone;
East Pakistan's cricketing infrastructure was demonstrably weaker than that of
Karachi and Lahore. But neither can the imbalance be understood without
acknowledging the unequal distribution of resources, opportunity and
institutional attention that characterised Pakistan during those years.
In that sense, cricket became a miniature version of the
Pakistani state.
East Pakistan was present, but peripheral; represented, but
rarely powerful; capable of producing talent, but forced repeatedly to prove
that the talent existed.
Then came 1971.
The country whose selectors Bengali cricketers had once
struggled to impress was no longer their country. The neglected eastern
province became Bangladesh, and a cricket culture that had spent decades
seeking recognition could finally construct institutions of its own.
There is a historical irony in what followed.
Football had once pushed cricket towards the margins of
Bengali sporting life. Pakistan's cricket establishment had never fully
integrated the eastern wing into its national structure. Yet decades later,
cricket became perhaps the most visible expression of Bangladesh on the
international stage.
The journey from the improvised club matches of the late
1940s to the packed international stadiums of modern Bangladesh was therefore
neither straightforward nor inevitable. It passed through neglected grounds,
touring curiosities, first-class defeats, selection controversies, political
upheaval and war.
It also passed through Kardar and Damal, Abdul Latif and
Shamim Kabir, Jewel and Raquibul—men belonging to different generations but
connected by the attempt to establish cricket in a region where the game was
repeatedly forced to fight for its place.
Today, when a Bangladesh team walks onto an international
cricket ground beneath the red and green flag, that history is easy to
overlook. But modern Bangladeshi cricket did not begin with Test status in
2000, the ICC Trophy in 1997, or even independence in 1971.
Its foundations were laid much earlier, in another country
and under another flag, by generations of cricketers who played from the
geographical and institutional margins of Pakistan.
Their greatest achievement was not that they created a
dominant cricket culture in East Pakistan
They did something more fundamental.
They kept the game alive long enough for Bangladesh to
inherit it.
Thank You
Faisal Caesar
