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Shadows Across the Playing Field: 60 Years of India Pakistan Cricket
Presents the story of the turbulent cricketing relations between India and Pakistan and celebrates the talent of many of their great cricketers.
- GenresSportsNonfiction
189 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2009
6 people are currently reading
228 people want to read
About the author
Shashi Tharoor
74 books3,053 followersShashi Tharoor is a member of the Indian Parliament from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Kerala. He previously served as the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information and as the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs.
He is also a prolific author, columnist, journalist and a human rights advocate.
He has served on the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also an adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva and a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University. He has also served as a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and the Advisory of the Indo-American Arts Council, the American India Foundation, the World Policy Journal, the Virtue Foundation and the human rights organization Breakthrough He is also a Patron of the Dubai Modern High School and the managing trustee of the Chandran Tharoor Foundation which he founded with his family and friends in the name of his late father, Chandran Tharoor.
Tharoor has written numerous books in English. Most of his literary creations are centred on Indian themes and they are markedly “Indo-nostalgic.” Perhaps his most famous work is The Great Indian Novel, published in 1989, in which he uses the narrative and theme of the famous Indian epic Mahabharata to weave a satirical story of Indian life in a non-linear mode with the characters drawn from the Indian Independence Movement. His novel Show Business (1992) was made into the film 'Bollywood'(1994). The late Ismail Merchant had announced his wish to make a film of Tharoor’s novel Riot shortly before Merchant’s death in 2005.
Tharoor has been a highly-regarded columnist in each of India's three best-known English-language newspapers, most recently for The Hindu newspaper (2001–2008) and in a weekly column, “Shashi on Sunday,” in the Times of India (January 2007 – December 2008). Following his resignation as Minister of State for External Affairs, he began a fortnightly column on foreign policy issues in the "Deccan Chronicle". Previously he was a columnist for the Gentleman magazine and the Indian Express newspaper, as well as a frequent contributor to Newsweek International and the International Herald Tribune. His Op-Eds and book reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, amongst other papers.
Tharoor began writing at the age of 6 and his first published story appeared in the “Bharat Jyoti”, the Sunday edition of the "Free press Journal", in Mumbai at age 10. His World War II adventure novel Operation Bellows, inspired by the Biggles books, was serialized in the Junior Statesman starting a week before his 11th birthday. Each of his books has been a best-seller in India. The Great Indian Novel is currently in its 28th edition in India and his newest volume. The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone has undergone seven hardback re-printings there.
Tharoor has lectured widely on India, and is often quoted for his observations, including, "India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.". He has also coined a memorable comparison of India's "thali" to the American "melting pot": "If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali--a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast."
He is also a prolific author, columnist, journalist and a human rights advocate.
He has served on the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also an adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva and a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University. He has also served as a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and the Advisory of the Indo-American Arts Council, the American India Foundation, the World Policy Journal, the Virtue Foundation and the human rights organization Breakthrough He is also a Patron of the Dubai Modern High School and the managing trustee of the Chandran Tharoor Foundation which he founded with his family and friends in the name of his late father, Chandran Tharoor.
Tharoor has written numerous books in English. Most of his literary creations are centred on Indian themes and they are markedly “Indo-nostalgic.” Perhaps his most famous work is The Great Indian Novel, published in 1989, in which he uses the narrative and theme of the famous Indian epic Mahabharata to weave a satirical story of Indian life in a non-linear mode with the characters drawn from the Indian Independence Movement. His novel Show Business (1992) was made into the film 'Bollywood'(1994). The late Ismail Merchant had announced his wish to make a film of Tharoor’s novel Riot shortly before Merchant’s death in 2005.
Tharoor has been a highly-regarded columnist in each of India's three best-known English-language newspapers, most recently for The Hindu newspaper (2001–2008) and in a weekly column, “Shashi on Sunday,” in the Times of India (January 2007 – December 2008). Following his resignation as Minister of State for External Affairs, he began a fortnightly column on foreign policy issues in the "Deccan Chronicle". Previously he was a columnist for the Gentleman magazine and the Indian Express newspaper, as well as a frequent contributor to Newsweek International and the International Herald Tribune. His Op-Eds and book reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, amongst other papers.
Tharoor began writing at the age of 6 and his first published story appeared in the “Bharat Jyoti”, the Sunday edition of the "Free press Journal", in Mumbai at age 10. His World War II adventure novel Operation Bellows, inspired by the Biggles books, was serialized in the Junior Statesman starting a week before his 11th birthday. Each of his books has been a best-seller in India. The Great Indian Novel is currently in its 28th edition in India and his newest volume. The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone has undergone seven hardback re-printings there.
Tharoor has lectured widely on India, and is often quoted for his observations, including, "India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.". He has also coined a memorable comparison of India's "thali" to the American "melting pot": "If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali--a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast."
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 17, 2012
The title is inspired by an excellent cricket book from Ramachandra Guha that comes more recommended than the frequent in-your-face insertions of statements backing up India's secular ideals espoused in cricket and other arenas here by Dr. Tharoor. Coming from an educated, intelligent and well-traveled man like he is, it seems nothing more than a diplomatic gimmick disguised under anti-diplomatic passion that takes more potshots at Pakistan's sectarian ideals than required. The Shaharyar Khan portion fares better with a tempered and more equitable stance, but is hampered by the language a bit. There is some overlap in content between the Tharoor and the Khan portions that distracts the attention somewhat. Not recommended!
July 25, 2011
Nice book. Shashi Tharoor was always expected to write well but Shahrayar Khan has outshone him in many parts. His first chapter was fascinating to read. His experience and Statesman like stature has held him in good stead. Shahrayar Khan also displayed a great sense for history and tradition and stood out with his balanced views on the two countries.
Tharoor, on the other hand is a little more patriotic. You clearly get the drift that he believes India to more advanced, secular and tolerating and.He also gives a chronological account of all India Pakistan matches since the independence. It becomes a little tiring to read after a point in time.
Tharoor, on the other hand is a little more patriotic. You clearly get the drift that he believes India to more advanced, secular and tolerating and.He also gives a chronological account of all India Pakistan matches since the independence. It becomes a little tiring to read after a point in time.
June 5, 2016
Short, Quick read. The book is part rambling history of Indo-Pak cricket and part sermonising by two acclaimed subcontinental mandarins. An account of a chequered, uncertain cricketing (and indeed political too) relationship between the two countries.
Tharoor writes wistfully about the tense Test Matches before the satellite TV era whereas Khan, a little more pragmatically, focuses on the last decade of detente between the two rivals. If you breathe cricket, not a bad buy.
Tharoor writes wistfully about the tense Test Matches before the satellite TV era whereas Khan, a little more pragmatically, focuses on the last decade of detente between the two rivals. If you breathe cricket, not a bad buy.
June 25, 2015
I found Shashi Tharoor's essay balanced and Shaharyar Khan's essay slightly partisan. But that maybe because I myself lack objectivity.
September 10, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads # Cricket
Reading this book in 2021 felt like a paradox. Why so? Covid days. The world was cloistered in silence, stadiums were empty, cricket—our most communal game—was reduced to antiseptic contests inside bio-bubbles. No crowd chants, no tricolour flags, no green shirts filling Karachi or Lahore, no blue seas in Eden or Wankhede.
And here I was, mask half-slipping, doomscrolling between news of vaccines and variants, holding in my hand a book that told the story of India and Pakistan through the prism of cricket—a sport that had, across decades, done what statesmen, generals, and bureaucrats rarely managed: create moments of common joy, common pain, common obsession.
Reading Tharoor and Khan then was not just about sport; it was about longing for contact, about missing the simple electricity of a stadium that vibrates when an Indo-Pak ball is bowled. The book became a substitute for live fever, but also something richer: an archive, a narrative, a diplomacy manual in disguise.
What makes Shadows Across the Playing Field so compelling is not simply that two eminent men wrote it—Tharoor, the flamboyant parliamentarian-intellectual, and Shaharyar Khan, the aristocratic diplomat and later Pakistan Cricket Board chief—but that the book is structured as a dialogue across a border.
It is not one man lecturing on cricket’s role in Indo-Pak ties; it is two men talking, remembering, contesting, sometimes gently ribbing, sometimes conceding. That structure is in itself an act of diplomacy, a small symbolic border-crossing.
Reading it in 2021, when actual borders were more closed than ever, when international flights were grounded, when visas were frozen, the effect was heightened. Their dialogue felt like contraband, like listening in on two old friends whispering secrets across a forbidden fence.
The book begins with memory, as all good cricket books do. Tharoor conjures up Calcutta’s Eden Gardens, Shaharyar remembers Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium, and both return to their youth when cricket was still a shared inheritance of the Raj. This is where the book departs from most Indo-Pak political histories: instead of Partition as the rupture, cricket becomes the fragile thread that remained. Players who were once teammates—Amir Elahi, Gul Mohammad, Abdul Hafeez Kardar—carried their talent across a newly drawn border, and in doing so, embodied both continuity and division. That early memory work is where this tome is at its richest, because it captures the intimacy of a shared game suddenly forced to become adversarial.
In this, the book reminds me of Ramachandra Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field, which excavates the deep, layered history of Indian cricket. Guha’s focus was more internal—caste, community, colonial power—but his method of placing cricket at the centre of social and political history resonates with what Tharoor and Khan attempt. The difference is tone: Guha, the historian, is precise, archival; Tharoor and Khan, the raconteurs, are expansive, anecdotal. They are less interested in footnotes than in memories. And yet, one feels that the book achieves a kind of cultural history that is no less significant.
The India–Pakistan rivalry in cricket has always been about more than cricket. Every Indian fan knows the trope: “It’s not just a game, it’s war without the guns.” But Shadows Across the Playing Field gently contests this, or at least complicates it. Shaharyar Khan, with his urbane polish, insists that cricket should be seen as a bridge, a place where politicians and generals can find a common grammar. He recalls moments when series were resumed after diplomatic thaw—Musharraf’s famous Delhi visit during an India–Pakistan match comes to mind—as proof that cricket opens doors otherwise shut. Tharoor, for his part, is both realist and romantic: he knows the rivalry is often hijacked by jingoism, but he also writes of the magic of Wasim Akram swinging the ball at Eden, or Sachin’s Sharjah desert storm, as moments where artistry triumphed over politics.
Reading these recollections in 2021, when Indo-Pak cricket was frozen for nearly a decade, was almost surreal. The last bilateral series had been in 2012–13, and since then, encounters were restricted to ICC tournaments. For a younger generation of fans, India–Pakistan cricket had become a rare, manufactured spectacle, not the routine drama it was in the 1980s and 1990s. This is where the book gains poignancy: it preserves the memory of a time when India–Pakistan cricket was lived, not rationed. Shaharyar’s stories of Karachi crowd frenzy, Tharoor’s recollections of Eden’s roars, feel like dispatches from another world, a world inaccessible in the pandemic year.
What distinguishes this book from the usual cricket writing is its double voice. Compare it, for instance, with Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones, the great history of Pakistan cricket. Osman’s book is magisterial, but it speaks from one side, even if empathetically. Tharoor and Khan’s text, by contrast, is polyphonic: two perspectives colliding, colluding, co-creating. When Tharoor praises Indian resilience, Khan counters with Pakistani flair; when Khan laments politics intruding, Tharoor notes how politics sometimes elevated the stakes, producing great cricket. It is in this back-and-forth that the book achieves what no single author could: a simulation of the rivalry itself. Reading it is like watching an Indo-Pak Test unfold, full of thrust, parry, declaration, draw.
There is also a strong autobiographical undercurrent. Tharoor cannot resist slipping into the persona of the wide-eyed boy in love with cricket, who later became the cosmopolitan man still addicted to the game’s metaphors. Khan cannot resist evoking his royal Bhopal lineage, his memories of diplomacy in London, his vantage point as PCB chief negotiating with the BCCI. In another book, this might feel self-indulgent; here, it enriches. Because the Indo-Pak rivalry has always been personal. Every fan has a personal Indo-Pak memory—the match you bunked school to watch, the six you remember more vividly than your own exam results. For Tharoor and Khan, those memories are simply writ larger, and they make their personal vantage points part of the collective archive.
The emotional charge of the rivalry is captured in anecdotes: Miandad’s last-ball six in Sharjah, Tendulkar upper-cutting Shoaib Akhtar at Centurion in 2003, Kumble’s ten-for against Pakistan in Delhi, India’s win at Karachi in 2004. Each episode is narrated not just as cricketing feats but as seismic events in the Indo-Pak psyche. When Pakistan wins, Khan remembers the street celebrations; when India wins, Tharoor recalls the vindication of pride. In this sense, the book becomes a chronicle of parallel emotional economies. It shows how cricket became the theatre where nationalism, insecurity, joy, and grief played out more viscerally than in parliaments or battlefields.
The writing itself is lucid, though not always literary. Tharoor can sometimes become florid, Khan sometimes too diplomatic. But together, their prose balances: Tharoor’s exuberance softened by Khan’s restraint, Khan’s sobriety lifted by Tharoor’s lyricism. If one seeks high literature, one might still prefer CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary, the gold standard of cricket writing. But if one seeks political memoir infused with cricketing passion, Shadows Across the Playing Field is unmatched.
Reflecting on the book in 2021, I also felt its silences. There are things the authors skirt around—match-fixing scandals, for instance, are acknowledged but not dissected; the darker edges of crowd violence are touched upon but not explored. Perhaps this is deliberate, a diplomacy of narrative. However, for the reader steeped in the ferocity of the rivalry, these omissions are noticeable. At the same time, one must concede that the book’s purpose is not exposé but dialogue, not demolition but bridge-building. In that sense, the silences are part of its ethic.
Placed alongside other books on Indo-Pak cricket—Prashant Kidambi’s sections in Cricket Country, or Mihir Bose’s writings on cricket and politics—Shadows Across the Playing Field feels more personal, less analytical. But that is its charm. Kidambi gives you the archive, Tharoor and Khan give you the nostalgia. Bose explains the political economy, Tharoor and Khan give you the feeling of being there when Saeed Anwar hit 194, or when Kumble bowled with a broken jaw. Both are necessary: one to understand, the other to feel.
In the long history of cricket writing, the India–Pakistan rivalry has perhaps been over-mythologised. Every article seems to repeat the same clichés: “more than a game,” “war minus the shooting,” “subcontinent’s greatest drama.” What Shadows Across the Playing Field does, refreshingly, is acknowledge the cliché but still humanise it. Because here, it is not journalists amplifying headlines; it is two insiders telling their stories. That insider tone, whether it is Shaharyar recalling PCB’s frustrations with BCCI, or Tharoor recalling being in the stands during a famous win, breaks through the cliché.
For me, reading the book in 2021 was not just about history. It was about yearning. Yearning for cricket to once again become what it once was: a regular Indo-Pak affair, not an occasional ICC spectacle. Yearning for full stadiums. Yearning for borders to soften. Yearning for those moments when Saeed Anwar and Rahul Dravid would walk out together, adversaries yet craftsmen of the same game. Covid, in a strange way, mirrored the partition of cricket: empty stands mirrored severed ties. And so, the book became a kind of antidote. It reminded me that cricket had, in the past, survived greater ruptures, and perhaps would again.
The title itself—Shadows Across the Playing Field—is evocative. The “shadows” are many: Partition, war, terrorism, politics, suspicion. But across those shadows, the playing field still exists, bat and ball still speak a language. That metaphor, in 2021, felt almost prophetic. The world was shadowed by a pandemic, yet the playing field of memory, of narrative, of longing, still endured. The book thus became both historical document and emotional companion.
If I had to compare the book’s impact to other cricket reads: reading Guha gives you knowledge; reading Osman Samiuddin gives you context; reading CLR James gives you philosophy; reading Tharoor and Khan gives you companionship. It feels like being in a living room where two elder uncles are chatting, remembering, joking, lamenting, and you, as reader, are the younger relative listening in, absorbing, occasionally smiling, occasionally sighing. That intimacy is rare in cricket writing, and it is what makes this book endure.
As I close the book in memory now, in 2025, I realise that reading it in 2021 was an act of both escape and engagement. Escape, because it transported me out of the pandemic into crowded stadiums of the past. Engagement, because it forced me to think of Indo-Pak ties beyond news channels and Twitter vitriol, through the humanising lens of cricket. It is perhaps the only book that, in the bleak Covid year, made me feel that Indo-Pak peace was still imaginable, because if cricket could create joy across borders, maybe something else could too.
And so, to read Shadows Across the Playing Field is to understand cricket not as sport alone, but as archive, as diplomacy, as longing. It is not perfect, it is not exhaustive, but it is deeply human. And perhaps that is the highest praise one can give any cricket book: that it captures not just the runs and wickets, but the heartbeat.
Reading this book in 2021 felt like a paradox. Why so? Covid days. The world was cloistered in silence, stadiums were empty, cricket—our most communal game—was reduced to antiseptic contests inside bio-bubbles. No crowd chants, no tricolour flags, no green shirts filling Karachi or Lahore, no blue seas in Eden or Wankhede.
And here I was, mask half-slipping, doomscrolling between news of vaccines and variants, holding in my hand a book that told the story of India and Pakistan through the prism of cricket—a sport that had, across decades, done what statesmen, generals, and bureaucrats rarely managed: create moments of common joy, common pain, common obsession.
Reading Tharoor and Khan then was not just about sport; it was about longing for contact, about missing the simple electricity of a stadium that vibrates when an Indo-Pak ball is bowled. The book became a substitute for live fever, but also something richer: an archive, a narrative, a diplomacy manual in disguise.
What makes Shadows Across the Playing Field so compelling is not simply that two eminent men wrote it—Tharoor, the flamboyant parliamentarian-intellectual, and Shaharyar Khan, the aristocratic diplomat and later Pakistan Cricket Board chief—but that the book is structured as a dialogue across a border.
It is not one man lecturing on cricket’s role in Indo-Pak ties; it is two men talking, remembering, contesting, sometimes gently ribbing, sometimes conceding. That structure is in itself an act of diplomacy, a small symbolic border-crossing.
Reading it in 2021, when actual borders were more closed than ever, when international flights were grounded, when visas were frozen, the effect was heightened. Their dialogue felt like contraband, like listening in on two old friends whispering secrets across a forbidden fence.
The book begins with memory, as all good cricket books do. Tharoor conjures up Calcutta’s Eden Gardens, Shaharyar remembers Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium, and both return to their youth when cricket was still a shared inheritance of the Raj. This is where the book departs from most Indo-Pak political histories: instead of Partition as the rupture, cricket becomes the fragile thread that remained. Players who were once teammates—Amir Elahi, Gul Mohammad, Abdul Hafeez Kardar—carried their talent across a newly drawn border, and in doing so, embodied both continuity and division. That early memory work is where this tome is at its richest, because it captures the intimacy of a shared game suddenly forced to become adversarial.
In this, the book reminds me of Ramachandra Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field, which excavates the deep, layered history of Indian cricket. Guha’s focus was more internal—caste, community, colonial power—but his method of placing cricket at the centre of social and political history resonates with what Tharoor and Khan attempt. The difference is tone: Guha, the historian, is precise, archival; Tharoor and Khan, the raconteurs, are expansive, anecdotal. They are less interested in footnotes than in memories. And yet, one feels that the book achieves a kind of cultural history that is no less significant.
The India–Pakistan rivalry in cricket has always been about more than cricket. Every Indian fan knows the trope: “It’s not just a game, it’s war without the guns.” But Shadows Across the Playing Field gently contests this, or at least complicates it. Shaharyar Khan, with his urbane polish, insists that cricket should be seen as a bridge, a place where politicians and generals can find a common grammar. He recalls moments when series were resumed after diplomatic thaw—Musharraf’s famous Delhi visit during an India–Pakistan match comes to mind—as proof that cricket opens doors otherwise shut. Tharoor, for his part, is both realist and romantic: he knows the rivalry is often hijacked by jingoism, but he also writes of the magic of Wasim Akram swinging the ball at Eden, or Sachin’s Sharjah desert storm, as moments where artistry triumphed over politics.
Reading these recollections in 2021, when Indo-Pak cricket was frozen for nearly a decade, was almost surreal. The last bilateral series had been in 2012–13, and since then, encounters were restricted to ICC tournaments. For a younger generation of fans, India–Pakistan cricket had become a rare, manufactured spectacle, not the routine drama it was in the 1980s and 1990s. This is where the book gains poignancy: it preserves the memory of a time when India–Pakistan cricket was lived, not rationed. Shaharyar’s stories of Karachi crowd frenzy, Tharoor’s recollections of Eden’s roars, feel like dispatches from another world, a world inaccessible in the pandemic year.
What distinguishes this book from the usual cricket writing is its double voice. Compare it, for instance, with Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones, the great history of Pakistan cricket. Osman’s book is magisterial, but it speaks from one side, even if empathetically. Tharoor and Khan’s text, by contrast, is polyphonic: two perspectives colliding, colluding, co-creating. When Tharoor praises Indian resilience, Khan counters with Pakistani flair; when Khan laments politics intruding, Tharoor notes how politics sometimes elevated the stakes, producing great cricket. It is in this back-and-forth that the book achieves what no single author could: a simulation of the rivalry itself. Reading it is like watching an Indo-Pak Test unfold, full of thrust, parry, declaration, draw.
There is also a strong autobiographical undercurrent. Tharoor cannot resist slipping into the persona of the wide-eyed boy in love with cricket, who later became the cosmopolitan man still addicted to the game’s metaphors. Khan cannot resist evoking his royal Bhopal lineage, his memories of diplomacy in London, his vantage point as PCB chief negotiating with the BCCI. In another book, this might feel self-indulgent; here, it enriches. Because the Indo-Pak rivalry has always been personal. Every fan has a personal Indo-Pak memory—the match you bunked school to watch, the six you remember more vividly than your own exam results. For Tharoor and Khan, those memories are simply writ larger, and they make their personal vantage points part of the collective archive.
The emotional charge of the rivalry is captured in anecdotes: Miandad’s last-ball six in Sharjah, Tendulkar upper-cutting Shoaib Akhtar at Centurion in 2003, Kumble’s ten-for against Pakistan in Delhi, India’s win at Karachi in 2004. Each episode is narrated not just as cricketing feats but as seismic events in the Indo-Pak psyche. When Pakistan wins, Khan remembers the street celebrations; when India wins, Tharoor recalls the vindication of pride. In this sense, the book becomes a chronicle of parallel emotional economies. It shows how cricket became the theatre where nationalism, insecurity, joy, and grief played out more viscerally than in parliaments or battlefields.
The writing itself is lucid, though not always literary. Tharoor can sometimes become florid, Khan sometimes too diplomatic. But together, their prose balances: Tharoor’s exuberance softened by Khan’s restraint, Khan’s sobriety lifted by Tharoor’s lyricism. If one seeks high literature, one might still prefer CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary, the gold standard of cricket writing. But if one seeks political memoir infused with cricketing passion, Shadows Across the Playing Field is unmatched.
Reflecting on the book in 2021, I also felt its silences. There are things the authors skirt around—match-fixing scandals, for instance, are acknowledged but not dissected; the darker edges of crowd violence are touched upon but not explored. Perhaps this is deliberate, a diplomacy of narrative. However, for the reader steeped in the ferocity of the rivalry, these omissions are noticeable. At the same time, one must concede that the book’s purpose is not exposé but dialogue, not demolition but bridge-building. In that sense, the silences are part of its ethic.
Placed alongside other books on Indo-Pak cricket—Prashant Kidambi’s sections in Cricket Country, or Mihir Bose’s writings on cricket and politics—Shadows Across the Playing Field feels more personal, less analytical. But that is its charm. Kidambi gives you the archive, Tharoor and Khan give you the nostalgia. Bose explains the political economy, Tharoor and Khan give you the feeling of being there when Saeed Anwar hit 194, or when Kumble bowled with a broken jaw. Both are necessary: one to understand, the other to feel.
In the long history of cricket writing, the India–Pakistan rivalry has perhaps been over-mythologised. Every article seems to repeat the same clichés: “more than a game,” “war minus the shooting,” “subcontinent’s greatest drama.” What Shadows Across the Playing Field does, refreshingly, is acknowledge the cliché but still humanise it. Because here, it is not journalists amplifying headlines; it is two insiders telling their stories. That insider tone, whether it is Shaharyar recalling PCB’s frustrations with BCCI, or Tharoor recalling being in the stands during a famous win, breaks through the cliché.
For me, reading the book in 2021 was not just about history. It was about yearning. Yearning for cricket to once again become what it once was: a regular Indo-Pak affair, not an occasional ICC spectacle. Yearning for full stadiums. Yearning for borders to soften. Yearning for those moments when Saeed Anwar and Rahul Dravid would walk out together, adversaries yet craftsmen of the same game. Covid, in a strange way, mirrored the partition of cricket: empty stands mirrored severed ties. And so, the book became a kind of antidote. It reminded me that cricket had, in the past, survived greater ruptures, and perhaps would again.
The title itself—Shadows Across the Playing Field—is evocative. The “shadows” are many: Partition, war, terrorism, politics, suspicion. But across those shadows, the playing field still exists, bat and ball still speak a language. That metaphor, in 2021, felt almost prophetic. The world was shadowed by a pandemic, yet the playing field of memory, of narrative, of longing, still endured. The book thus became both historical document and emotional companion.
If I had to compare the book’s impact to other cricket reads: reading Guha gives you knowledge; reading Osman Samiuddin gives you context; reading CLR James gives you philosophy; reading Tharoor and Khan gives you companionship. It feels like being in a living room where two elder uncles are chatting, remembering, joking, lamenting, and you, as reader, are the younger relative listening in, absorbing, occasionally smiling, occasionally sighing. That intimacy is rare in cricket writing, and it is what makes this book endure.
As I close the book in memory now, in 2025, I realise that reading it in 2021 was an act of both escape and engagement. Escape, because it transported me out of the pandemic into crowded stadiums of the past. Engagement, because it forced me to think of Indo-Pak ties beyond news channels and Twitter vitriol, through the humanising lens of cricket. It is perhaps the only book that, in the bleak Covid year, made me feel that Indo-Pak peace was still imaginable, because if cricket could create joy across borders, maybe something else could too.
And so, to read Shadows Across the Playing Field is to understand cricket not as sport alone, but as archive, as diplomacy, as longing. It is not perfect, it is not exhaustive, but it is deeply human. And perhaps that is the highest praise one can give any cricket book: that it captures not just the runs and wickets, but the heartbeat.
August 17, 2018
Shadows across the playing fields: 60 years of India Pakistan Cricket: Shashi Tharoor, Shaharyar Khan and David Page. shashi Tharoor has written about the subject of Indo Pak cricket for the previous 60 years through research and from the records including historical facts in the script. It makes fair reading. Nawabzada Shaharyar Khan retired foreign secretary of Pakistan and Chairman of Pakistan Cricket Board has written about how in Bhopal, where the State sport was hockey, he developed interest in cricket, Pentangular cricket tournament held in Mumbai attracted him. He has written historical details how cricket can usher peace in the sub-continent and how he was able to conduct cricket tours between India Pakistan during 2003-2006. He has written that terrorism is a menace which has affected the life of people in Pakistan. The people of Pakistan share common bond with Indians and are generally peace loving. In this internet age, people know the truth about Military rule. If UK and France can share partnership with Germany in European Union, then why can India and Pakistan not share the fruits of peace and grow. He writing is quite an eye opener. It is a must read for all.
Read
October 10, 2019Indo-Pak cricket is inseparable from politics and mass hysteria.There have been long periods,often lasting decades,when the two countries have not played each other.Cricket,at times,has become a substitute for war.It would have been better,if in examining these issues,the two authors had written separate books.I didn't particularly like Shashi Tharoor's part of the book.
September 17, 2020
A mixed bag with some nostalgia and some partisanship mixed in. Each of the writers has a clear view point they attempt to support using cherry picked examples and on the nose writing. Their individual points of view as in Tharoor's case, external observer of cricket and in Khan's case, internal official make their accounts noticeably different. Tharoor takes the well trodden road of making comparisons between the histories and evolution of each of the countries in questions and playing up the differences when it comes to religious tolerance while Khan attempts to approach it more from of a class differences perspective. The writing varies from poignant to wooden with the authors making the same points time and again. I'm sure most people that did not live through this entire period will find something or other that they did not previously know or appreciate but if you did follow cricket through this period then staying away is probably best.
November 28, 2025
It offers an insightful look into the complex and deeply rooted rivalry between India and Pakistan, viewed through the lens of cricket. Tharoor combines historical context with the passion of the sport, tracing the evolution of cricket between the two nations over six decades. He skillfully examines how the game became a symbolic battleground for national pride, intertwined with political tensions, and highlights some of the most iconic matches and players that have defined this rivalry.
While the book is rich in historical and political detail, its academic tone may be a bit heavy for casual readers or those seeking a more lighthearted sports narrative. However, for those interested in the intersection of sport and diplomacy, Shadows Across the Playing Field is a fascinating and thought-provoking read that captures not only the drama of the game but also its role in shaping the relationship between two nations.
While the book is rich in historical and political detail, its academic tone may be a bit heavy for casual readers or those seeking a more lighthearted sports narrative. However, for those interested in the intersection of sport and diplomacy, Shadows Across the Playing Field is a fascinating and thought-provoking read that captures not only the drama of the game but also its role in shaping the relationship between two nations.
June 26, 2023
The book contains two chapters with one written by Shashi Tharoor and the other by Shaharyar Khan. Shaharyar provides an extensive piece of writing focusing more on cricket diplomacy for the incidents he witnessed as Pakistan Manager and Cricket board president. I am quite disappointed with Shashi tharoor's piece of writing, as it just contains statistical information of the matches, which is available in espn website too
December 29, 2023
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