Azhar, the Everyman

By all accounts, the biopic Azhar is a fictionalised rendition of the life, the rise and the fall of Mohammed Azharuddin, the former Indian cricket captain. Filmmakers are at liberty to play around with facts; that is a legitimate cinematic and creative tool. Previous biopics — from Braveheart to Mangal Pandey — used real-life characters and historical events but did incorporate elements of exaggeration and fiction. That didn’t stop them being good or watchable films.

n the case of Azhar, a film centred on cricket — along with cinema and politics, one of India’s three great passions — is bound to intrigue and interest viewers. Initial box-office receipts are said to have been encouraging. Whether this will persist into the second week is another matter. It is also irrelevant to the subject of the film, Mohammed Azharuddin, and how one may judge him.

The film is targeted at a young audience that was probably not around to have watched Azharuddin in his pomp. He made his Test debut against England in 1985. He peaked as a cricketer, as India’s captain and as a business proposition, in the 1990s, when he led India in three successive World Cups — 1992, 1996 and 1999. By 2000, he had been engulfed in the match-fixing scandal. His career was a mess, his credibility in tatters. He was over.

Subsequently, Azharuddin did make a comeback. He contested the ban by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and got a judicial reprieve on a technicality, but it was never going to be enough to win him selection (he was too old anyway). That apart, few who had followed the match-fixing scandal and who had played with Azharuddin in the compromised games of the late 1990s — including cricketers such as Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, who were to form the nucleus of a better and cleaner Indian team post-2000 — have been able to forgive Azharuddin.

Even his election to the Lok Sabha in 2009, when the diffident, much-loved young boy of the 1980s metamorphosed into a cynical, worldly-wise politician conscious of his Muslim identity in a Muslim-dominated constituency in Uttar Pradesh, was not enough to redeem him. In some senses, it made things worse. This was not how the Azharuddin fairy-tale was supposed to have turned out.

A cricketer in India — any achiever really, but particularly an iconic sportsperson or movie star — encompasses many identities. So it was with Azharuddin as well. He was a delightful batsman, with a lazy elegance, spectacularly supple wrists and a bat he used like a scimitar. In the 1980s, few could match him for flair and sheer beauty of stroke play; or for his ability to play the ball late. To this writer’s mind, only David Gower compared. The 1980s was still a time when cricket in India was a big city, English-speaking sport. The social churning we are seeing today, and which is throwing up small town cricket stars from extremely humble backgrounds, was yet to come.

Azharuddin was a pioneer here. A middle-class lad from old Hyderabad, introduced to the sport by a loving grandfather — who, tragically, passed away just before that dramatic century on Test debut — he was painfully shy, endeared himself with his absence of glibness and cleverness, and was a marvel when it came to discipline and rigour. A magical fielder and fitness maniac, Azharuddin didn’t run between the wickets; he flew. In that he heralded a new culture in Indian cricket.

In 1990, Azharuddin was appointed captain of the Indian cricket team. The BCCI had chosen him because it was felt he would be self-effacing and malleable, in comparison to other senior cricketers — from more prosperous and supposedly sophisticated backgrounds — who were on a rebellious path and demanding commercial autonomy from the Board. Even so, whatever the circumstances of his appointment, few held it against Azharuddin.

Rather the fact that a self-made man, an unsung lad from an ordinary household, without a family legacy to exploit, had made it this far was appreciated. This triumph of the underdog had India congratulating itself. Azharuddin was Everyman’s hero; he was Everyman himself. That he was Muslim only added to the emotionalism. It held up the essential promise of an Indian meritocracy, with the most important institutions — and the national cricket captaincy was certainly one such — being open to anyone with requisite talent. At least that was the ideal India wanted to believe of itself.

India had had a Muslim captain before, but Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi was an aristocrat, member of a social and educated elite that is, frankly, beyond religious identity. Azharuddin was the commoner; his commoner status was independent of religion but the combination made his story all the more heart-warming. It also meant that when the match-fixing scandal broke, and when K. Madhavan, the former joint director of the CBI who investigated the case, interrogated Azharuddin and had him admitting that “maine match banaye (I manufactured a match result)”, wrote a profoundly damaging report, it led to a feeling of colossal betrayal.

The wound is most deeply felt when it is inflicted by one in whom there has been the greatest emotional investment. Azharuddin ended up letting down the cricket fan, letting down the Indian dream, and letting down the Indian Muslim, especially when he sought to dismiss the fixing allegations as the product of vendetta against his faith. It was so ridiculous that it had fellow Muslim cricketers upset and angry. Above all else, Azharuddin let down the grandfather he so loved — and the India that loved him back.

What continues to hurt is the absence of contrition. Despite the evidence, despite the confessions of corrupt bookies who spent their money on him, despite the financial trail, Azharuddin has never once said “Sorry”, never once made a public admission of wrongdoing and sought to come to peace with his art and his people. In collaborating on a designer script for the biopic, he is once again seeking to camouflage and run from his self-created tragedy. It will take more than a film though to mend his broken reputation — and India’s broken heart.

The author is distinguished fellow, Observer Research Foundation. He can be reached at malikashok@gmail.com