In a recent interview, former Pakistan cricket captain-turned-politician Imran Khan had this to say about the recent biography published on him: “This isn’t my official biography. I gave an interview, but I haven’t seen the final manuscript.” The biography in question is Imran Vs Imran: The Untold Story, written by Delhi-based writer Frank Huzur and after reading the book it is quite evident that Imran just gave an interview.
Huzur couldn’t have chosen a better subject for a biography since Khan has such a charismatic persona and his cricketing career was absolutely phenomenal. He tries hard to blend both the cricketing career and his political career in the book — and falls short on both counts. For starters, it is clear that he did a lot of research and spoke to a lot of people who were close to Imran — the acknowledgements chapter is five pages long and Huzur thanks everyone whom he interviewed.
But he doesn’t seem to have leveraged his hard work at all — at least, it doesn’t come across in his writing. There are a lot of meaningless details in the book which make it a cumbersome read. For example, in the chapter about Khan’s courtship of Jemima Goldsmith, Huzur talks more about Goldsmith’s family and briefly mentions how they met and decided to get married. In a book about Khan, why would anyone want to know how many dogs Goldsmith’s grandmother had?
The early part of Imran’s life is one of the better parts of the book. The accounts of how he grew up with three sisters or how he began his cricketing career give a fair insight into what led to him becoming one of the greatest all-rounders the game has seen. Huzur captures the hardships Khan faced as a student at Oxford pretty well. Khan, unlike many other cricketers from Pakistan, came from an aristocratic family and never had financial issues. Yet, he did menial jobs to support himself as a student.
However, there’s very little about Imran’s cricketing career. One of the most impressive feats Khan achieved as a captain of the Pakistan team was that he never lost a Test series to the mighty West Indies team of the 80s. There’s hardly any mention of that. The other high point of Khan’s life was winning the cricket World Cup in Australia in 1992. Huzur talks about that in detail and how Khan had the courage to bat at number three in the semi final and final. “He knew Salim Malik wasn’t performing to the best of his ability and wanted to lead from the front,” writes Huzur.
Khan was known for his leadership skills and how he picked players like Wasim Akram or Inzamam ul-Haq from obscurity and turned them into superstars. Apart from getting a few quotes from Inzamam, there’s very little about Imran the captain from the players’ point of view. Surprisingly, there’s also very little about the behind-the-scene politics for which the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) is notorious. Even stranger, the India-Pakistan rivalry barely gets any mention in the book.
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Khan the politician gets much better treatment from Huzur, maybe because the writer wanted it to be a political biography. Here we see Khan being much more candid about people like Nawaz Sharif, Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto and issues like Indo-Pak relations. Talking about the Lahore declaration and the bus trip in 1999, Imran says “it was doomed from the start.” About Bhutto, with whom he was rumoured to have a relationship during his Oxford days – which he denied – Imran says, “In Oxford debates, she would roar over the issues of human rights abuse, rule of law, gender justice, discrimination and fiscal corruption. But when she found herself in the middle of the power pitch, she metamorphosed into a venal, self-centred political empress. She tasted the blood of power, and got drunk.”
Huzur’s writing fails to evoke the real Imran Khan, both as a cricketer and as a politician. Khan, for various reasons, hasn’t done much in Pakistan’s politics despite being around for quite some time now. Yet, Huzur tries to portray him as a national hero for whom the people of Pakistan are willing to do anything. For Khan the cricketer, they might do or already did when they supported him in his cause of building the first cancer hospital in Pakistan. But as a politician, there are still question marks over Khan, and rightly so.
In the same interview in which Khan denied that Huzur’s book was his official biography, he mentions that he has written an autobiography that should come out sometime later this year. It’s better to wait for that to come out to know more about Imran Khan, the cricketer, the politician and the man.
IMRAN VS IMRAN: THE UNTOLD STORY
Frank Huzur
Falcon and Falcon
462 pages; Rs 795