Salim Durani (1934-2023): Flair and Flamboyance

NUMBERS DO NOT LIE. It is an old adage, frequently repurposed as sporting wisdom to measure a player’s worth. But in the case of Salim Aziz Durani—the flamboyant Indian cricketer of the 1960s and 1970s who died recently in Jamnagar—the numbers do not lie as much as they conceal. Durani played only 29 Test matches, where he scored just about 1,200 runs, a solitary century amidst those runs, and took a total of only 75 wickets. None of these figures are impressive, even by the standards of the time he played. It might even prompt the cricketing jargon of the bits-and-pieces cricketer, someone who can do a bit of everything, but none of them too spectacularly. But analysing Durani’s impact merely by the cold logic of numbers would fail to capture the fevered passion he generated in crowds, and the genius he exhibited on the cricket field.

Durani was the opposite of the staid and conventional cricketers of older generations. He was flamboyant and colourful, and he injected that sense of flair and excitement into the team. He would hit sixes, as the story goes, on demand. This was at a time when limited-overs cricket was still decades away, and hitting balls in the air was considered sacrilegious. Durani did not score runs and take wickets every match. But he was that rare type who could have an outsized influence on the course of a match, and who, in the course of a few overs, either with bat or ball in hand, could turn the match on its head. He generated such devotion and a following— unusual for those times—that when he was once dropped for a match, it famously led to slogans such as ‘No Durani, No Test’. Towards the end of his career, he even attempted to see if he could transfer this appeal onto the movie screen when he starred opposite Parveen Babi in the film Charitra (1973).

Most accounts of Durani say he was born in Afghanistan in 1937, and the entire family first moved to Karachi, and some years later, to India. In some interviews however Durani suggested he was born in Karachi. His interest in cricket was honed by his father Abdul Aziz, who was also a cricketer. But when Partition occurred, Aziz is believed to have migrated to Pakistan, leaving Durani and the rest of the family behind in Jamnagar. If this departure of his father, so early in his life, was a source of heartbreak, Durani did not exhibit it a few years later, on the cricketing field.

His two most famous performances came around the start and end of his career. In only his second Test series, he bowled India to victory against England in 1961-62, successively taking eight and 10 wickets in Kolkata and Chennai, respectively. Nearly 10 years later, he would, as the story goes, demand his captain Ajit Wadekar to hand him the ball, and then go on to produce his most famous spell, where he got Clive Lloyd and Garry Sobers out—the latter for a duck—within a few balls, to fashion India’s first victory in the West Indies.

Durani did not fit the model of the hardworking, disciplined cricketer, and he came to be viewed as an inconsistent genius. Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, who captained him in many matches, often regretted, it is said, that he had been unable to harness Durani’s skills. Durani however made his only century when Pataudi sent him to bat out of turn at No 3 against the West Indies.

This view of Durani as an unencumbered soul did hurt him. He found himself out of the team a few times. And apart from two tours to the West Indies, Durani never toured any other country. When the cricketer Raju Mukherjee asked Durani why he hadn’t been picked for a particular tour to England, according to a post he put up on his blog, Durani told him, “The selectors thought England would be too cold for me.” When asked why not to Australia and New Zealand, he responded, “Maybe, too hot for me.”

Such selection calls probably hurt him a lot, but even in his anguish, Durani’s flamboyance remained.

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