In the fourth test match of England’s winter series in India, Rishabh Pant played one of the most audacious innings in the history of test cricket. Moments after having reverse lapped Jimmy Anderson for four, on 94 he launched Joe Root high over midwicket to move to his hundred. Sunil Gavaskar, the excitement palpable in his voice, announced that this was ‘the new India – a bold India.’

In that moment I was transported back to 1996 and the memory of Sachin Tendulkar launching Mim Patel straight over the sightscreen, like Pant advancing from 94 to 100 with one effortless blow. ‘It surprised everyone’ bellowed Mark Nicholas, ‘but nothing that this young man does need surprise us anymore.’

I’d fallen in love with cricket the previous summer, the summer that Brian Lara had come to town and my mother had taken me to the Parks in Oxford to watch him ease to 83 against the Combined Universities – my first experience of watching elite cricket. 1996 was, therefore, my first full year as a bona fide fan. And, while I knew I was meant to support England, while I marvelled at the artistry of Sachin, Azharuddin, Sourav and Rahul, it was the Pakistanis who enthralled me.

It wasn’t just their brilliance (five Pakistanis averaged more than 60 in the series and they were supported by Wasim, Waqar and Mustaq as they blew England away). It was like they were playing a different sport, tapping into something of which my 10 year old self was only vaguely aware.

There was rawness in the way they played the game, aggressive and confrontational but hidden behind languid elegance; an ability to tap into a higher consciousness and, for those watching, we saw far more than just a cover drive or a glance to leg – as CLR James might have described it, we saw in their cricket ‘a true expression of a man’s personality.’

Jung talks about how he ‘unconsciously wanted to find that part of [his] personality which had become invisible under the influence and the pressure of being European…the predominantly rationalistic European finds much that is human alien to him,’ he says, ‘and he prides himself on this without realising that this rationality is won at the expense of his vitality.’ He might well have been talking about the difference between Atherton and Saeed Anwar.

What I realise now is that I was witnessing a moment of liminality – a tiny epoch of calm in the rancorous history of Pakistani cricket. I was witnessing an unshackling from its sordid past; the cornered tigers of 1992 had broken down the barriers of Pakistani cricket’s imperial roots and unleashed it on the masses.

If Hanif Mohammad was, along with Fazal Mahmood, Pakistan’s first great cricketer, he was still a defensive batsman in the English mould. And if AH Kardar and Imran Khan – a cricketer like no other whose success was driven more by force of personality than anything else – were nationalists and anti-imperialists in outlook, integral to how they saw the game and the world itself, they were Oxford educated and, as such, products of the English education system.

While we may never know for certain, one can’t help but wonder how much of Khan’s career in cricket and thereafter, seemingly dedicated to proving people wrong, was borne in the quads of Keble – where he was known by the moniker ‘Im the Dim.’ Stupid he is not.

However, we certainly know that AH Kardar took great umbrage at Donald Carr referring to him by his Oxford nickname ‘the mystic from the East’ (or the ‘unintentional’ malapropism ‘the mistake from the East’) on the fateful MCC ‘A’ tour of 1955/6. On this same trip, the Englishmen kidnapped a Pakistani umpire, Idriss Baig, and performed on him what can only be described as waterboarding. Carr later said of the incident, as way of apology, ‘I think it was about the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life.’

But the great Pakistani team of 1996 represented a different Pakistan, a team that found its origins not from the elites but from what Naguib Mahfouz might have described as the ‘harrafish’ – the urban rabble. Here was a manifestation of James’ idea that ‘if style and daring can be both creative and effective it will be a demonstration of the idea that great cricketers and their style must be seen in relation to the social environment which produces them.’

In Orientalism, his magnum opus, Edward Said describes the East as ‘almost a European invention…men make their own history,’ he says. 'What they can know is what they have made, and [they] extend it to geography.’ He uses the analogy of Flaubert encountering an Egyptian courtesan.

‘She never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence or history. He spoke for her and represented her…[but his] situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled.’

But, in attempting to describe the distinction between ‘humanism’ and politics, he points out that ‘no one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of society.’

This idea is echoed in the opening lines of Peter Oborne’s magnificent book, Wounded Tiger – a History of Cricket in Pakistan. ‘Cricket writing about Pakistan has sometimes fallen into the wrong hands,’ he states. ‘It has been carried out by people who do not like Pakistan, are suspicious of Pakistanis, and have their own preconceptions.’

It often strikes me that cricket, like Jay Wright Forrestor’s 1970s vision of the world, has long been seen (particularly in the West) to operate as if existing within a spaceship. For so long, everything has been geared to maintaining equilibrium and any attempt to disturb this has been seen with suspicion, or even contempt; the individual merely a cog in the wheel representing the greater whole.

But, as Adam Curtis says in All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, ‘ecosystems do not tend towards stability. The very opposite is true – that nature, far from seeking equilibrium, is always in a state of dynamic and unpredictable flux.’

Like the ecologists who were viscerally upset because it challenged the very core of their belief system – that nature was stable – or Plato’s cave dwellers who would shun or even kill the returning philosopher, does the idea of losing the control, the narrative and the hegemony of how cricket is played terrify us too?

Those who followed English cricket in the 1990s were never so naïve as to think this hegemony extended towards actually playing the game – but it certainly included how it was played. In a society which seems increasingly veering towards absolutism on both sides of the political spectrum, cricket exists in this strange moral hinterland.

The rules are superseded by a code of moral relativism, an arbitrary line drawn in the sand, and any contravention seems more egregious when committed by someone with brown skin. ‘It’s just not cricket,’ is a phrase born out of the Thomas Arnold school of thought that education should prioritise moral development, as prescribed by those in power, and that intellectual development comes some way behind.

When Javed Miandad controversially ran out Rodney Hogg as he wandered out of the crease at the MCG in 1979, the excuse that these were the rules according to cricket played in the streets of Karachi cut no mustard. He was operating within the laws but he had contravened the spirit in an unforgivable way – he became someone not to be trusted.

The great Indian all rounder, Vinoo Mankad, is best remembered for having the temerity to run out Bill Brown as he tried to steal a march by leaving the crease at the non-striker’s end, rather than for his startling feats on the field of play – the first Indian to score a hundred and take five wickets in the same test (at Lord’s no less).

As Oborne points out, discussing the Shakoor Rana controversy, ‘it is hard to come to grips with the set of values which led [Gatting] to take such a strong stand against allegedly poor Pakistan umpiring, yet be relaxed enough about apartheid to take a rebel squad to South Africa,’

In 2002, Sourav Ganguly stood on the Lord’s balcony, topless and swirling his shirt over his head in the aftermath of Kaif and Yuvraj having toppled England at the home of cricket. This ‘disgraceful’ act of rebellion from Ganguly, known as ‘Dada’ (elder brother) in Kolkata but Lord Snooty in Manchester, might be seen to have taken its roots in the anti-colonial uprising of 1857, ‘the confidence behind the act of defiance’ in the words of historian Boria Majumdar ‘acquired on the cricket field.’

Much like the Maharaja of Natore, who, in creating a team made up only of Indians in 1890, defied the British attempts at cultivating the sport amongst the aristocracy as a form of soft power, so too the princely Ganguly was perverting the natural order.

The irony, of course, being that he was parodying Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff – the English ‘every man’ whose indiscretions were an endearing representation of a working class lad done good and who once compared having Ganguly as a teammate at Lancashire to ‘like having Prince Charles in your side…’

This winter we watched Pant and others, this new and bold India, stepping out of its imperial shadow – no doubt emboldened too by Brexit, Trump and the west’s calamitous response to the pandemic. This new India seems not to care for the public school morals which, while deemed outdated and elitist in almost all walks of life, are still sacrosanct in English cricket.

Virat Kohli, tattooed, bearded, bristling, uber confident and startlingly articulate is the ultimate representation of this. Not only the best player in the world in all three formats, he sets the moral code by which he plays rather than adheres to some anachronistic notion of it – a cricketer, if ever, whose ‘style must be seen in relation to the social environment which [produced] them.’

10 years ago almost to the day, the Indian team paraded Sachin Tendulkar around the Wankhede Stadium on their shoulders in the aftermath of their greatest sporting triumph – winning the World Cup at home. A 21 year old Kohli, speaking to a billion people, said he ‘has carried the burden of the nation for 21 years. It is time we carried him.’

15 years previously, when Sachin hit Patel high over the Edgbaston sightscreen ‘it surprised everyone.’ To risk a hundred for glory (as Pietersen often found to his peril) remains anathema to so many. Yet, nothing this Indian team does now ‘need surprise us anymore.’

In the words of Ashish Nandy, cricket has truly become 'an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.' It is time we celebrate that.