In 1978, the Indian cricket team toured Pakistan, the first time the two countries had played against each other in 17 years (the wars of 1965 and 1971 intervening). When the plane carrying our cricketers landed at Karachi airport, the team carried on to the hotel, with one exception. This was Sunil Gavaskar, who chose first to visit the home of Hanif Mohammad.

Gavaskar told reporters that he wished to meet the "original Little Master". He could, but didn’t, add that although he never watched Hanif play, the Pakistani had a profound impact on his batsmanship. Indians of an earlier generation venerated Hanif, among them Gavaskar’s own early mentor, the former Bombay cricketer Vasu Paranjpe. Coaching the young Gavaskar, Paranjpe told him: "When Hanif Mohammad played forward defensive in the Brabourne Stadium, the thook of the ball hitting the middle of the bat could be heard at Churchgate Railway Station".

Hanif Mohammad had a deep and abiding connection with India. He was born in Junagadh (then capital of a princely state, but now in the state of Gujarat), was coached early on by a Hindu (Jaomal Naomal), and late in life said that he wished Partition had never taken place and India had been one country. He made two Test tours of India with Pakistan; in 1951-'52 and then again nine years later. He was 16 when that first tour began, celebrating his 17th birthday during the Test series. His precocity impressed Jawaharlal Nehru, who specially asked to be introduced to him in New Delhi, as well as countless lesser known Indians, who woke up the Pakistani cricketers at railway stations as they criss-crossed the country, demanding to see the boy wonder. His team-mates were so impressed by this adulation that they nicknamed Hanif "Dilip", after Dilip Kumar, India’s most famous film star, himself originally from Peshawar and once named Yusuf Khan.

On Hanif’s next tour of India the adulation had, if anything, intensified. The cartoonist Bal Thackeray (whose founding of the Shiv Sena lay some years in the future) wrote of him as “the biggest stumbling-block to India in the coming series.”. “For one so young”, Thackeray went on, “he has rare restraint, for, like a veteran he digs himself in and masters the situation”. Hanif scored an immaculate hundred in the Bombay Test, watched by Vasu Paranjpe and Bal Thackeray, among others. A cricket fan from Nagpur wrote to Dawn, the leading newspaper in Karachi, that their fellow townsman was “the darling of the Indian crowds”, adding that a Rs 50 ticket was selling for Rs 500 on the black market, so keen were Indians to see Hanif bat.

Hanif Mohammad’s defensive technique was legendary. There are many stories about it, none better than the one about an innings he played against West Indies in Bridgetown, Barbados, a couple of years before he batted in Bombay before Vasu Paranjpe and some 30,000 others. ( I have told this story before, but I think I am allowed to repeat it now, to mark his passing.) Batting first, the West Indies scored 579 (Conrad Hunte and Everton Weekes scoring hundreds) and then bundled out Pakistan for a mere 106. Following on some 400 runs behind, Pakistan fared better, with Hanif and Imtiaz Ahmed putting together an impressive opening partnership.

In this stand, Imtiaz blazed away (he was a wicket-keeper after all), while Hanif blocked at the other end. Watching this rearguard action were thousands of ticketed spectators at the ground, alongside hundreds of young boys, perched on palm trees outside. Late on the evening of the third day, exhausted by the mid-day sun and the relentless thook-thook of Hanif’s forward defensive, one of these young cricket lovers fell asleep, slipped down the tree and hit his head on the ground below. He was badly concussed, and taken to hospital. When the boy recovered consciousness, his first words were: “Is Hanif still batting?”. The answer, alas, was in the affirmative.

In this Test, Hanif was to put on century partnerships with Imtiaz, Alimuddin, Saeed Ahmed and his own elder brother Wazir. When he was sixth out, the team’s score was 626, and his own individual score 337. The match had been saved, through arguably the bravest innings in cricketing history. And certainly the longest. According to the record books Hanif Mohammad batted for 16 hours and 10 minutes, or 970 minutes in all; although for some strange reason when I was growing up I was always made to believe that he batted for 999 minutes. (It was, I think, an elder cousin who told me this, probably to make it sound symmetrical with the other great batting record Hanif then held, of the highest score in first-class cricket, 499).

Play

For one so associated with the dead defensive bat, it is ironic that the only “live” shot of Hanif that I was able to access on YouTube has him hooking Freddie Trueman with gusto. Other frozen images on the Net show him sweeping and square driving. In truth, despite his reputation, he had strokes all around the wicket. It was only his team’s often perilous situation that compelled Hanif to play defensively more often (and far longer) than he might have wished.

Hanif was the most remarkable member of what – the Chappels and the Graces and the Amarnaths and the Hadlees and the Waughs notwithstanding – must be reckoned the greatest of all cricketing families. His brothers Wazir, Mushtaq and Sadiq were all high-quality Test batsmen, while a fifth brother, Raees, was once 12th man in a Test match. Hanif’s son Shoaib went on to play 45 Tests for Pakistan, but he should in fact have played many more. He was a fine batsman, if occasionally more carefree than his father, as well as an outstanding outfielder. That Shoaib was not always a regular fixture in the Pakistan side of the 1980s was a product entirely of the pernicious factionalism of that country’s cricketing politics, one which makes our own conduct of the game almost genteel by comparison.

The first Pakistan team I followed “live” on the radio was that which toured England in 1971. By this time Hanif had retired, but his brothers Mushtaq and Sadiq were playing. I saw these two bat on TV in the series of 1978, and also watched Sadiq bat at the ground in Tests in Bangalore and Madras (as they were then known) when Pakistan came touring us a year later. I also came to watch quite a lot of Shoaib on TV, although my abiding memory of him as a cricketer relates to hearing radio commentary on an innings of his. This was on the England tour of 1992, when Hanif’s son was left out of the first four Tests. Brought in belatedly for the fifth Test, he batted assuredly. When he reached his half-century, the expert on Test Match Special, the former England all-rounder Trevor Bailey (who had played against Hanif), praised Shoaib’s batsmanship, asked why he had been left out of the earlier Tests in the series, and finally remarked that the proudest person at that moment would be an old lady named Ameer Bee, following the game ball-by-ball from Karachi. He was right on all three counts, especially the last, for Ameer Bee, mother of Hanif and his four brothers and grandmother of Shoaib, had most closely followed, and encouraged, the cricketing careers of all the men (and boys) in her family.

I never saw Hanif bat. The closest I got to him in the flesh was during a Pakistan-India Test in Bangalore, played in March 2005. One morning I was summoned to the President’s Box, my first ever entry into those protected precincts in 30 years of watching cricket in the Chinnaswamy Stadium. (I owed my unexpected invitation to a literate official accompanying the visitors, who had read one of my books.) I sat there for an hour, watching Younis Khan and Inzammam-ul-Haq forge a superb retrieving partnership after two early wickets had fallen. On the same row, to the right, and with some empty seats between us, sat the first great Pakistani batsman, also watching with appreciation. I noticed that he had dyed his hair black, albeit with a dash of henna. And that he was eating peanuts, out of a yellow plastic bag. Had I been younger and more brash I would have approached him for a chat, but it seemed appropriate to leave him to his thoughts and the cricket. I only hope that on this, almost certainly his only visit to my home town, Hanif met the one among the now numerous Little Masters who was as modest as himself.

A version of this article will shortly appear in The Telegraph.