Empire games

Though it is certainly easy to get caught up in the most recent jaw-dropping feats of Adolfo Cambiaso and ‘Juanma’ Nero or to be totally absorbed in one’s personal practice and tournament schedule, taking time to reflect on polo’s past provides a meaningful way to foster our appreciation for the game. Readers of Hurlingham can reasonably be expected to have a basic grasp on the early development of polo: in the 1850s, natives of Manipur – a remote region on the Indian/Burmese border – were observed by officers of the British army playing a ragged version of hockey on horseback. They were so intrigued by the practice, they took it up themselves and persuaded some of their countrymen to join them.

The game grew so popular in the second half of the 19th century within the army in India that nearly every one of the 25 cavalry regiments on the subcontinent had its own club. Before long, a description of what was to become known as polo had been written up and submitted to a popular sporting magazine published in Britain. When that description was circulated in March 1869, an idle group of cavalry officers stationed in Aldershot took to their mounts and, in doing so, ushered in the birth of the game in Britain.

Previous page A group portrait of six Manipuris preparing for polo at Manipur, India, in the 1870s. This page, clockwise from left An illustration depiciting a polo game in the late-19th century; student ofcers riding mules at a military academy, 1915; a polo match at Venado Tuerto, Argentina, 1919. Opposite Team Hurlingham in 1893: Francisco Balfour, Frank Furber, CJ Tetley and Hugo Scott Robson

This sequence gives an idea of how transmission of the game began, but understanding precisely how that game – which the Manipuris called sagol kanjai – transformed into what we today know as ‘polo’ reveals a surprising mix of cultural forces at work: a Victorian obsession with rules and codes, a deep connection with the other sports of the empire, and, above all, an emphasis on social interaction that is not typical of the other sports Britain popularised throughout the world. The process had as much to do with the widely investigated connection of public schools with imperial service as it did with the interactions that ideological agents of the empire such as military officers, merchants and planters had with princes in the subcontinent and London society back on home soil. Polo’s popularity – and, indeed, very existence – today is in large part a result of the cultural phenomenon of sport within the British Empire that began more than a century and a half ago. On the one hand, many Victorians and Edwardians saw sport as ‘an imperial umbilical cord’ that they found more meaningful than literature, music, art or religion in connecting them back home. On the other, sport served as a vehicle for cultural diffusion that taught subjects – Briton and foreigner alike – values such as sportsmanship and equality. All too frequently, however, the sports that attracted the most attention were limited to what can be termed the so-called ‘imperial games’ of football, cricket and rugby, and not the ‘sport of kings’. The development of polo represents a unique element of the culture of imperial sport because – as opposed to the more widely discussed sports of cricket, football, and rugby – the game is in an especially sensitive area of conceptual negotiation. Some narratives suggest that the creation and codification of the imperial sports led to their export to

dominions and colonies as well as areas not part of the British empire – Argentina, for example – thus making them effective yet unofficial instruments of imperialism.

The rhetoric surrounding the world-bettering ideology of Britain’s empire in the 19th century found many of its strongest voices in the writings and sermons of the headmasters of schools such as Eton, Harrow and Rugby. In laying out the imperial purpose of education, the Reverend JEC Welldon, headmaster of Harrow from 1885-1898, offered the following: ‘Englishmen are not superior to Frenchmen or Germans in brains or industry or the science and apparatus of war, but they are superior in the health and temper that games impart… The pluck, the energy, the perseverance, the good temper, the self-control, the discipline, the co-operation, the esprit de corps that merit success in cricket or football, are the very qualities that win the day in peace or war. The men who possessed these qualities – not sedate and faultless citizens, but men of will, spirit and chivalry – are the men who conquered at Plassey and Quebec. In the history of the British Empire, it is written that England has owed her sovereignty to her sports.’

That Welldon would liken sports to warfare is not surprising, given the physical action and co-ordination required of all of the three major games of the empire. But the hierarchies and levels of interaction involved in co-ordinated team sports also model the organisation of the armed forces or the civil service and illustrate the adaptability expected of each individual at any given time. By exerting self-control and co-operation for the greater good of his team, the schoolboy sportsman who followed the lead of men such as Welldon learnt to adapt his behaviour to allow for the best communal outcome. In choosing to highlight values such as good temper and esprit de corps, sentiments like his make the case that the triumph of Britain’s empire over other nations did not result from any unnatural strength of body or of intellect, but from the individual Briton being attuned to his role within the game of life, which would soon turn toward the enterprises of government and of war.

While polo was recognised from the time of its discovery in Manipur as an important

This page, top, and opposite Open Polo Tournament, Bombay, 1925. HE The Governor’s Staf beat Bhopal in the final. This page, below British Military personnel at a polo match in Sindh Province, India, 1920

tool for training the cavalry in India, it was still too unrefined a game to have held a central role in the schoolboy athleticism on which the sport came to be based. Perhaps the supreme example of this ethos is found in Henry Newbolt’s celebrated poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’. Many readers will be familiar with its refrain of ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game! ’ – the imagery of a boy at bat in the deciding moments of a cricket match giving way to a soldier fighting for his country during a desperate last stand against an attacking enemy all display how the schoolboy sportsman was expected to conceive of adaptation as a virtue directly transferable from sport in one’s youth to the business of adult life. By the time sagol kanjai had first been observed by officers in Manipur, this relationship between sport and imperial service was well established. The manner in which the game was later used to keep soldiers combat-ready typifies the stress on adaptability facing the Victorian agent of empire.

While the connection between Victorian education and imperial service certainly helps to explain polo’s transformation into a British game, what sets the game apart from the three other imperial sports is its origin as a practice of a completely different culture. The fact that Indian society was subject to Britain is highly significant because it marks the special case where an imperial sport was developed in a foreign context, cultivated to suit the purposes of various agents of empire and, finally, distributed across the world just like the other three major global games. While this may seem little more than a slight variation in the tried formula for the development of a sport, it flies in the face of the accepted wisdom in interpreting how sporting culture operated and who could lay claim to it.

All sports have a socialising aspect, but polo’s is particularly pronounced because the game is itself one continuing experiment in cultural interaction. Just as polo would not exist today if the Manipuris who knew the game in the

1850s had refused to show the British how the game worked, so today’s game would be unrecognisable had the officers of the cavalry not standardised the size of the field, established a fixed number of players per side and authorised the first referees. The game was able to grow as quickly and as pervasively as it did within the army in India and among the Indian princely states because it came to enjoy official administrative support from military leadership. For a time, the top military brass in London enthusiastically championed the game not only as a technically rigorous method of preparing for equestrian combat, but also a healthy social outlet to the excesses in the lifestyle that many young men chose to lead in the east. In a separate vein, the role of spectators – who have flocked to modern polo without fail both to watch the game and to interact with one another – has in its own right been of tremendous importance throughout the game’s history. Without the civilian fan base that early polo drew in the 1870s, the game would have missed the transformation from military practice to civilian pastime and would certainly no longer exist today. The crowds, players, grooms and horses all contribute together to the living ritual of polo – a practice that has survived not only in the face of the transformation from a rural world to an urban one, but also from a time of mounted combatants to mechanised infantry and military drones.