King of Games: Politics, Polo, and the Raj

‘First the hunter, the missionary, and the merchant’, wrote the cricketer and historian Cecil Headlam in Ten Thousand Miles Through India and Burma (1903), ‘next the soldier, the politician and then the cricketer – that is the history of British colonisation.’ Pithy but sharp, Headlam’s observation captured a deep truth about the role of sport in upholding the edifice of colonialism. For those governing Britain’s imperial possessions, sports were a site for what Headlam termed ‘moral training’, a key vehicle for the transmission of the social behaviours that the Raj sought to foster: discipline, integrity, teamwork, self-restraint, obedience to duly constituted authority, and respect for rules. And so it was that sports, particularly team sports like cricket, embodying colonialism’s civilising mission, travelled to the far-flung corners of the subcontinent. But it was polo, the game of kings, once played by the Persianate elite across South and Central Asia, that encapsulated the contradictions inherent in the colonial enterprise.

Unlike cricket, polo’s journey did not begin in the metropole. Discovered by tea planters and military officers in the 1850s in distant Manipur, it electrified the British imagination like nothing before. By 1859 the first club had been founded in Assam and in 1869 the first match on English soil was held at Hounslow Heath. With a games revolution underway – the first Football Association Cup was played in 1853, the county cricket championship inaugurated in 1873, the first Wimbledon titles staged in 1877 – Britain’s officer class embraced polo with gusto. In 1874 the Hurlingham Polo Committee drew up the first set of rules: field dimensions were standardised, rules codified, number of players limited, and official tournaments organised. Folk polo had been an unruly stick-and-ball equestrian game with few rules or restrictions. It was now reconceived and transformed into a modern sport with all its attendant paraphernalia, a process that for many commentators was a metaphor for British rule itself.

‘One could see how order loving and disciplined minds of the westerns have organised a game which was originally a wild helter-skelter into a careful, scientific, and military sport’, wrote J.M. Brown and T.F. Dale in their 1900 volume on polo for the Badminton Library. ‘These things are an allegory, and the polo of East and West may to the careful observer give a suggestion why in war and government the West ever prevails.’ Arch-imperialists such as Lord Curzon proudly saw reflected in polo the beneficent effects of British rule, which had made ‘the ground more even, the riders better mounted, the rules more precise, the strokes more scientific and the play more brilliant’. The idea of polo as a school of war – teaching horsemanship and tactics and reinforcing preferred notions of masculinity – drove its popularity to unprecedented heights, especially in India. Polo came to dominate the lives of increasingly polo-mad British officers, exemplified by a young Winston Churchill who travelled to India solely to play in the 1899 Inter-Regimental Cup.

British supremacy, however, was only one side of the story. The other was decidedly Indian. Over a third of the Raj consisted of princely states, ruled not by the colonial government but by nominally sovereign maharajas who, with time to spare and cash to burn, also took to polo with unbridled passion. Dangerous and expensive, it fitted with their ideas about recreation and soon became the mainstay of princely sporting pursuits. More importantly, they found it a useful vehicle for displaying traits traditionally associated with kingship and authority: equestrian prowess, conspicuous consumption, and lavish hospitality. Their sovereignty constrained by submission to the Crown, the maharajas and their nobles did not flock to the polo field because they sought to imitate the British or imbibe ‘moral training’, but because it was a public assertion of their status as kshatriyas, or warrior-princes. Polo, like war (‘an open door to heaven’, per Sir Pratap Singh, regent of Jodhpur and polo player), reaffirmed the martial and aristocratic traditions they had inherited from their ancestors.

In sports such as cricket, power differentials and social divisions were performed and made manifest on the field. Indian teams were drawn from single communities such as the ‘Muslims’ or the Parsis; noticeably inferior when measured against the British, they invariably lost and were therefore assumed to lack the social values (discipline, diligence) that underpinned sporting success. A dismal performance by the Parsi cricket team in 1886 caused the Bombay Gazette to wryly comment: ‘The Parsis lack that grit and staying power which are the characteristics of the English race.’ But on the polo field, keenly matched in terms of equestrian skill and athletic ability, coloniser and colonised met in a relatively egalitarian setting. Indian and British teams competed on an even footing – and indigenous teams fielded by the princes regularly beat British sides in prestigious tournaments. The Jodhpur team led by Pratap Singh, for example, triumphed in the inaugural Indian Polo Championship of 1893.

As with colonialism itself, limited egalitarianism did not imply structural equality: the British wrote the rules and the sport was restricted to elites. Nevertheless, princely successes on the polo field when going toe-to-toe against the British could not but undermine the hierarchies of race and masculinity that defined social relations off the field. Because social rankings were determined and enacted on the sporting field, colonial observers liked to ascribe Indian victories to individual players’ ability, rather than crediting indigenous teams with the social values that might indicate parity with the British. R.L. Ricketts, author of First Class Polo: Tactics and Match Play (1938), was a case in point: lauding the tactical innovation of the Patiala teams of the 1890s, but crediting it to the individual genius of player Hira Singh.

By excelling at polo, however, the maharajas, often derided in colonial discourse as foppish aesthetes or errant schoolboys, were laying claim to a status of social equality. Once articulated, it was a claim that extended beyond the polo field. In a reversal of Headlam’s sequence, it eventually found echo in the political demands made by the princes for restrictions on British paramountcy and a defined constitutional position for themselves as partners of the Raj, starting from the chief’s conferences in 1914 and cemented by the induction of the maharaja of Bikaner into Lloyd George’s war cabinet in 1917, which in turn shaped imperial politics through the 1920s and 1930s. Where the cricket field validated colonial claims to order and masculinity, the polo field came to represent the contested nature of Britain’s imperium, creating a space where these claims were challenged, gradually eroded, and ultimately overturned.

Tripurdaman Singh is an Ambizione Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute.