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.