Polo in the Pampas

If the worlds best polo is found in Argentina and youre the Indian polo champion,theres only one thing to do up your mallet and move there,which is exactly what Indias top polo family,the Ali brothers,have done. For eight months of the year,I play and practise in Pilar (a city in the province of Buenos Aires) with my family at La Quinta Polo club with the likes of Luke Tomlinson,the England polo captain and an eight-handicap,along with his brother Mark.

Shamsheer,a six-goal player with an unparalleled record in Asia,along with his brothers Bashir (rated a six-goaler in Argentina) and Hamza (a five-goaler),spends most of his time in Argentina. He started with a handicap of two but with passion and perseverance notched up an impressive six-goal rating and an Asian championship. In India,it is not an easy sport to pursue. My father,Nawab Syed Shujat Ali,had to build a farm and buy horses for us to play. There are very few polo fields in India,barely eight,in Delhi,Jaipur,Hyderabad and Mumbai. The clubs are exclusive and only the Army or a privileged few have access to them. If a non-member wants to play,he/she is allowed to play only 20 games in a season. Jaipurs 61st cavalry (one of the few unmechanised mounted cavalry regiments in the world) alone gives a chance to civilians to use their polo grounds. The choices for the not-so-affluent civilians are limited and the culture of the game is languishing, says Shamsheer.

Interestingly,this sophisticated equestrian team sport was brought to South America by the early British settlers from India. The modern game of polo,formalised and popularised by the British,originates from Manipur. In a twist of history,this oldest recorded team sport,with the first matches being played in Persia over 2,500 years ago,was brought to The Argentine flat farmlands by the British settlers and Railway engineers from India in the 1870s.

The Mughals were largely responsible for taking the game from Persia to the Indian subcontinent and,by the 16th century,Emperor Babur had established it in India. Shortly after the Indian Mutiny of 1857,Joseph Sherer,a subaltern in the Indian Army,came across the game being played by Manipuri tribesmen at Silchar. Greatly excited,he is said to have exclaimed,We must learn the game.

It was the British army and the tea planters who founded the worlds first polo club at Silchar,west of Manipur. Other clubs followed,and today the oldest in the world is the Calcutta Club which was founded in 1862.

R Vishwanathan,Indian ambassador to Argentina,says,While the pomp of polo is displayed during the polo season in India and kept up by the royalty of Jaipur and Jodhpur,the level of the game in India has not been high. The highest handicap in India is said to be six. Now there is a boost to the sport by the entry of Indian corporate chiefs who play and patronise the game. Even with this,India is likely to continue in the minor league while Argentina has taken the game to new levels of excellence. They say that there are two levels of polo: world-class and Argentine-class.

Shamsheer laments the contrast,In India,polo is dwindling. We used to have 20-goal tournaments earlier but now we have had to peg it down to a 16-goal tournament. And now 13-goal tournaments are also being played. There used to be seven teams or so for various tournaments in the past but now there are barely one or two.

Deepankar Sharma,an avid polo player,is headed southwards too. He wants to improve his polo skills and is spending time at the sprawling El Venado farms. Thanks to the perfectly flat farmlands in Buenos Aires province,and a strong horse-centric tradition,the nation has galloped ahead to became polos international playground, he says.

The sports adoption by the gauchos has made it considerably more accessible in Argentina than in most other countries,where it largely remains the preserve and privilege of the wealthy. Polo should easily pull rank as Argentinas national sport as the level of players and the grounds are of excellent quality,as are the horses, says Sharma who represents International Polo Group (IPG),an India-based polo company.

Argentina has,at this moment,11 ten-handicap players out of the 12 in the world. There are over 1,000 polo fields in Argentina. Pilar and Lobos are the polo capitals where one can play and watch high-level polo from September to April.

Today,nearly all the worlds top-ranked polo players hail from the west bank of the River Plate. And the countrys ponies are highly prized by aficionados. Argentina exports roughly 3,000 polo ponies a year,which are bred at the worlds most extensive network of polo farms. We have 45 horses between the three of us that are getting trained in Argentina, says Shamsheer.

The contribution of gauchos to the Argentine pampas and their love for the horse is at the heart of the Argentine tradition of polo. The sense of ownership gauchos felt towards the game of polo and their stake in its legacy made the sport more easily available in Argentina than in other countries,where it largely remains the preserve of the privileged.

Polo tourism provides a fillip to the local economy and has every polo enthusiast and novice alike heading southwards to the land of pampas. However,Argentinas dominance in polo estancia,ranch polo,played by farm hands competing to represent their neighbourhoods is still played as a labour of love and with passion for the sport .It remains unaffected by the world of glamour,capital and high fashion,with which it has begun to be associated elsewhere.

Polo continues to represent the majesty of the equestrian game and reaffirms the special bond between steed and rider. It is epitomised by a famous verse inscribed on a stone tablet next to a polo ground in Gilgit,Pakistan,Let others play at other things. The king of games is still the game of kings. n

(The writer is a freelance journalist)