Loss of habitat and lack of resources threaten the survival of the agile animals of Manipur, writes RAHUL BEDI
DISTINCTIVE POLO ponies peculiar to India’s northeastern Manipur province, where the game associated with aristocrats and royalty originated thousands of years ago, are fast becoming endangered.
They stand 11-13 hands high or 3.6-4.3ft, are agile and enduring and are descendents of the Mongolian Wild horse crossed with Oriental and Arab stock. But Manipuri polo ponies are beset by loss of habitat and grazing grounds due to expanding population, inadequate breeding and veterinarian facilities and a desperate resource crunch which makes it difficult to keep them in nutritious fodder.
In addition, these specialised ponies had, over the years, been smuggled across the porous border to frontier towns in neighbouring Myanmar, barely 50km away, and yoked to carts for transporting passengers and material. Locals withdrew them from polo tourneys and dragooned them into hauling loads in remote and sparsely populated hill districts surrounding the lush Manipur Valley where the majority of the state’s 2.7 million people live.
Many ponies have died after being beaten up or knifed by local farmers for straying into their paddy fields, while more endure painful suffocation after swallowing discarded plastic bags.
“Polo is a common man’s game in Manipur but the majority of its proponents are unable to afford suitable upkeep for their ponies,” said Noren Singh, honorary secretary of the Manipur Polo Association.
“We are constantly running from pillar to post for money to ensure the ponies’ survival and at times even contribute from our own pockets but that’s barely enough,” he added ruefully.
If something is not done quickly, the Manipuri polo ponies will become extinct, Singh warned. The majority of Manipur’s polo players are school and college students, farmers and labourers whose passion for the game is in inverse proportion to their limited finances.
According to Manipur’s 17 surviving polo clubs – down from about 25 a few years ago – there are some 500 ponies in the valley and just half that number in the adjoining hill regions, compared to around 1,100 in 2007.
The provincial government had established a breeding farm in the late 1980s but following recurring clashes between rival tribes it was taken over by one of the warring groups and all but disappeared.
Many of the ponies housed there died and the survivors suffered increasingly from a lack of wholesome fodder, a combination of diseases, timely medical treatment and, above all, an ineffective breeding programme.
But polo ponies are hardly a priority in Manipur, one of India’s most backward and insurgency-ridden provinces.
It also has the highest rate of heroin addiction – the narcotic is available cheaply, smuggled from Myanmar – and an alarmingly high percentage of HIV-positive victims.
Known locally as Sagol-Kangjei – sagol for horse and kangjei meaning mallet or hockey stick – polo originated in Manipur around 3100 BC and was played by royalty and the king’s cavalry.
Mounted on Manipuri ponies, locals wearing tight-pheijoms or sarongs tucked up to their knees; chunky, half-sleeved, jacket-like shirts; and thick white turbans played a game with minimal rules that appears to have been a hybrid of Afghanistan’s and Central Asia’s untamed tribal buzkashi horse sport and, surprisingly, a localised version of hurling.
With seven players to a side, no fixed field size or goal posts and no time duration, Sagol-Kangjei was a wild, uncontrolled melee in which any team member was free to catch the willow ball even in the air and gallop with it to score a goal even by hitting it, hurling-like in mid-flight.
Even the ponies were trained to carry the ball in their mouths and drop it victoriously into their opponents’ side.
The sport also helped hone the Manipur cavalry’s equestrian skills in their frequent skirmishes with their restive Burmese neighbours over territorial control.
In the mid-19th century, British soldiers and tea planters chanced upon it in Imphal at the world’s oldest existing polo ground and, over years, adapted it to the way it is played today.
In 1859, the British founded the world’s first polo club in nearby Chachar in modern day Assam state that no longer exists.
They also called the game “polo”, a derivative of pulu, the Tibetan word for willow, from which the balls were originally made.
Four years later came the Calcutta Polo Club – in the city that became colonial India’s capital – which is still active. Officers returning on home leave brought the game to England.
The first “official” polo match was organised by an officer from the 10th Hussars on Hounslow Heath in 1869 and five years later the game’s governing body, the Hurlingham Polo Association, drew up its first set of rules many of which are still in existence.
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