February 28, 19 18 
Land & Water 
23 
Twice ur thnce as the mob clattered by I saw him lean forward 
eagerly, but it was not until one of his opponents, riding free on 
a clean run with the ball down the field, came charging almost 
aCRiss his prostrate form that he made a decisive move. Lunging 
sharply forward, he thrust his short stubbv mallet between 
the forelegs of the galloping pcnv, and an instant later two 
lim;) figures instead of one were lying in the middle of the 
stone-;iitered maidan. 
I he fringe of spectators, who up to this moment had con- 
tnic( their applause to chesty grunts of approval, broke into 
a wild yell of delight and approbation as the second rider was 
overthrown, and I noticed that the men in a group standing 
near me were roaring with merriment at the comments of 
one of their number. 
" VVhat is he saying, Gunga ? " I asked my Punjabi bearer, 
who betrayed m an unwonted smile, evidencelof being amused 
himself. - " 
"He say Sahib," was the reply, " that Mulik play the 
better polo from the earth than from the horse." - 
♦ i,^°T^*^^'^ ^^^^^ hillman for his ;' pulu "—the word is from 
the libetan, by the way, and means a willow ball— that he 
no more thinks of foregoing it for lack of afield than does the 
street urchm his cricket for lack of a pitch. If topographical 
exigencies forbid a maidan, he plays in the village bazaar or 
up and down the solitary street. These are the wildest ex- 
hibitions of all. 
'■ What in the name of common sense did you bring those 
old polo balls along for ? " I asked the young British officer 
ot an Indian regiment who had accompanied me on shikar in 
Kashmir We had followed up the Sind from Srinagar 
crossed the lofty Zoji La, and were in camp at Leh, the capital 
of Ladakh. With the country for hundreds.of mUes in every 
direction tipping one way or the other at an angle of forty- 
hve degrees, my question was a natural one. 
" For your especial amusement," was the reply. " Tossing 
a polo ball into a Ladakh bazzar beats throwing copper coins 
to famine sufferers for excitement. Come 6n down and see 
lor yourself." 
Tibetan, Ladaki and Nepali shouldered Pathan, Khirgiz 
^d Dogra, and the gossip of half a continent buzzed in Leh 
tezaar as, pushing between ponies and yaks, goats and sheep 
B~— and I picked our way to breathing room in the centre 
ot the httle square. Shouting something in his fluent Hindu- 
stani, my companion held the battered ball aloft for a moment 
and then tossed it upon the cobbles among the vendors of 
grains and pack gears. 
Theefifect Was electric, explosive. The vendors seized armful s 
of their stock and bolted for shelter, hillmen of a dozen races 
came running with stubby mallets in their hands, and mount- 
ing the nearest pony, pressed upon the ball. Yaks grunted 
goats and sheep bleated, ponies snorted, women chattered 
and screamed and men yelled. Now a dozen ponies were 
stampmg the tough lump of bamboo root into the stones 
now a S€ore. The air was black with flailing sticks, and their 
resounding thwacks, as they fell on man and beast alike 
mingled with the bedlam of cries, Now the ball was kicked 
from the press and a quick wrist stroke sent it flying out of 
the bazaar and down the narrow street. A fugitive Tibetan 
girl wnth her arms full of strings of turquoise hair ornaments 
blundered in front of the leader, fell sprawling, and half the 
clattenng pack passed over her felt-padded anatomy without 
doing apparent harm to anything but the scattered stock of 
jewellery. 
Ever)- able-bodied pony in the bazaar was seized, mounted and 
sent in pursuit of the flying throng. There was no endeavour 
to resolve mto sides. Each man strove only to hit the 
ball as hard and as often as possible— where it went was a 
secondary consideration. Wayfarers and loiterere seemed to 
understand what was coming, and the street cleared as before 
the charge of a troop of cavalry. Most of the traffic bolted to 
safety through windows and doors, but asmall flock of fat-taUed 
sheep, which refused to be driven into someone's front parlour 
was fed into the vortex of hoofs like meat into a sausage 
machine, to emerge in about the same condition. A coupfe of 
unhorsed hillmen, scarcely distinguishable in their sheepskin 
coats from the bodies of the trampled wethers, were left floun- 
dering in the shambles as the press swept on. A blind side- 
swipe sent the ball through an open window, and the iron-shod 
hoofs struck sparks from the flinty cobbles in the rush to be 
hrst upon it as'it was tossed out. Then a quick-eyed Tibetan 
on a shaggy rat of a Tibetan pony got away for a clean run 
and hittmg tile ball time after time as it shuttled back and fortli 
between side-wall and pavement, carried ^t out of sight round 
a corner. • . ° 
And I, already late fur tea at the Commissioner's, had ro 
luctantly to forego following further in the wake of the ava- 
lanche we had set in motion. As an aftermath, however we 
were called upon that evening to give audience to a " damage^ 
deputation," and. after an hour's parley, paid for five fat- 
tailed sheep, half a dozen sets of shattered hair ornaments 
several bags of grain and a number of minor losses. The 
Claims^ strange to say, were entirely reasonable, amounting to 
less than thirty rupees in all, and the fun, especially for one 
interested in polo, was cheap at the price'. 
This will give some idea of what early Indian polo mu-^t 
nave been, the polo that was passed on from the Himalayan 
mil states to the sport-loving nobles of Ra putana and the 
i'unjab. It was the game as developed by these latter that 
came to he known as " the game of kings," for the manly 
JNawabs Rajahs and Maharajahs of these war-like States 
ever used to taking personal lead in battle and the chase, we;e 
not content to remain passive while any contest of strength 
or skill was going on. Some of the best polo players the 
game has ever produced have been rulers of one or another 
ot the native states of India, nor, indeed, need I use the past 
tense m making that assertion. 
A Burma Polo Ground 
One of the most striking instances of polo enthusiasm 1 
recati ever having encountered was that of a number of planters 
and army officers near Mergui, in the southern " panhandle " 
ot Burma. That district, with the lower end of the Malay 
Peninsula, was experiencing a rubber boom, and incidental to 
cleanng a stretch of dense tropical jungle it was planned to 
make a polo field. All that cutting and burning could do 
however, was to get rid of the lighter brash and timber. 
Several giant stumps still remained, together with a half- 
dozen forty or fifty-feet lengths of prostrate trunk, while 
straight across the middle of the field meandered a little perennial 
streamlet for the diversion of which no practical means was dis- 
covered. Several years would have to elapse before the timber 
and stumps would be dry enough to burn, and the expense of 
building an underground conduit for the streamlet was pro- 
hibitive ; so the plucky enthusiasts, with true Oriental philo- 
sophy simply did the best they could with the facilities 
ottered. The stream, except when it ran away with the ball 
as happened every now and then, was not a senous handicap' 
and the stumps could generally be avoided ; but the great 
prostrate tranks seemed to get mixed up in every run Of 
course there were a good many accidents at first, both to man 
and beast, and the feelings of one plantation manager— he 
was a Dutchman, from Sumatra, and had scant sympathy 
for sport of any kind— regarding the demoraUsation of his 
staff of assistants incident to the game as played, was summed 
up in the statement that " haff of mine men vas haff kUt, und 
all of dem vas all crazy." 
At the end of a few weeks of this steeplechase polo the 
casualty hst had increased to an extent that left neither ponies 
nor players enough to make a game, and before two full teams 
were ready again elephants and dynamite became available 
Between these two irresistible forces stumps and logs were 
soon blown up and dragged out of thewav. When I visited 
Mergm five years ago, this remarkable field was two feet deep 
under water from the monsoon rains, but I was assured that 
in the dry season, " though a bit soggy, it was reallv a very 
sportmg bit, of turf." ,- 
The story is told of a polo field at one of the North- Western 
Irontier posts which was so near the Afghan border that the 
festive Afndis used occasionaUy to he safely hidden among 
the rocks of their own hill sides and indulge in long-range 
target practice at the flying figures on the plain below. -This 
was back in the 8o's. Scant attention was paid to pot- 
shooting, for the Afridis, though exceUent marksmen, were 
rarely able to do much damage at long range with their " ten 
rupee jezails." Polo went on as usual until one day some of 
the first fore-running Mausers from the yet undeveloped 
Persian Gulf smuggling trade feU into the hands of the tribes- 
men at this point. It was a Saturday afternoon, a game was 
on with a visiting team from Peshawar, and the players were 
just beginning to straggle o^t for a preliminary warming up. 
One of them— the visiting captain— was in the act of carrying 
a ball down the field at an easy canter, when there came the 
shnek of bullets in the air, and the rider went tumbling 
from his horse, shot through the chfst almcst before the ringing 
cracks from the distant hill-sid^ told the players that there 
were mcdern high-power rifles tiUined down from the brown 
rocks which they had so often before seen overhung with the 
drifting smoke-wreaths of the harmless old jezails. 
I could tell the story of a tiger that was shot and killed 
one night almost between the goal posts of a polo field in 
Upper Burma, where he had dragged and was eating at leisure 
the body of the post's crack pony, or of how some rhinos 
came down early one morning to" a polo ground in Upjx-r 
Assam and, in endeavouring to reach the fcdder that was stored 
for the pionics , completely wrecked the stables,' but I 
hardly ne«d further to multiply instances to show the splendid 
sporting instmct which must imbue the Anglo-Indian poloist 
to lead him to play the game under such untoward conditions. 
