Manipur and the British: where modern polo took shape.

Sagol kangjei

The Government of Manipur's tourism department traces modern polo to sagol kangjei, the Manipuri game played on the Manipuri pony and used as a test of a king's martial and cavalry skill. It calls Mapal Kangjeibung, the ground in central Imphal, the world's oldest polo ground. Scroll.in describes the same ground as the oldest functional polo ground in the world and notes a sign there saying Manipur gave the world the game of polo. Tournaments in Imphal carry a sign naming Manipur the birthplace of modern polo, according to Sahapedia, which also mentions a shrine at Heingang to Lord Marjing, described as the god of polo.

One difference from today's game stands out. Sagol kangjei is played seven a side, against four in modern outdoor polo, Scroll reports.

Manipuri tradition and Wikipedia's Polo in India article give much older dates for the Imphal ground and for the game's founding, some drawn from the Manipuri royal chronicle. Those claims carry citation-needed tags in Wikipedia and include openly legendary material, and we have not been able to check them against the chronicle, so we leave the dates out.

The Manipuri pony

Scroll describes the Manipuri pony as one of India's five recognised horse breeds and says it is often called the only living original polo pony. It usually stands 11 to 13 hands (about 1.1 to 1.3 metres). Sahapedia says the breed probably descends from the Mongolian pony and was kept for sport, ritual and war rather than farm work.

The breed is in decline. Scroll reports that numbers fell from 1,898 in the 2003 livestock census to 1,101 in 2012, and that the latest breed report counts 994 in India, 918 of them in Manipur. Manipur adopted a pony conservation policy in 2016, but Scroll reports that it has been weakly put into practice. The polo pony page covers how today's much larger polo horses developed.

The British encounter

Sahapedia says the British first saw the game played by the followers of a Manipuri boy-king living in exile in Assam in the mid-19th century, and that East India Company soldiers and tea planters watched and then joined in. The Sentinel, an Assam newspaper, says Manipuris who had settled in Cachar brought their game, kanjei, with them, and that tea planters were already playing alongside them by 1853 to 1854.

When the British first saw the game is one of several disputed dates:

• The Sentinel puts planters on the field with Manipuri players by 1853 to 1854.
• The Calcutta Polo Club says Captain Robert Stewart and Major General Joe Sherer, as the club names them, watched sagol kangjei in Manipur in 1858.
• The Bridge says Lieutenant Joseph Sherer saw the game, which it says was also called pulu, in 1859.

The Silchar club

The same two men appear in some versions of the next step. The Sentinel says Captain Robert Stewart and Lieutenant Joe Sherer, assistant deputy commissioners, founded a club at Silchar with local planters after Stewart became deputy commissioner in 1859. The Bridge calls it the Silchar Kangjai Club, founded in 1859; Sahapedia spells it Silchar Kangjei Club and calls it the world's first polo club. Britannica, as quoted in a search summary (we could not open the page itself), dates the first European polo club to 1859 at Silchar, founded by tea planters. The HPA's history agrees that British tea planters found the game in Manipur in the 1850s and formed the first club at Silchar. The club survives as the Cachar Club, which Wikipedia says opened in 1859.

The date is not unanimous. Wikipedia's Polo in India article says the first Indian polo club was set up at Silchar in 1834. Most sources, including Britannica (via search summary), The Bridge, Sahapedia and Wikipedia's own Cachar Club article, give 1859.

The Sentinel says the game in the British period was played seven a side, and the first team to score seven goals won.

The Calcutta Polo Club

The Calcutta Polo Club's heritage page says Stewart and Sherer founded the club after watching the Manipuri game, and that it produced what the club calls the first rule book for modern polo. The founding year differs by source:

The Bridge credits the founders with cutting teams from seven players to four and adding goalposts. The HPA calls Calcutta the oldest club in the world today, and Wikipedia calls it the world's oldest operational polo club. The club itself says it nearly lost that standing when it went dormant in 1998, and that it was revived in 2005 under Keshav Bangur.

The club's trophies include the Ezra Cup, which the club dates to 1880 and which is named for the Calcutta businessman Sir David Ezra. The club calls it the oldest polo trophy in the world; that is the club's own claim, and we have not found an independent source for it. The club also lists the Carmichael Cup (1910) and the Stewarts Cup (1932). It says it helped form the Indian Polo Association in 1892 and hosted the association's first championship in 1907.

Rules take shape

Historic UK and The Field both credit Captain John Watson of the 13th Hussars, an Irishman, with writing early rules and shaping the modern game in India in the 1870s. Sahapedia describes the route the game then took: from the planters' grounds to Calcutta, and on to Britain, where rules were written down at Hurlingham and the name "polo" stuck. That story continues in polo in England.