Polo
Polo is truly an ancient Indian game; but it is losing its
popularity day by day. Many countries of the world know it to be an Indian
sport, but many men and women in India have never seen polo and its players are
getting fewer and fewer year after year.
The game did not actually start in India. Polo came to us
from the Middle East, having been brought here by the Muslim invaders but it
became native to the soil in the grand Mughal days; and all foreign travellers wrote about it in high admiration.
"It was a game which India was able to offer, in
hospitality, to the British Army in the days when they lived with us a return
gesture, if you like to think of it so, for all the various sports they gave to
us.
"Yet polo is a game which the average Indian has rarely
seen- let alone played. It is a game which demands that its players shall own,
for a start, several ponies… so, you will understand; it was and is beyond the
range of all but the select few. It is, in fact, a game of what I can only
describe as the Maharaja class."
Polo is a fine and exciting game but it is not a game for
the common man. At best it is a sidetrack from the highway of Indian sports and
games. C.B. Fry, the English sportsman described it as a game in which
"the players have all the fun and the horses do all the work."
