It is to the survival of the game in Manipur,
that the world owes the genesis of modern polo

India has rightly been called the cradle of modern Polo. While Polo may have grown to maturity in the Americas, it was in India that the modern game was 'discovered' and nurtured. Within a decade it had spread across the globe like wildfire taking horse-lovers around the world by storm.
When polo had all but disappeared from the subcontinent with the decline of the Mughal Empire, it survived in a few places where life was untouched by the great battles and intrigues taking place on the plains below. Polo is still played in Gilgit, Ladakh and Manipur, much the same as it has been played for over 2000 years with few, if any, concessions to the modern version of the game.
However, it is to the survival of the game in Manipur and the coming of the British, that the next page in the story of polo must unfold. Shortly after 1857, Joseph Sherer, a subaltern in the Indian Army, was posted to Assam's Cachar district. He first came across the game being played by the hardy Manipuri tribesmen at Silchar. Greatly excited, he is said to have exclaimed "We must learn the game".
In Manipur the game was played in most villages with tremendous enthusiasm. Curiously enough, it was very much a game of the people, as opposed to being a game restricted to a chosen few that it was destined to become after its 'Europisation'. In the mountains of the north -west, where the game had survived in places like Gilgit, Chitral, Baltistan and Ladakh, polo was still played in its original unrestrained form. There were very few rules and the number of players was only limited by the number of ponie that could be mustered for the game. Since there were few places large enough to make an ordinary-sized ground, more often than not, the village main street was used. In Manipur, however, the grounds were more even and something akin to the modern polo stick was used. Players legs were protected by stiff leather shields attached to the saddles and girths.
At Silchar, Sherer experienced his first taste of the mounted game along with the District Suprintendent, Captain Robert Stewart and like a good Englishman, proposed that they form a club. Thus it came to be that in 1859, Sherer - dubbed the father of English Polo - Stewart and seven tea planters set up the first club of the modern game, the Silchar Polo Club. The other founding members of the club in that remote outpost of the Empire were James Abernethy, Arthur Brownlow, James Davidson, Ernst Echardt, Julius Sandeman, A. Stuart and W. Walker. Regular seven - to- a - side games were played between the club and the local Manipuris mounted on the small Manipuri ponies. It was not until 1861 that a Captain Eustace Hill took the game to Dacca and CB Stewart and a few Calcutta merchants introduced it to their city.
In 1862, during the Christmas Race week in Calcutta, polo was played in public for the first time . Joseph Sherer visited Calcutta in 1863, and once again was instrumental in setting up a club - the Calcutta Polo Club - which holds the proud title of being the oldest Polo club in the world still in existence. In 1863 Sherer organised a match with a visiting team of Manipuris, called the Band of Brothers. Playing on their handy little ponies of about 11.2 hands, the Manipuris easily beat the less well mounted or experienced Calcutta team. They returned hone after selling many of their ponies for good prices and leaving behind an enthusiasm for the game which was soon to spread rapidly across the world.
By 1865 the game had taken root in Bengal and by 1870 had spread throughout British India where it was at once taken up by army officers and civil officials, all of whom kept ponies both as a normal means of transport and for taking exercise. Soon reports of the 'New' game began to appear in the British press at home and it was in 1869 that an officer of the 10th Hussars at Aldershot, reading of the game in 'Field' magazine after lunch, immediately initiated an afternoon's sport with his fellow officers. Mounting their chargers, the officers attempted to play 'Hockey on Horseback' using walking sticks and billiard balls; not with much success. However, the game appealed enough to catch on and fellow officers from the 9th Lancers were
  introduced to the sport, with the result that the first inter-regiment match on an English ground was played on Hounslow Heath in 1869.
Even at that early stage of the game, a newspaper reported that "Nearly all fashionable London" journeyed out to witness the match. Playing eight to a side, the game lasted for one and a half hours. In 1870 the 1st Life Guards, Royal Horse Guards, 9th Lancers and 10th Hussars played a series of games in Richmond Park. Polo soon became an important fixture of army life in many countries across the globe. Perhaps the first man to make a serious attempt to systematize the game was John Watson in the 1870s. He started the regular use of the back hander and arranged his side of 4 players in the present day 'line-ahead' manner. The practise of 'riding off', by which a player may challenge for possession by pushing his opposite off the line of the ball by laying his pony alongside and using its weight to push him away, appears to have developed around the same time. Seeing two galloping horsemen locked in combat, as it were, for the possession of the ball, adds greatly to the 'hell for leather' excitement of the game which characterises modern polo today.
Watson imported his system into England in the early eighties and thereafter the game began to progress rapidly both in England and in India.

THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN POLO

  When polo was first taken up by Europeans in the 1860's, very small ponies of about 12 hands were used, and the game was comparatively slow moving and sedate. Many polo old timers in the 1920s, long retired from the game, would proudly pull out faded photographs of this or that favourite pony, " The fastest pony in England, my boy; he would gallop up to the ball and stop dead for me to hit it."

Moreover, in its initial stages when the game was entirely in British hands, it was viewed primarily as a source of amusement or exercise and a pastime for relaxation after the work of the day. It was only when the national horizons of Polo were expanded to admit players from outside, that the competitive spirit was infused into the game, and the development of polo as a tactical and scientific sport actually began.

Uptil the early eighties of the last century, however, the systematic development of the game was exceedingly slow. There were at that time no fixed numbers of players to a side, anything upto 7 or 8 being common, nor was there any definite arrangement of players. All played in a bunch hitting the ball as best they could and the maximum concession to tactics was the backing up of the man with the ball by one of his own side in case of a miss. The ball was most commonly dribbled and the man in possession usually kept the ball as long as he possibly could. Local sides occasionally had their own ideas, and two backs and two forwards was an arrangement sometimes employed with the idea of passing the ball around the ground. Sometimes there was even a goalkeeper as at football. Back handers were not known, the ball being dribbled around. As a consequence, the game was very slow, hard hitting being impossible with the sticks employed, while the ground and pony training were most elementary.

 Perhaps the first man to make a serious attempt to systematize the game was John Watson in the 1870s. He started the regular use of the back hander and arranged his side of 4 players in the present day 'line-ahead' manner. The practise of 'riding off' ,by which a player may challenge for possession by pushing his opposite off the line of the ball by laying his pony alongside and using its weight to push him away, appears to have developed around the same time. Seeing two galloping horsemen locked in combat, as it were, for the possession of the ball, adds greatly to the 'hell for leather' excitement of the game which characterises modern polo today.

 Watsons methods made full use of riding off in the case of the No. 1 and started the system by which the No. 1 was not expected to hit the ball, but to devote himself entirely to impeding the back. This tactic worked exceeding well in the moderate polo of the times and when the offside rule was in force. In those days the No. 1 was usually a young and inexperienced player, while the back was the reverse. If the No. 1 could merely neutralise the back, he was considered to have more than pulled his weight in the game.

Watson imported his system into England in the early eighties and thereafter the game began to progress rapidly both in England and in India. It was around the same time that a new element was introduced into the polo world which was to have a profound impact upon the subsequent development and spread of the game. This was the advent of the Indian princes upon the Indian polo scene. Armed with their hereditary equestrian skills and with the enormous resources at their disposal, the Maharajas took the polo world by storm. In an exceedingly short period of time they achieved a standard of excellence in polo that has yet to rivaled anywhere in the world. It was their love for the sport, and also in no small measure for its glory, that brought Indian polo into the world arena. The heyday of Indian polo, which lasted from the nineties of the last century till the outbreak of the second world war, saw unmatched performances by the teams of the princely Indian states. Some of these superlative teams were those of Patiala, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Hyderabad, Kishangarh, Alwar, Bhopal, Kashmir and Bikaner.

These princely teams contributed immensely to the scientific and tactical development of the game. The advancement in the game was evidenced by the play of Jodhpur under Sir Pertab Singh and the Patiala team upto about the year 1894. The Patiala team developed to the highest degree the system of giving a clear run through to the back. They owed their superlative performance in large measure to the outstanding genius of Hira Singh, who was considered to be head and shoulders above all other players at that time.

 The next real improvement to the game was introduced by Captain H.de B.de Lisle of the Durham Light Infantry. He devised a system of intensive training for both man and pony to an extent not attempted before. On this he based a policy of increased flexibility and passing, which enabled his regiment to win the Inter-Regimental Tournament for three years in succession, a honour which had earlier always gone to the cavalry. Sir Winston Churchill describes an encounter between his regimental team (4th Hussars) and the redoubtable Durham Light Infantry in 1898:

 "There was no more leave for me until the regimental polo team went north in the middle of March to play in the Annual Cavalry Tournament. I was fortunate enough to win a place, and in due course found myself at Meerut, the great cantonment where these contests usually take place. We were, I think, without doubt the second best team of all those who competed. We were defeated by the victors, the famous Durham Light Infantry. They were the only infantry regiment that ever won the Cavalry Cup. All the crack regiments went down before them. The finest native teams shared a similar fate. All the wealth of Golconda and Rajputana, all the pride of their Maharaja's and the skill of their splendid players, were brushed firmly aside by these invincible foot soldiers. No record equals theirs in the annals of Indian polo. Their achievements were due to the brains and will-power of one man. Captain de Lisle, afterwards distinguished at Gallipoli and as a Corps Commander on the Western Front, drilled, organised, and for four years led his team to certain and unbroken victory in all parts of India. We fell before his prowess in this the last year of his Indian polo carreer."

 Alwar was the next team to come to the fore. Organised by Captain R.L. Ricketts of Hodsons Horse, the team was never beaten in a tournament in its short 21/2 years existence . Amongst other competitions it won the Indian Championships in the season of 1900-01, 1901-1902 and the Delhi Durbar tournament (which absorbed the Championship) in 1902-3. It's overall goal record was equally impressive. In the first class tournaments alone, the team scored 79 for, with 14 against , in 9 matches.

The only other teams who emulated the new tactics during that period were the Poona Horse, winners of the Indian Army Tournament at the Delhi Durbar 1902-03 and the team of "Indian Pilgrims" who won the Indian Championship in 1905-06. Other teams who stood out in India in the period before the first world war broke out were the 10th Hussars under Lt Col John Vaughan, and the Maharaja of Kishangarhs' team. Another team which blazed its way across the Indian firmament and which had an exceptionally long lease of brilliance, was the famous Golconda team of Hyderabad. Under the influence of the redoubtable Major Shah Mirza Beg, whose capacity for pure ball-control has probably never been equaled, this team based its tactics on a development of the dribbling methods of early polo. They had a long list of successes and exacted a terrible toll off opponents over whom they established ascendancy.

During the World War One period of 1914-18, polo was at a standstill. Sadly many a good polo players were never again to be seen on the polo grounds, having fallen on different fields, in France, Belgium, and Mesopotamia.

After the end of the war, the leading teams in India were the Jodhpur and Patiala teams, the Central India Horse under Captain A. H. Williams, the 21st PAVO Cavalry under Captain Dening, the 15th Lancers under Major A. J. Atkinson. The period culminated in the Jaipur team which won the Indian Championship in 1932-33 and followed up this success by beating with consummate ease all the best teams in England in 1933. From then uptil the outbreak of the second world war, Jaipur, under His Highness Sawai Man Singh, dominated polo in India and Europe. Indeed, Jaipur established an unbeaten record of winning every open tournament in England, and the Indian Championship every year from 1930 to 1938. A famous cartoon in Punch depicted the Jaipur team led by Maharaja Man Singh, mounted on an elephant, scattering English players left and right.

 A major landmark event of Indian polo was the clash of the titans; Patiala and Jodhpur, in 1922. The game marked the eclipse of the famous Patiala team, for in 1924 it ceased to exist, and the ascendancy of the star of Jodhpur, which reigned supreme and unmatched for the next decade. The epic match is described in detail by the doyen of Indian polo the late Rao Raja Hanut Singh:

 "It was in 1922....

 An analysis of the gradual evolution of polo as a tactical game upto this period will show that improvements in the game mainly were in the form of development of what already existed. This was achieved primarily by an increased attention to details and extending the game to its natural conclusion, specially as the keen edge of competition, spurred on by Regimental or National honour was increasingly applied to the sport. Teams came to the top as leaders arose who had the necessary skills in the game to guide and shape the lines of play as well as the capacity for leadership to enforce their view on others. However, the lessons taught by one team were soon forgotten, having to be re-learnt to a great extent by the next due to a failure by the players in general, to grasp the essentials. Only on two occasions did tactical ideas give evidence of creative talent. The first was when Watson started the four-a-side 'line-ahead' arrangement with full use of back-handers. The second was the intensive pace and eye -training system adopted by the Alwar team at the turn of the century. The Alwar players never equalled the variety of stroke of the Golconda team, or even of their American counterparts, but were fully their equals in the sustained aggressiveness of their tactics and probably their superiors in the degree of pace to which they attained in their game .

INDEPENDENCE & AFTER

  The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, coupled with the mechanistion of the Indian Cavalry in the late 30's almost sounded the death knell of Indian polo. A good seventeen years were to pass before Indian polo rose again, like a latter day Phoenix, from the ashes of the war and the aftermath of independence and partition. Indeed in the prewar years as the Indian demand for self-rule and later independence, grew, polo at times provided the backdrop for the intense political drama unfolding across the land. When the Duke of Windsor, then Edward, Prince of Wales, visited India in 1921 –22, he was greeted by nationwide hartals announced by the All India Congress Party. At Allahabad, as he travelled from the Railway Station in his state carriage, he was meet by a city of ghosts. Not a soul was visible and there was an ominous silence in the deserted, troop lined streets. However, there was an interesting sequel to this incident, described by the Duke himself in 'A Kings Story':

 "Stationed at Allahabad was a Battalion of the Black Watch, and as often happened, a polo game had been arranged in the afternoon between my staff and the regimental team. I was somewhat surprised to be informed by the Governor of the United Provinces that, if it were still my intention to play polo, he would have to call out some more police."

 "Why?" I asked. "Do you expect trouble?"

 "On the contrary, Sir," he answered with a smile, "I have reason to believe that there will be a tremendous crowd to see you at the polo field."

 "Even after the success of the hartal this morning?"

 "If anything, because of it," the Governor went on; "Nehru succeed in making the population obey him this morning but he can't control it indefinitely, Sir"

 "It was as the Governor had predicted. Thousands of laughing Indians were massed along the side lines as I rode out to play. And to judge by the excited applause that greeted my every shot, one might have thought it was Pandit Nehru and not the Prince of Wales who was on the pony. But, while I was still not so naïve as to suppose that the India won by Clive had been saved through my exerions on the polo field of Allahabad, I was thereafter inclined to take with a pinch of salt the newspaper accounts of hostile demonstrations against the British Raj."

 Accompanying the Prince of Wales on his Indian tour was a young naval officer who was beginning his forays into the world of polo. Little could he, or anyone else at the time know that he was destined to preside over the end of Britain's Indian Empire, a mere quarter of a century hence. The Duke of Windsor ruminated on this:

"The circumstances attending the recent winding up of British rule in India under the Viceroyalty of my second cousin, Lord Mountbatten caused my mind to flash back to my tour in 1921-22, on which Dickie was one of my Naval ADC's. Although he had scarcely ridden before, he was determined to learn to play polo, and his initial appearance on a pony startled the Indian cavalry officers and my staff. But Dickie was nothing it not analytical; and undaunted by his inexperience, he persevered. It was my impression at the time that his interest in the manifold problems of India was confined to that part of the country bounded by the white boards of polo fields. However, when next I heard his name coupled with that country's it was to discover him established in the Viceroy's House at New Delhi, engaged in the process of liquidating the immeasurable Imperial trust that he and I, each in our own way had endeavored to defend in our youth."

 In spite of his somewhat belated and hesitant beginning at the sport, Dickie Mountbatten came to be quite a good player and even Captained the Royal Navy's Bluejackets team, which almost took the Inter–Regimental Championship away from the cavalry in 1936. In that tournament the Bluejackets had beaten the Royal Horse Guards and a Dragoon Guards Regiment to play in the finals against the 12th Lancers. The Navy was actually leading until their No 1 broke his leg in a fall and then insisted on playing on in great pain. The Bluejackets lost in the last chukker, but it was very tight contest, and perhaps the only time that the Navy came close to beating the Army at its own game!

 Dickie Mountbatten was to later perform an even greater service for Indian polo. It was largely due to his initiative and encouragement that the erstwhile Presidents Estate Polo Club came into being after independence, thereby ensuring that Indian polo survived the traumatic aftermath of partition.     

 take into account the tall, lance carrying PBG Troopers who are an integral part of all ceremonial in Rastrapati
Bhawan.

 The 'Mechnical mounts' of the PBG have variously been Diamler an Homber Armoured Cars. equipped with respectively the indigenous Nissam Scout car and currently the BTR 60 armoured vehicles.

PBG Uniforms

Up to 1857 the PBG was clothed entirely at the expense of the Commanding officer. For this purpose, he drew an annual sum from the Government, called "Off Reckonings". Any surplus left over, became the property of the commanding officer. In addition to what was thus supplied, the men themselves provided certain minor items for which purpose they received a monthly allowance, known as "Half Mountaining". From 1858 uniforms were provided by the State.

 The traditional uniform and accouterments today, date back to 1890 and comprise of a blue and gold ceremonial turban with a distinctive 'Fan' a Red or, White Long Coat with gold girdles, white buckskin quantients, white buckskin quantities, white breeches and Napoleon baots with spurs. The PBG's special 10 feet 9 intches long bamboo cavalry lances carried in stirrup lance buckets, are adorned with the red and white Cavalry pennon. A sheathed cavalry sabre is carried at the side of the saddle of each trooper. The wings of a trained combat parachutist, in gold., adorm the brest of each member of the PBG, in symmetry with the full medals. The Officers and Junior Commissioned Officers in addition, wear beautifully worked pundh belts set on gold aigulillettes. Officers carry Cavalry sabres on parade with scabbards supported in a scarlet and gold sabretach.