Sagol kangjei (polo)

Sagol Kangjei(Polo) : Manipur is considered as the real home of Polo. The Manipuri Puranas trace it to the mythological age when it was played by the gods. This game is also believed to have been played on the occasion of recognising Laishna as the wife of King Pakhangba of Manipur who ascended the throne in 33 A.D. The game is played on horse-back with seven players a side. Mounted players hit the ball to the goal. The stick is made of cane having a narrow wooden head fixed on it. The ball about 14 inches in circumference is made of bamboo root and is usually light. The Manipuris play on ponies which are not more than 4ft.6inches in height. The game is now played in 2 styles namely Manipuri Style and International Style.


Polo is one of the oldest games. Scholars  usually point out that the earliest forms of the game were played in ancient Persia, that it later spread slowly to the East. The name Polo is said to have derived from pulu, the Tibetan word for ball. The Moghul conquerors brought Polo to India. But it died along with the decline of the Moghul Empire in India.
Polo in Manipur had a different ancestry. Manipur, one of the 25 States constituting the Indian Union today, was not a part of India until 1949. All the major ethnic groups constituting the Manipuri people are of the Mongoloid stock and their languages belong to the Tibeto-Burman family. Polo is a part of their cultural inheritance, as waves of people migrated from southern China in the prehistoric times.
Among the Meiteis, which is the predominant ethnic group among the Manipuri people, the divine guardian of polo is called Marjing. One of the rituals today in Umang Lai (sylvan deities representing ancestors) worship is a mime by the Maibi (priestess), holding a mallet in her hand, of a game of polo.



Manipur existed as an independent kingdom for centuries until the British defeated them  in 1891. However, Anglo-Manipur relations were firmly established in the aftermath of the First Anglo-Burmese War 1819-24 which also resulted in the annexation of Assam to the British Indian Empire. A British Political Agent was stationed at Imphal, the capital of Manipur, from 1835.
British officers certainly saw Sagol Kangjei (polo) being played regularly at  Mapal Kangjeibung (polo ground) in Imphal because it was adjacent to both the royal palace and the Political Agency. Sagol literally means a pony in Manipuri language while Kangjei stands for a game played with sticks.
Polo is generally associated elsewhere with the royalty. In Manipur it was, and still is, played with enthusiasm by ordinary people so much so that, as a popular story goes, polo players were known to have pawned their wives to buy a pony.
The enthusiasm apparently infected Captain Robert Stewart, assistant deputy commissioner of Cachar, a district in Assam under British administration which also had a sizable Manipuri population as it was contiguous to Manipur. During 1853-54 he invariably joined the Manipuris when Sagol Kangjei was played at Silchar, the district headquarters.
In 1859 Stewart became the deputy commissioner and Lieutenant John Shearer joined as assistant deputy commissioner. The duo enthusiastically took to the game and they decided to start a polo club to play in matches against the Manipuri players. Thus came into existence, in March 1859, the Silchar Polo Club in a meeting held at Stewart’s bungalow. Its first elected members were Captain Robert Stewart, Lt. John Shearer, James Davidson, Julius Sandermon, James Abemetly, Arthur Brownlow, Earnest Echardt, W. Walker and A. Stewart. The Silchar Polo Club, now called the Retreat Club, is possibly the world's first polo club.
By 1861 polo was played in Dacca on the initiative of Captain Eustace Hill of Lahore Light Horse who saw the game being played on a trip to Cachar.  British merchants from Calcutta were similarly introduced to the game and got interested. The Calcutta Polo Club was formed in 1862. Now the game spread rapidly to almost every cantonment in British India.
In 1864, on invitation from Calcutta, the Silchar Polo Club raised a Manipuri polo team known as The Band of Brothers and Lt. John Shearer took them, with their ponies, to Calcutta by country boat. The team consisted of Toolsi Singh, Chowba Singh, Ammu Singh, Omah Singh, Tubal Singh, Aema Ba and Monga Pa. The Manipuri team easily defeated the Calcutta team.
A match was also staged between the Calcutta Polo Club and the Manipuri team on the occasion of a visit to Calcutta by the Prince of Wales in 1876. It ended in a draw. It was largely due to the tireless efforts of Lt. John Shearer that  Sagol Kangjei got transformed into the popular game of modern polo. When Shearer retired as a Major General, he was rightly acknowledged as the father of English Polo.
The first regular match in England was played at Hounslow in 1869 between the 10th Hussars and the 9th Lancers with eight a side. It was then known as ‘Hockey on Horseback’, a curiosity in the British society. The 10th Hussars won by three goals to two.  Hurlingham started polo in 1874 and soon became the headquarters of the game. The rest is part of fairly known polo history.
Sagol Kangjei always enjoyed the patronage of Manipur kings. After the Anglo-Manipur War 1891, when Manipur came under British suzerainty (not as a part of the British India), the government continued its patronage by including a separate provision for polo in the Manipur State Budget.
A Maharaja-in-Council, under a democratic Manipur constitution, governed when the British left the Indian subcontinent in 1947. A Manipur State Polo Committee was formed in 1948 by a resolution of the Manipur State Council to look after the game. The Maharaja was its patron. However, an abrupt change in the fortunes of polo occurred when Manipur became a part of India in October 1949. The entire polo establishment in the government was disbanded and government patronage to polo was discontinued.
 For a long time, permission was not granted for playing polo at Mapal Kangjeibung, the world’s oldest existing polo ground where Sagol Kangjei had been played since time immemorial. The consequent shock and hurt feelings among the Manipuri people was palpable.
The problem was aggravated by the utter destruction of properties and rampant dislocation in  socio-economic life during World War II in which Manipur was a ‘prize’ to be won between the Japanese and the Allied forces.  The pony was a casualty of the war. The Manipuri people were struggling for return to a normal life when the swift political changes overtook them.