i don't where to begin. These (the Indians among them, and Hesky Baig) are people that I watched growing up. In Calcutta Polo, Polo at Xmas, as it was called, the sequence was defined: Stuart Cup (mainly us locals, all playing scratch or below - unlike the Yanks, in Anglo-Indian polo, we started at -2); Carmichael Cup, Ezra Cup (high handicap, team count 10 or more), Darbhanga Cup and, right at the end, the IPA Championship. After that, everyone went to the New Year's Day races (same venue; there were two full-size polo grounds in the middle of the RCTC, and the races were run around the perimeter - NOT at the same time!!). Just before the Stuart Cup, that started around September, we would lark around playing 'mud polo', everybody careful not to ride faster than a hand-gallop, careful not to injure the ponies, with the big season coming up. I never got my handicap, as it became clear that after my father retired, horses would not be part of our lives, and I shifted to rowing.
Sitting on the ground from the left is Lt Col Sikander (Sikku) Ali Baig, the younger brother of Hesky Baig. Their father was Nawab Hamid Yar Jung, Minister-in-Waiting to the Nizam of Hyderabad and they were the grandsons of Sir Afsarul Mulk, C-in-C of the Hyderabad Army. Sikku was a well-known cavalry officer. He was the recipient of a gold medal from the Indian Military Academy (IMA) Dehradun and during the Second World War he saw active service in the Middle East with the 16th Light Cavalry. ‘Horsey’ to the core like his brother, he had a four-goal handicap.
For those supercilious souls who raise their eyebrows a millimetre or so at our running off at the mouth about a 4-goal or 5-goal player, two thoughts - the highest handicaps in Indian polo are 4 and 5 nowadays, played by the sons of those Army blokes whom I watched - Garcha, Kalaan, and their friends and comrades - but that is another story. The second thought is that these 4 and 5-goal players played 1 and 2! The kinds of teams that had 4-goal players for forwards can be imagined. This was the era of Hanut and his sons, and of Jaipur (I was under the impression that HH played 10 for a season or two, but this article seems quite sure about his having been 9).
Hesky Baig had an odd crouched posture, but is otherwise best described as a bolt of lightning. I have watched V. P. Singh, and Billy and Pickles Sodhi at their peak, and he was faster and hit the ball better.
An oddity: their Hyderabad became the centre for Cycle Polo, and, at one time, were completely unbeatable. These players were ordinary people; years later, I met some of them, and they were tailors and washermen and things!
Hari Singh, the son of the great polo player Hanut Singh.
This was a scary family, all four generations, from the legend Pertaub Singh (Pratap Singh nowadays), Regent of Jodhpur, and general prince in charge of everything (his own 'thikana' was Idar), his son but not by his regular wife, hence, Rao Raja, Hanut Singh, who was really the god of polo; I am privileged to have seen him play, season after season after season. Hanut's two sons were the bespectacled Bijay, whose appearance comforted me as I got used to my spectacles, and the better player of the two, and Hari, handsome as hell, and a dasher, but, like all the family, conservative and very set in his ways; and then the incredible Bunny (Bijay and Hari were Kunwars, so naturally Laxman Singh, Bijay's son, was a Bhunwar, Bunny to his irreverent friends and elders), who made his mark in Golf. My memories are of a little fellow whose stirrup irons had to be looped up for him to get his feet into the stirrups, but who could still ride with the rest of them; at that age, he couldn't do much about hitting the long shots that his father, uncle and grandfather did, or ride off anybody, but could - and did - tap the ball around with the rest of us.
The story goes that Hanut could not be 10 because Jaipur was 10, and it wouldn't do to equate the head of the Kachwahas with the son of a 'morganatic' marriage.
Next is Major Kishan Singh from Jodhpur who was serving in the 61st Cavalry. Apart from the Bodyguards, the 61st Cavalry is the only horse mounted cavalry regiment in the Indian Army and has a rich polo-playing tradition. Kishan had a four-goal handicap and was a member of the Indian Polo Team that won the world cup at Deauville, France in 1957. In a professional career spread over 28 years, he won more than 400 trophies.
I learned more from watching Major Thakur Kishan Singh play than from anything else, except perhaps Mountbatten's pseudonymic book on Polo, authored by him under the name Marco. When he came onto the Calcutta scene, he had some odds and ends from the Army team, but soon, he had formed a 61st Cavalry team, where he obviously played 3, and switched between the ferocious V. P. Singh and the elegant Sodhi brothers for forwards. P. K. Mehra, who married Kumaramangalam's daughter (K was also a very keen player and always turned up during the season), was their 4; personally, I have a great deal of doubt about PK. He lacked the grim implacability to be a good back, and Ratanada used to outrun and outgun him.
The thing to do in an Army game was not to waste time watching VP and the Sodhis at their derring do, but to watch Kishan. He would be cantering around in mid-field, watching the game closely, sometimes even slowing into a trot, when the pace was slow, or the umpire was setting up the ball for a penalty. Suddenly he would accelerate, dart into the scrimmage, retrieve the ball and send his forwards hallooing away goalwards - all within seconds. His grasp on the game was outstanding; he, and Hanut, Bijay and HH were on the Indian team that won the Gold Cup at Deauville, and people tend to forget that he was there.
The Army team was better mounted than anyone else, once Hanut started slowing down (HH also died, in 1970, prematurely, in an accident, like Iftikhar Pataudi before him), but it was dull to watch - straight up and down. Then we started importing Argentineans, and what a revelation that was! I watched Goti and Lisle in action, only 4 and 6 goals, but they wove their magic across the entire ground, cutting the ball, using a lofted back-hand to devastating effect, and running rings around the opposition. They were mounted by the local police - who were still importing and riding Walers - and couldn't keep up with the Army, although the Army didn't import but used the geldings and fillies from Saharanpur - hard-mouthed brutes, all of them, not like our beauties - but still stopped the Army in mid-career.
Then it was time for the Hipwoods. Julian used to come over alone first, and we watched in awe as he climbed, season to season, with Hurlingham handicaps of 4, then 5, then 6 - i don't think I actually saw him playing all the way up to 9 ever, all that happened in England, and we ran out of money, and the Army - Gopal bloody Bewoor - pulled out and took the IPA away to Delhi. Then Howard joined him one season, coming in earlier, getting thoroughly bullied by VP, who was really a mean player on the field - in his later days, his wife would take away his dentures, so that his language was indistinct and there was less fear of a brawl in mid-field - then Julian came in, and mounted on our best ponies (we had a few that were outstanding), cooled the Army down considerably.
She was the mother of Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi (the great cricketer also known as Tiger Pataudi) and her daughter-in-law was Begum Ayesha Sultana (better known as Sharmila Tagore).
Seated in the center is unmistakably the glamorous Maharani Gayatra Devi of Jaipur (known to her friends and the world as Ayesha). She was the daughter of the ruler of Cooch Bihar, fell in love with the 21-year-old Maharaja of Jaipur when she was only 12 and married him at the age of 20 years.
Both Bengali beauties - Gayatri Devi remains to this day one of the most elegant and good-looking women I have ever seen - both known to my parents; Sharmila's dad was manager for Indian Oxygen, servicing the Burnpur (IISCO) steel plant, with a bungalow next to my uncle). Both always called Ayesha, never their 'proper' names.
Mansur Ali Khan's father Iftikhar Ali Khan was a gentleman and a man of character, and was the only one in the team to give Douglas Jardine the finger and dissociate himself completely from the sordid goings on in the Bodyline tour of Australia.
Next is one of the most famous of Indian and international players, Brigadier Rao Raja Hanut Singh – possibly the greatest polo personality of South Asia. He had a handicap of nine goals for twenty years from 1919-39 and from 1931-39 he captained the Jaipur Team. During this period it remained almost unbeatable in India – and in England in 1933 where they referred to him as the god of polo. His father was Lieutenant-General Maharaja Sri Pratap Singh of Idar, who was a great warrior and even at the age of 70 commanded his Jodhpur Lancers in France and Palestine during the First World War. Rao Hanut Singh served as his father’s aide in both these theatres.
NOTHING I write can convey even a flavour of this man's play. I watched Julian Hipwood in later years and he wasn't a patch on Hanut. If he was worth 9, Hanut should have been 11!
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My apologies for going off-topic, but these memories are all that I have left. A polo ball used in the Centenary Gold Cup, where I had the autographs of these great men, vanished thirty or forty years ago, and my sticks and jodhpurs even earlier than that. My riding weight was 10 stone and a bit (Julian Hipwood was nearly 14 stone) and I am now over 16. I would probably end up impaling myself tent pegging, and have lost all my dressage skills. So I crave the collective pardon of the forum.
@PanzerKiel Thank you for that evocative commentary on the pic. I really wish I had watched those Pakistanis play; if Hesky Baig was their forward, what must the whole team have been?
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