Expert Equestrians: How the Game of Polo Forged Masculinities in British India and the British Metropole, 1862–1914

Abstract

ABSTRACT Polo is a team sport played on horseback hitting a small ball through the opposing team’s goal. In today’s form, it originated in Northern India and is an example of colonial encounter and the formation of colonial masculinities. This paper follows Mrinalini Sinha’s findings that see power at the centre of masculinity in arguing that the emerging dynamics between elite colonisers and colonised displayed in the game of polo aided both groups’ interest to rule. The late nineteenth century was defined by shifts in imperial social relations and the outdoors became a space to practice changes linked to racial, class, sex, ethnic, or national differences and discourses. Threatened not least by the emergence of Indian nationalism, British elite colonisers and Indian nobility played polo to assure each other of their social, cultural, and political power arrangement within a mostly homosocial milieu. In playing polo a cross-racial (elite) form of masculinity was practiced that allowed both groups to showcase their manliness and upkeep existing social hierarchies and status. After arriving in the metropole, polo turned into an even more elite form of masculinity to defend fragile class divides and reassure British upper classes of their status and privilege.