The government’s recent takeover of the historic nearly century-old Jaipur Polo Ground in New Delhi passed off with remarkable ease, bringing down the curtain on an era, despite polo’s deep association with the military establishment. The lack of visible resistance was striking, especially since the incumbent Indian Army Chief traditionally serves as president of the Indian Polo Association (IPA), the apex body that has overseen and promoted the sport in India since 1892.The IPA’s long association with India’s cavalry tradition has made it one of polo’s principal custodians, particularly after the decline of princely patronage. Yet, even this enduring institutional connection, headed by Army Chief of Staff General Upendra Dwivedi, proved insufficient to prevent one of Delhi’s most recognisable sporting landmarks from quietly passing into government hands, nearly eight decades after independence.Spread across 15.2 acres, the Jaipur Polo Ground may only be the opening move in a larger realignment of some of Lutyens Delhi’s most valuable land. Efforts are also underway to reclaim the adjoining 53.4-acre Delhi Race Club and the 27-acre Delhi Gymkhana Club across the road – a move that would bring nearly 100 acres of prime central real estate under government control.Officially, the rationale for these moves has been framed in broad terms, including public purpose, governance requirements, defence infrastructure and critical security needs. Beyond these stated objectives, little detail has been disclosed. The lack of a more specific explanation has inevitably fuelled conjecture in the capital.Former President of India Pratibha Patil with Army Skydivers who participated in the Sky Diving Show at Jaipur Polo Ground in New Delhi on March 2, 2008. Photo: President’s Secretariat, GODL-India, via Wikimedia CommonsOne of the more persistent conjectures is that the ‘reclaimed’ land could eventually be used to accommodate the expanded parliamentary infrastructure necessary after the long-delayed delimitation exercise, which has gained renewed momentum in recent days in anticipation of the 2029 Lok Sabha elections.Recent defections by Members of Parliament from Opposition parties like the Aam Aadmi Party and the Trinamool Congress have further fuelled speculation in political circles that the government may eventually secure the parliamentary numbers needed to advance its legislative agenda linked to delimitation. If parliamentary membership expands significantly after 2029, the challenge of accommodating a larger number of lawmakers would become pressing. Hence, making use of at least part of the land appropriated around the Polo Ground for this purpose remains a plausible proposition.But none of this has been officially acknowledged. Therefore, with little detail forthcoming on the government’s intentions, speculation continues to flourish, allowing Delhi’s rumour mills to fill a vacuum created as much by what has not been said, as by what has.Meanwhile, the muted response from the Army Chief’s office to the takeover has raised eyebrows among senior serving and retired military officers over the eventual fate of a venue gifted to the city in 1930 by Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II of Jaipur. One of polo’s most celebrated patrons and accomplished players of his era, the Maharaja died in England in 1970 after suffering a heart attack on the polo field.Given the Army’s longstanding role as custodian of India’s cavalry traditions – from the ancient and medieval eras through to the 21st century – many serving and retired military officers, who opted to remain anonymous, had assumed that greater efforts would be made to preserve one of the capital’s most historic polo venues.After all, they reasoned, the Army continues to maintain the 61st Cavalry, raised in 1953 from several former princely state mounted units and widely regarded as one of the last operational horse regiments in the world. For many, it represents far more than a mounted formation: it preserves an entire martial tradition of ceremonial grandeur, resplendent uniforms, regimental pride and pleasing, extraordinary equestrian dexterity.Ironically, in 2020, during another of the BJP-led government’s ‘de-colonisation campaign’, the senior military leadership itself proposed replacing the 61st Cavalry horses with armour – a move critics denounced as one that would “destroy a glorious historical tradition”. The proposal was eventually shelved, but the disappearance of the Jaipur Polo Ground years later suggests that cavalry heritage cannot survive through horses alone; the spaces, institutions and traditions that give it meaning can disappear just as easily under official fiat.In turn, this has prompted some Army veterans to wonder whether polo too has become an unintended casualty of the BJP-led government’s wider effort to decolonise the armed forces – from ceremonial practices and nomenclature to uniforms and symbols. If colonial associations alone are enough to invite scrutiny, they argue, polo would seem an obvious candidate, given that few pursuits are as closely linked in the public imagination with the British Raj.Expensive, exclusive and elitist, the sport is played by relatively few, understood by fewer still and watched by fewer yet. For most Indians, polo occupies a remote and highly esoteric corner of the sporting landscape, largely confined to the Army, diplomats, business elites, privileged old-money families and similar circles.“Viewed through the governments decolonisation prism, polo would seem a fairly straightforward candidate for elimination considering its association with imperial imagery,” remarked one retired three-star officer with a wry smile. The absurdity, he added, declining to be named, is that anyone should have expected such a symbol of the Raj to receive special protection, as the BJP-led administration is more comfortable celebrating history rooted in ancient scriptures and epic traditions than that which emerges from the ‘awkward’ centuries in between.The reality, though, is more complex, as this viewpoint overlooks a fundamental historical fact – one that is often lost when decolonisation becomes a political exercise – the British were not the progenitors of polo. They merely appropriated it, formalised its rules, and then exported it to the rest of the world with the confidence that so often accompanies the imperialist’s discovery of something that already existed.The sport they chanced upon in Manipur in the 1850s – known locally as Sagol Kangjei, from sagol meaning horse and kangjei meaning mallet or hockey stick – was the game that would eventually become modern polo. Its origins in the region stretch back to around 3100 BCE. Initially patronised by Manipuri royalty and the king’s cavalry, it gradually spread beyond the court to the wider population, becoming an integral part of local culture in a society that was markedly different from many of the princely states elsewhere in the subcontinent. In fact, polo was played regularly by ordinary people across Imphal Valley until the unrest that engulfed Manipur from 2023 onwards.Sagol Kangjei, Polo in Manipur. Photo: The Meitheis, E.J. Mitchell, Esq., via Wikimedia CommonsFascinated by the speed, skill and combative spirit of the game, British officers quickly set about organising and formalising it. In 1859, army officers and tea planters established what is generally regarded as the world’s first polo club, which no longer exists, at Cachar in Assam. They also gave the game its modern name, polo, derived from the Tibetan word pulu, meaning willow, from which the balls were originally fashioned.The sport’s institutional foundations followed thereafter. In 1863, the British established the Calcutta Polo Club, in what was then their colonial capital. Officers returning to Britain on home leave carried the game with them, introducing it to an audience that rapidly embraced what appeared to be the perfect combination of cavalry skill, athleticism and social prestige. The first officially recorded polo match in England was played on Hounslow Heath near London in 1869, and five years later the Hurlingham Polo Association codified the sport’s rules, most of which presently remain.The Calcutta Polo Club survives, proudly claiming to be the world’s oldest such institution but army veterans speculated whether it would face ‘uncertain times’ following the BJP’s recent electoral victory in West Bengal. Might it too, they wondered, eventually be classified as another inconvenient relic of the colonial past, following the fate of the Jaipur Polo Ground, and face a similar future of closure, repurposing or takeover? After all, they argued, if a sport with roots stretching deep into India’s own history can still be judged primarily through the lens of its colonial associations, few old institutions (like Calcutta’s Polo Club) can be immune from the shifting currents of the BJP’s historical outlook.Returning to Delhi, the future of the capital’s only other polo ground remains a matter of speculation.The President’s Bodyguard (PBG) polo ground on Mother Teresa Crescent, adjoining Rashtrapati Bhavan, lies tucked away in a forested corner of Delhi’s extended Ridge area, protected by the traditions of one of the Army’s oldest regiments. Unlike the Jaipur Polo Ground, which was a public sporting venue, this secluded ground belongs to the President’s own household cavalry regiment, where polo endures less as a social spectacle and more as a living expression of hoary cavalry heritage.Former President of India late Pranab Mukherjee at the inaugural exhibition match of the President’s Polo Cup, at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, March 10, 2013. Photo: GODL-India, via Wikimedia CommonsAt dawn and in the early afternoon, PBG sowars and officers still regularly streak across the vast field on horseback, their bamboo mallets flashing as they strike polo balls at speed – a scene that carries echoes of the mounted traditions forged under the East India Company centuries earlier.Raised in Bengal in 1773–74 by Warren Hastings as the Governor-General’s Bodyguard, the unit began as a mounted escort and personal protection force for the head of the East India Company’s administration. Drawing on the traditions of elite cavalry, it evolved into a distinguished mounted regiment, becoming the Viceroy’s Bodyguard after 1858 and, following independence, the Indian President’s Bodyguard.However, the PBG’s survival – and that of its polo ground – poses its own curious question in an era of decolonisation.Some army veterans wryly suggest that, carrying an unmistakable colonial inheritance – roots in the East India Company and an identity shaped under the Raj – the PBG too could one day find itself facing uncomfortable existential questions over disbandment or renaming, perhaps even being given a suitably ancient pedigree that relocates its origins from Hastings to a cavalry tradition embedded in ancient Hindu scriptures and epic memory. Will the horses that parade before India’s highest constitutional office eventually be recast – not as colonial remnants, but as heirs to a martial legacy stretching back to a far more ancient past, predating inconvenient chapters of history?Ultimately, the disappearance of the Jaipur Polo Ground represents something far greater than a simple change in land use – it signals the quiet closing of a chapter in India’s social and sporting history. Its transformation from a rare open expanse in a choking city into possibly another potential commercial or official asset captures a curious contradiction: a government eager to celebrate ancient heritage and identity, yet willing to sacrifice a historic open space where a living chapter of independent India’s social and sporting history once endured.