Place · pass & polo festival · Pakistan
Shandur Pass
Also known as Shandur Pass — the polo ground
A flat grassy saddle at three thousand seven hundred metres between Chitral and Ghizer, carrying the highest polo ground in the world. Each July, teams from Chitral and Gilgit play there in the free-style form — no umpire, no substitutes, six a side, and the ball taken straight from the throw-in at a gallop — before crowds that camp on the pass. The game is the older, rougher ancestor of the codified sport that left the Himalaya for Calcutta and then England.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 36.076, 72.520
Worth knowing
Free-style polo has effectively no rules beyond not striking another rider deliberately, so the version played at the top of the Hindu Kush is closer to the game's military original than anything played at Hurlingham.
Connections (2)
- Route adjacencyChitral
The Shandur is Chitral's road east, and the polo on it is the rivalry that road produced. At three thousand seven hundred metres the pass carries the highest polo ground in the world, and each July Chitral and Gilgit play there in the free-style form — six a side, no umpire, the ball struck from the throw-in at a gallop. The 1895 relief column came over this pass in snow to reach the besieged fort; the same crossing now carries a tournament between the two districts it joins.
- AnalogueBaltit Fort, Hunza
Polo in the western Himalaya is not the game that left it. The free-style version played on the Shandur between Chitral and Gilgit, and in the Hunza and Baltistan valleys under forts like Baltit, has effectively no rules beyond not striking another rider deliberately: no umpire, no substitutes, play from the throw-in. This is closer to the mounted training exercise the sport originally was than anything codified in Calcutta in the 1860s and exported to England, which is the version the rest of the world plays.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Shandur Pass” and “Shandur Polo Festival”. Gilgit-Baltistan and KP tourism department records; Horace A. Laffaye, The Evolution of Polo (2009).
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