In the chill, thin light of a weekend winter afternoon, scores of fierce horsemen gather in a stadium on the edge of Peshawar, capital of Pakistan`s North West Frontier Province. The riders are split into two teams of craggy, Mongol-featured men. Wearing their tribal clothing and sitting atop their horses, they could step back 1,500 years into history and easily blend in with their distant ancestors who rode with Genghis Khan.
The riders and horses are Afghans, some of them refugees from the war inside Afghanistan, some of them guerrilla fighters on leave from the war visiting their refugee families inside Pakistan. The game they are playing is buzkashi, the national sport of Afghanistan. Played with bruising abandon, it is perhaps the most dangerous game on horseback in the world.
The stadium is a bleak, grassless field dampened down to keep the hooves of the pawing, rearing horses from churning up clouds of dust. In front of the grandstand, a natural amphitheater with rising rows of tiered seating areas cut into a hillside, three 8-foot circles have been chalked on the ground, each several yards apart, forming a triangle. A hundred yards behind the circles a pole with a pennant flag has been stuck into the ground.
In the circle farthest from the grandstand, officials place a headless, hoofless carcass of a newly slaughtered calf. The whip-wielding riders surge from all sides to the circle. In the melee of colliding horses, the shouting riders elbow and shoulder each other, trying to reach the carcass. The riders who manage to edge closest to the calf jam their whips between their teeth and lean off their saddles to the ground, grappling for the calf.
Once a rider grabs the calf, riders from the opposing team form a circle around him, locking arms atop their horses to try to stop him from breaking out, the calf tightly in his grasp. If the calf-bearer manages to break out, he then gallops his horse furiously towards the distant flagpole. His teammates ride with him, forming a phalanx to protect him from members of the opposing team, who chase after him and attempt to wrest the carcass from his hand.
If the rider with the calf succeeds in reaching and riding around the flagpole, his team earns a point, and he continues riding hell-bent-for-leather back towards the starting point. There he attempts to drop the carcass into one of the two ”scoring” circles and thus earn two more points for his team. The game seldom follows such a neat pattern, however, as the straining mass of horses and men struggle and lurch protoplasmically in random directions across the field. Heedless of anything but the battle of competition, horses and riders often surge right into the tiered grandstand, scattering the several thousand spectators, most of them dressed much the same as the riders.
Unlike during a Western spectator sport, little noise comes from the crowd, other than an occasional groundswell of appreciative murmurs in admiration of a particularly outstanding display of horsemanship. Most of the noise comes from the frenzied shouting of the players themselves.
”Namon!” ”Wadur!” ”Bairak!”
”Don`t let them through!” ”Pick it up!” ”Grab it!” ”The flag!
Go around the flag!”
Once a player succeeds in dropping a calf into a scoring circle, his teammates shout ”Hallao!” ”Well done!”
Once a two-point score has been made, another, comic figure who has been riding a pint-sized, mangy horse on the fringe of the competitors takes center stage. He is the jorchi, or town crier, an older man outlandishly dressed in a furry hat and an ancient coat too large for him.
To the amusement of the crowd and the riders themselves, buffoonlike the jorchi shouts windily absurd praise for the scoring rider, the rider`s horse, the horse`s owner and the game`s sponsor. While the jorchi shouts, a factotum of the sponsor rewards the successful rider, usually in cash in amounts up to $100. While the award is passed out, the riders gather to restart the game as the calf is placed back in the starting circle.
The competition continues nonstop for three hours, until the afternoon light begins to wane. The day over, the assembled riders gather in front of the grandstand. Each rider receives at least a nominal prize from the day`s sponsor, usually a turban. The most outstanding riders of the day are singled out to the applause of the spectators and rewarded with more cash.
As competitive sports go, buzkashi does not seem very complicated or sophisticated. It relies pretty much on straightforward skills of brute strength and quickness atop well-trained horses to advance an object to a goal. Afghanistan and its people themselves seem a pretty much
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straightforward Third World, underdeveloped society, backward and agrarian. Rudyard Kipling 100 years ago realized, however, that Afghanistan and its people are anything but straightforward and uncomplicated. The same could be said for buzkashi.
Kipling coined the phrase ”the Great Game.” He used it to describe the 19th Century struggle between Russia and Britain over Afghanistan, a nation in name only. Russia wanted Afghanistan, a collection of feudal, Islamic tribes, as a means of access to the Indian Ocean and as a means of political control over the Indian subcontinent. The British wanted Afghanistan precisely so they could stop the Russians from realizing their dreams of warm-water ports and military control over the Indian subcontinent.
Britain bowed out of the Great Game in 1947 when it granted independence to colonial India. With its withdrawal, Britain retired from the Game having never quite managed to conquer and subdue the tough, wily, warlike Afghans. Perhaps more patient and cunning, the Russians waited until December, 1979, to attempt to subdue Afghanistan, invading the backwards, landlocked nation to prop up an unpopular Marxist regime. Now the Russians, too, appear to be retreating from Afghanistan, bloodied and stymied by the rude and ruddy Afghans.
The fact that a small, poor, undeveloped country made up of a fractious, feuding population could for two centuries hold off the greatest powers in the world is the stuff of legend. The Afghans were supposed to be the prize in the Great Game, yet somehow it has been the Afghans themselves who have always managed to win it. They are a remarkable people, and nothing exemplifies their character so well as the only game in the world that is played and understood only by Afghans themselves.
Few cultures are so wildly individualistic as Afghanistan`s. An Afghan male fancies himself a free agent in his society, a power unto himself. He spends his life constantly entering into and dissolving personal alliances with other men in an attempt to gain advantage in business and political dealings. Bonds between fathers and sons and brothers and brothers are strong, but the sense of belonging to a larger community is far weaker than in most societies. In Pushto, the most commonly spoken language in Afghanistan, the word meaning one`s paternal cousin has two usages-one means the son of one`s father`s brother, the other denotes ”rival” or ”enemy.”
Afghanistan was one of the most traditional societies in the world before the Soviet invasion and will likely continue to be so for most Afghans now that the Soviets have left. That means the most powerful men in Afghan society are the men who form the most successful alliances. Usually these men are landowners, men who combine a life of action with a taste for political intrigue that adds up to the all-important Afghan attribute for leadership-” reputation.` ` A man of reputation can get other men to follow him in his endeavors; he can get things done for himself and for others.
In traditional rural Afghan society, one of the great yardsticks by which to measure a man`s reputation is his ability to stage a buzkashi tournament. If he is worthy, he can attract the most and best horsemen and horses, offer the most lucrative prizes and provide the most lavish accommodations and entertainment for spectators who will come from far and wide for the tournament.
And in rural Afghanistan, a buzkashi tournament has no boundaries and few apparent rules. Anyone with a horse and the desire can join the contest, so in a rural tournament, hundreds of horsemen and horses are liable to be hurtling across the landscape. They chase the most skillful or luckiest horseman who has managed to snatch up the carcass, desperately reaching out in an attempt to wrest the carcass from him; the carcass-bearing horseman attempts to break far enough away from the pack to establish sole possession before he drops it on the ground in victory.
Once the victorious horseman drops the carcass free and clear from other competitors, the surging mass immediately gathers around the carcass again to start a new cycle of play. In the countryside of Afghanistan there is no set arena of play, so the direction of the game can range for miles across the bleak, stony landscape, following only the happenstance progress of the picking up and dropping of the increasingly shredded carcass. The contest goes on for several hours each day; the tournament itself can last for three or four days.
”The real players are the landowners who stage the games, pay the riders, own the horses, provide the awards and so on,” says American anthropologist G. Whitney Azoy. Azoy spent several months following the traditional rural tournaments inside Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion in preparation for a 1982 book, ”Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan.”
Since the invasion, he has been a frequent visitor to Pakistan, where he has worked to aid exiled Afghans, many of them his old buzkashi friends, both players and sponsors.
”They sponsor tournaments clearly to gain reputation because reputation is the currency of Afghan politics, and one`s name is the basis of one`s power or lack of it.” Azoy says. ”It`s analogous to Mafia power-the man who can wheel and deal and gets things done, who can reward those who help him, has power. He has to present himself as a big man with resources, control and a record of accomplishment.
”In Afghanistan, where there are scarce resources, a man with reputation and political power is looked to by his neighbors for all-important parceling of water and livestock grazing rights.”
These days buzkashi is most often played in Pakistan`s North West Frontier Province. Two million refugees have settled in the province to escape the war in Afghanistan and formed guerrilla resistance to the Soviet occupation in their homeland. Among the refugees and the guerrilla fighters are the best buzkashi players.
Certainly life in exile has not diminished the Afghan taste for politir contempt for, foreigners who do not understand Afghan ways. The exiled Afghans know they still are struggling with Kipling`s Great Game, and buzkashi sponsors have found in Pakistan ways to use buzkashi in that struggle.
”As refugees in Pakistan, the contest is over influence over largesse on the parceling of refugee aid,” says Azoy. ”A couple of sponsors here in particular have been smart enough to figure out that refugee aid comes primarily from foreigners-the expatriate population of diplomats and aid workers who have come to Pakistan in the wake of the Soviet invasion. The games here are staged as much to impress the foreigners as they are for the Afghan refugee population. They think that, if you can impress the foreigners, you can exercise influence over them, and it`s apparently true.”
Indeed, when buzkashi is staged in Peshawar, the stands are liberally filled out with admiring foreign diplomats and aid workers. Their presence is not lost upon the jorchi, one of whom, at the end of a s a drink during a break in the whirlwind of a national sport called buzkashi. Tribune photo by Chris Walker (page 4).