POSTCARD: India

6:28 PM, May 16, 2011 ι Sharilyn Neidhardt

Sharilyn Neidhardt

A NOSE FOR IT: The thick-skinned athletes of Jaipur.

ENCOUNTERING India for the first time is much like getting up close and personal with an elephant. Elephants are gigantic and intimidating. They smell funny. India itself is huge, complex, intimidating. It also smells weird.

My first elephant encounter was in Jaipur, on the grounds of the Rambagh Palace, the former residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur. Now it’s a hotel. This is not your typical hotel — as you might expect from a former palace, there are plenty of bells and whistles. Rooms are, well, palatial. There’s an astrologer on call. There are on-site polo grounds.

Polo played on ponies is a fast-paced game which requires great skill and horsemanship. That’s not what you come here for, though. At Rambagh Palace, elephant polo is the thing. Elephant polo is played in various parts of South Asia, from Nepal to Thailand. It’s a very serious sport — there is even a World Elephant Polo Association.

Elephant polo is not like regular polo — these beasts are not what you would call speedy, under the best of circumstances. The polo match is played with two people on each elephant: the mahout (Hindi for “guy who drives elephant,” loosely translated) who steers the elephant and the player who tells the mahout where to aim the elephant to get a shot at the polo ball. Mahouts are usually the owners of the elephants and have long relationships with the animals, who can live to be 70.

The players were tourists like me, helped onto the back of the elephant with the help of a stepladder, and given a long-handled mallet with which to strike the ball.

The mahout rides just behind the elephant’s head, with his legs pretty much around the elephant’s neck. I was perched much farther up, in a saddle which felt precariously perched in the rise of the elephant’s back.

Elephant motion is somewhere between a lumber and a sway, more difficult to get used to than I thought it would be. In the midst of this disorienting state, I was meant to use an eight-foot pole with a club at the end of it to accurately pass a soccer ball to my teammate, another woman perched awkwardly on another elephant.

My teammate and I swung our clubs into the turf far more often than we connected with the ball. I did not score, but my teammate, Claire, also a guest at the palace, managed one goal. In a final humiliation, one of our opponents’ elephants actually kicked the ball through the posts later in the game, so that I was outscored by a mammal that doesn’t even have thumbs. Clearly, I was not designed to be an Elephant Polo champion.

The game was terrifically fun, despite my basic lack of aptitude. The lazy pace of the game seemed to suit the super-hot summer day. The elephants were gaily painted and seemed to enjoy rambling around on the field. I think I even caught one sort of smiling.

Elephant polo arranged by Micato Safaris

Learn more about the palace at tajhotels.com .