An Introduction on Buzkashi (goat dragging) and the Riders

Buzkashi (goat dragging) is a spectacular, volatile, and often violent equestrian game played primarily by Turkic peoples in northern Afghanistan. Central Asian in origin, buzkashi also occurs, for the most part as a self-conscious folkloristic survival, in the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union north of the Oxus River and in China’s Xinjiang Province. During the 1980s and early 1990s, buzkashi was played among Afghan refugees near Chitral and Peshawar in Pakistan where, however, it bears no cultural relationship to Pakistani polo. In both its principal forms—i.e., the traditional-grassroots game (tudabarai) and moderngovernmental sport (qarajai)—the central action is much the same: riders on powerful horses congregate above the carcass of a goat or calf, lean from their saddles, struggle with each other to grab the carcass off the ground, and then try to keep sole control of it while riding away at full speed. While regarded primarily as playful fun, both forms of buzkashi also exist as an implicitly political events in which patron/sponsors seek to demonstrate and thus enhance their capacity for controlling events.

History

The origins of buzkashi are impossible to trace precisely, but it doubtless sprang from nomadic forebears of the same Turkic peoples (Uzbek,Turkomen,Kazakh, Kirghiz) who remain its core players. Equestrian nomads, these groups spread westward from China and Mongolia between the 10^th and 15^th centuries. The game quite likely developed, in much the same way as American rodeo, as a recreational variant of everyday herding or raiding activity. No evidence supports the lurid notion, advanced to horrify tourists during the 1960s and 1970s, that the game was originally played with live human prisoners.

In recent generations other ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan have started to play buzkashi: Tajiks, Hazaras, and even Pushtun migrants from south of the Hindu Kush whose new prominence in the north was supported by central government policy. Another key development dates from 1955 when the central government, based in Kabul, hosted its first tournament on the birthday anniversary of King Mohammed Zahir. From the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, successive national regimes hosted similar buzkashi competitions in Kabul.With the collapse of the authority of the central government during the Afghan-Soviet War (1979–1989), the tournament fell apart. In the 1990s, as political chaos continues, buzkashi has largely reverted to its original status as a locally based pastime north of the Hindu Kush.

Rules and Play

Whatever its form and occasion, buzkashi depends on sponsorship of both the champion horses and riders and of the ceremonial event in which buzkashi is played. In the traditional, rural context of northern Afghanistan, both types of sponsorship are exercised by khans, men of social, economic, and political importance who constitute the informal and ever-shifting power elite of local life.The khans breed, raise, and own the special horses whose bloodlines are proudly chronicled and whose success in buzkashi contributes to owner status. Khans likewise employ specialist riders (chapandazan) for their prize horses. Most important of all is their sponsorship of the celebratory events called toois at which buzkashi is traditionally played. These are scheduled for winter, both because it is the agricultural slack season and because horses and riders can play then without overheating.

Khans stage toois to celebrate ritual events such as a son’s circumcision or marriage.While the ritual itself is generally a private, family affair, it provides the occasion for much wider gatherings whose centerpiece is a day or several days of buzkashi. It also represents a status-oriented initiative in which the social, economic, and political resources of the sponsor (tooi-wala) are publicly tested. If those resources prove sufficient and the tooi is a success, its sponsor’s “name will rise.” If not, the tooi-walla’s reputation can be ruined. Preparations include the amassing of funds for food and prize money and the recruitment of nearby hosts for the hundreds of invited guests who, the sponsor hopes,will accept invitations to attend. Equally hopeful but likewise problematic is the expectation that the guests will present the sponsor with cash gifts to help defray the costs of the tooi.

After a ceremonial first day’s lunch, everyone mounts and rides to the buzkashi field: sponsor, closest associates, invited khans, their sizable entourages (including prize horses, chapandazan, and assorted associates who have come in the name of “friendship”but can be quickly mobilized in case of serious conflict), and the local populace.The field itself typically consists of a barren plain, unbounded and undemarcated, on the village periphery. A goat or calf carcass lies in the middle. (While the term buzkashi specifically refers to “goat,” calf carcasses are often used because, it is said, they last longer.) Without ceremony but in accordance with Muslim law (hallal), the animal has been bled to death, decapitated, and dehooved to protect contestants’ hands. An eviscerated carcass makes for faster play, but purists tend to favor a heavier,ungutted animal so that only real power, rather than mere quickness,will prevail. Most traditional buzkashis begin without fanfare and gather intensity as more and more participants arrive. Any number may take part, and some games involve hundreds of riders at once. A morning or afternoon session consists of several dozen play cycles, each of which starts with the riders forming an equestrian scrum over the dead calf. With their horses lurching, rearing, and trying to hold position, riders lean down from the saddle and grab at the carcass. More horses and riders batter their way toward the center of an ever-growing, ever more fiercely contested mass of wild movement. Lunging half-blind in the melee, one rider manages to grab hold of the carcass briefly,but, as a saying goes,“Every calf has four legs,” and other riders quickly wrench it away. The calf is trampled, dragged, tugged, lifted, and lost again as one competitor after another seeks to gain sole control.There are no teams although friendly riders (or the riders of friendly khans) may sometimes assist each other. Everyone has the right to try, but play is monopolized in practice by the chapandazan in their distinctive fur-trimmed headgear. Meanwhile the “town crier” (jorchi) shouts the amount of prize money offered. The longer a given play cycle is contested, the greater that amount grows and the fiercer the competition.

Finally one horse and rider emerge from the mass (tudabarai), take the calf free and clear, and drop it in uncontested triumph. Play stops for a brief moment while the town crier launches into a stylized praise chant for the rider, the horse, and most of all the horse owner:

Oh, the horse of Hajji Ali,

On him rode Ahmad Gul.

He leapt like a deer.

He glared like a leopard.

How he took it away.

How he showed what he is.

How the name of Hajji Ali rose.

How we all hear his name.

How his pride is complete.

Prizes for the victorious rider once took the form of carpets, rifles, and even horses. Now almost all are cash,with amounts depending on tooi sponsor liberality and sometimes exceeding $100. The horse owner’s sole reward is prestige or “name,” that amorphous but most important currency of traditional Afghan life. Barely has the chant finished before the next play cycle starts. Cycle follows cycle with no sense of cumulative score. The last cycle each day, typically played with a carcass in shreds,has special value, and the winning rider proudly departs with the tattered calf dangling across his saddle.The visiting khans and their entourages then retire for dinner and sleep at one or another of the nearby host houses where every event of the past day is reviewed in conversation: whose horse did well, whether the prize money was sufficient, and—most of all—what happened in case of serious dispute. Disputes and the issue of who can control them represent the darker, less readily admitted core of interest in buzkashi.

Three factors contribute to dispute in traditional buzkashi. First, the play activity itself is already full of physically brutal contact. Second, the question of being sufficiently “free and clear” for a score is notoriously subjective and difficult to adjudicate. And third, the horse-owner khans, whose horses and riders compete, are very often rivals of each other in the real-life game of local politics. Indeed it is during buzkashi that such rivalries and alliances, otherwise hidden by the diplomatic niceties of day-to-day existence, are revealed in all their disruptive potential.

It takes little to trigger a dispute. Had a victory claimant really gotten the carcass “free and clear” before dropping it? Was one rider guilty of grabbing another’s bridle or whipping him in the face? Did the chapandaz of Mujib Khan have a rope secreted in his sleeve in order to enhance his grasp of the carcass? Suddenly the violent pushing and shoving, hitherto “for fun,”now becomes “for real.” Each khan’s entourage coalesces around him. The current play cycle is abandoned and the air is full of angry shouts as everyone tries to gain control of an increasingly uncontrollable situation. While outright fighting is rare, an aggrieved group may leave the buzkashi and go home rather than suffer perceived injustice. Such defection tarnishes the reputation of a tooi and thus of its tooi-wala.More typically the shouting and jostling gradually subside as one or another of the khans makes himself heard and emerges in the role of peacemaker. Much prestige thereby attaches to him.He has, after all, demonstrated an ability to control volatile events, to impress his will on a dynamic that had shifted from playful to political. Now his “name will rise” in the countless tellings and retellings of this buzkashi. Such reputational gain can then be of considerable importance as potential followers calculate the benefits of attaching themselves to a patron or of taking sides in a real-world dispute over land, water, livestock, or women.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Afghanistan’s central government likewise began to enlist buzkashi in its efforts at political impression management. The Afghan National Olympic Committee was charged with staging a “national tournament” in Kabul each year on the birthday of King Mohammed Zahir. Provincial contingents were organized in the north (as yet unlinked by all-weather roads to the rest of the country), and the game itself was transformed into a more or less codified sport (qarajai) with uniformed teams, authorized referees, a demarcated field of play (the qarajai), a cumulative scoring system, and severe penalties (including arrest) for any form of dispute during play.Only the players (typically 10 or 12 per team) and the referees (usually military officers) were allowed on the field. Horse-owner khans, their tooi-sponsorship role now co-opted by the government,had to sit on the sidelines. And instead of having the vague “free-and-clear” objective of tudabarai, players now had to carry the calf around a flag and drop it in clearly marked circle (the daiwra). The king assumed the role of national tooiwala, hosting the tournament banquet and presented the championship medals. The tournament allowed Kabul residents to rub elbows with rustic horsemen from the distant north. And the northerners returned home each year with fresh tales of a broader Afghanistan and potent impressions of the central government’s capacity for control.

By the time of the king’s fall from power in 1973, the Kabul buzkashi tournament had become a fixture in the national calendar. Subsequent nonroyalist regimes retained the October timing but shifted the occasion first (under President Mohammed Daoud, 1973–1977) to United Nations Day and then (under communist rule) to the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Always presented in the name of sheer play and fun,Kabul buzkashi tournaments continued to serve as a symbol both of Afghan national unity and of governmental capacity for dispute-free control. The nationwide collapse of Afghan government control in the early 1980s was reflected in the year-by-year disintegration of Kabul buzkashi. In Daoud’s era, the tournament had lasted 12 days and featured ten provincial teams in a precisely orchestrated round-robin. From 1980 onward, fewer teams came each year. By 1983 the Soviet puppet government had abandoned all pretense of staging buzkashi.

During the Afghan-Soviet War (1979–1989), buzkashi was played in Pakistan’s North West Frontier province by refugees based in Peshawar and Chitral. Many of the same khans and riders who had dominated the game in prewar Afghanistan now formed the core of competitions played on Fridays in the winter months. Now, however, the principal tooi-wala role shifted to several men whose newly developed renown rested on their leadership of local refugee relief efforts. As usual, all was done in the name of fun, but soon the new breed of sponsor-entrepreneurs were competing to attract resource-rich spectators from the fast-growing expatriate community: diplomats, United Nations personnel, and directors of nongovernmental aid organizations. Thus ingratiated with their “guests,” these tooi-walas in exile promoted themselves as conduits for international aid to the refugee community. By the mid-1990s, the central government in post-Soviet Afghanistan was still too weak to resume the national tournament and the main locus of buzkashi had reverted to the northern provinces. Some traditional khans still sponsored toois, but local warlords and militia commanders were replacing them in the primary sponsorship role.