Overview

During a seven-year journey around India, Emma Levine heard about the wonderful game of buzkashi, a kind of anarchic rugby on horseback where teams of men wrestle and race to grab a headless goat and propel it towards goal. This sparked a desire to explore Asia's unique traditional sports. A Game of Polo with a Headless Goat is Emma Levine's absorbing account of her epic adventure, which took her from camel wrestling in Turkey through bull racing in India and traditional gymnastics in Iran. Illustrated with stunning photography, this book evocatively portrays sporting ways of life rarely seen in the western world, revealing what it is about sport that makes it so universally inspiring.

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9780233994161

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Reviews

A little obsession is a healthy thing, which is fortunate as Emma Levine is a woman obsessed. All she can think about, it seems, is sport. Her first work was about the Indian national fixation for cricket. Her new book, A Game of Polo With a Headless Goat, charts her year-long ramble through west and central Asia in search of some of the strangest sports ever devised. Polo played with a headless goat (and with no mallets), Buz Kashi as it is known, hails from Afghanistan. Levine is acutely observant and writes with a sharp, straightforward style. During her travels she locates a catalogue of peculiar sports, many of which might be regarded by Western eyes as being torturous to animals. In Turkey she watches a pair of camels wrestle with each other ('Trying to describe camel-wrestling to a novice,' she says 'is like explaining cricket to an American'), and she views a cirit match (a game played on horseback with javelins); she searches for ram-fighting in Tashkent, and in Iran she encounters the austere-sounding 'Federation for Traditional Sports and Heroic Wrestling', in India she finds bull racing and, in Pakistan, donkey-duelling and polo. The creme de la creme in strange sports comes, of course, in several versions of the inimitable game Buz Kashi of the title, which is said to have been first played by Genghis Khan. This is a well-researched narrative which will surely be enjoyed by travellers, sports fanatics, and by those who harbour a secret obsession of their own. Review by TAHIR SHAH Editor's note: Tahih Shah is the author of Sorcerer's Apprentice, published by Phoenix, which describes his apprenticeship to one of India's great conjurors. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Born in Bradford in 1969 into a sports-loving family, Emma Levine graduated in graphic design in 1991. Spurning the design world, she immediately left England for a trip around Asia with a camera and a desire for adventure. Emma's first major assignment was to capture the passion for cricket in India. Since completing A Game of Polo With a Headless Goat, Emma has returned to England and now lives in north London....but has just bought a flat in Istanbul.

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