AFMA Paper／AFMA報告 Recovering ’s Lost West ’s Asian Connections in the Realm of

H. E. CHEHABI

Ⅰ . Introduction Ⅱ . Ⅲ . Ⅳ . The Ⅴ . Conclusion

I. Introduction

One of the inconsistencies of contemporary geopolitical nomenclature is that the continent of Asia seems to have lost its West. In North America and Europe one speaks of , , , , but almost never of West Asia. It is often forgotten that Asia extends all the way to the city of , the world’s only major city which is located on two continents; indeed, through European Istanbul, one is directed to the two bridges that link the two parts of the city by signs pointing to “Asia.” And yet, in the the geographic area covered by the Association for Asian Studies does not include anything west of , an area that is covered by the Middle Eastern Studies Association. The term “” was coined by the American naval strategist Alfred

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31-2_中東学会.indb 303 2016/03/15 16:43:22 Thayer Mahan in 1902 to designate the area between Arabia and , which in his mind was centered on the Persian Gulf [Mahan 1902]. Mahan’s article was reprinted in The Times and followed in October by a twenty-article series entitled “The Middle Eastern Question,” written by the British journalist, historian, and diplomat Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol (1852-1929). Chirol expanded the definition of Middle East to include “those regions of Asia which extend to the borders of India or command the approaches to India.” In the course of World War I, the term “Middle East” was adopted by the British government to designate those regions of the , essentially the area south of Anatolia, that were to become “national” states for Arabs, Jews, and Armenians under British tutelage [Renton 2007]. In the late 1930s, the British established the “Middle East Command,” based in Cairo, for their military forces in the region. It was after World War II that the term “Middle East” gained broader usage in Europe and the United States, with the Middle East Institute founded in Washington, D.C. in 1946 and the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) founded in 1966. The term “Middle East” has been criticized for being Eurocentric, reflecting a compartmentalization of the world that reflects Western strategic concerns, but the construct has been internalized by indigenous scholars and policy makers of the area, who now routinely speak of sharq al-awsaṭ in Arabic, khāvar-e miyāneh in Persian, Orta Doğu in Turkish, and ha-mizrach ha-tichon in Hebrew. And there is indeed a certain cultural unity to this area based on Islam and the Arabic language, which is common to all states except , Iran, and . Turkey has long-standing ties to much of the Arab world, having together constituted the Ottoman Empire; Iran became connected with the Arab world after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century; and Israel is a relatively recent creation in which at least a fifth of the population speaks Arabic.(1) One could therefore argue that while it is true that “the Middle East” is a Eurocentric concept, so is “Asia,” which, after all, was defined by the ancient Greeks and not by the peoples of Asia themselves.(2) So why insist that “West Asia” is preferable to “Middle East”? The reason is that the term “Middle East” erases historical, linguistic, and cultural continuities in the contacts between the peoples of West Asia and the rest of the continent. In this article I illustrate these connections and continuities by drawing attention to athletic practices that can be found in the various regions of Asia—from the East coast of the Mediterranean to the West cost of the Pacific Ocean. For obvious geographic reasons the West Asian area most closely connected to

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31-2_中東学会.indb 304 2016/03/15 16:43:22 the rest of Asia is the Iranian Plateau, which borders on Central Asia in the northeast and on South Asia in the southeast. Iran has been connected to East Asia, specifically , since ancient times by the .(3) To give but two examples: when Muslim armies overran the in the middle of the seventh century AD, the son of the last pre-Islamic Persian emperor, Peroz III, fled to China and entered the service of the ; his descendants adopted the family name Li. In the late thirteenth- century China and Iran were all part of the Mongol empire, the largest the world had ever seen. Within this empire unprecedented cultural interchanges took place, one result being that even today human figures on Persian miniatures have East Asian facial features [Allsen 2001]. In the twentieth century, the Japanese victory over in the war of 1905 sent shockwaves through all of Asia [Kowner 2007], including Iran, where the outcome was hailed by progressive forces in the constitutional revolution of 1906, who argued that what had allowed an Asian power to defeat a European one was that was the only Asian power with a constitutional government whereas Russia was the only European power without it. Admiration for Japan was such that an Iranian poet wrote an epic in praise of the Japanese emperor titled Mikādonāmeh, ‘the Book of the Mikado’,(4) using the same poetic forms as the Shāhnāmeh, ‘Book of Kings’ by Abolqāsem Ferdowsi, a work considered to be Iran’s national epic. The successful Iranian revolution in turn inspired some of the Chinese revolutionaries of 1911 who followed events in West Asia very closely [Wang 2010]. The Iranian and Indian cultural spheres have common origins in ancient times, and exchanges between them have existed since time immemorial. The Muslim conquest of India after the eleventh century intensified these contacts when Muslim rulers in India adopted the for official purposes.(5) For this reason the commonalities between West and South Asia are better known and have been the objects of more numerous studies.(6) Modern Persian, a language born in Central Asia, varieties of which now have official status in three countries (Iran, , ), was a pre-modern Asian lingua franca [Fragner 1999]. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this: when the Mongol Khan wrote a letter to the Pope in 1246 asking him to submit to his power, he wrote it in Persian [Pelliot 1922/23],(7) and when Portuguese missionaries visited Tibet, they communicated with the Tibetans in the same language [Didier 1996]. My aim here is not to present an exhaustive account of the cultural contacts between the Persian

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31-2_中東学会.indb 305 2016/03/15 16:43:22 lands and the rest of Asia. More modestly, I will use two athletic practices to illustrate how Persian traditions are embedded in a wider Asian context. These two practices are wrestling, a popular amusement, and polo, an elite pastime. I will end with a short discussion of the Asian Games as a contemporary manifestation of an “Asia” that begins at the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

II. Wrestling

Wrestling is probably the most universal of all , and there are very few cultures and countries that do not have at least one indigenous version of it. There are three Persian terms relating to it that have spread throughout much of Asia, they are the words koshti (wrestling) and pahlavān (hero, champion), and the name Rostam, the mythical hero of the Shāhnāmeh. First, let us look at the trajectory of the word that is variously rendered as koshti, kosti, kushti, or kusti. It originally denoted a kind of belt or girdle in the Persian of northeastern Iran,(8) and the original meaning survives in the name of the sacred girdle that observant Zoroastrians, adherents of Iranians’ main pre-Islamic religion, tie around their waists (Fig. 1) [Stausberg 2004]. In Persian the verb “to wrestle” is rendered as koshti gereftan, ‘seizing the belt,’ and a wrestler is called koshtigir, ‘belt seizer.’(9) This means that the original form of wrestling in Iran was a form of belt wrestling, in which contestants tie belts or shawls around their waists, seize their opponent’s, and attempt to throw him to the ground to gain victory. This is one of the three basic forms of wrestling into which the vast majority of the world’s local and regional styles can be divided—the other two being a contest where one athlete tries to make his adversary fall down or the ground with any part of the body other than the feet, and a contest which continues on the ground and in which victory is achieved by pinning the adversary to the ground, rather like the modern freestyle variety. Belt wrestling is very common around the world. In Europe, Icelandic Glíma and Swiss come to mind, and in Asia examples can be found from ancient all the way to contemporary East Asia, areas connected by the Silk Road. A little statuette dating from 2600 BC and kept in the Museum shows two Sumerian belt wrestlers (Fig. 2).

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31-2_中東学会.indb 306 2016/03/15 16:43:22 Fig. 1: The Zoroastrian kusti

Fig. 2: Sumerian wrestlers

Fig. 3: Sasanian silver cup

A Sasanian silver cup from northeastern Iran dating from the seventh century and depicting various amusements (located at the Sackler Museum in Washington D.C.) clearly shows two belt wrestlers engaged in a bout (Fig. 3). The clearly visible belts or shawls on this stylized image illustrate the etymology of koshti gereftan perfectly. The words themselves appear for the first time around three centuries later in Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh. Since Ferdowsi was also from northeastern Iran, it is therefore not astonishing that the wrestling contests that he mentions in his

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31-2_中東学会.indb 307 2016/03/15 16:43:23 work invariably begin with the two contenders seizing each other’s belts, at least in the early, i.e., mythological, part of the epic.(10) These duels are not athletic contests as in ancient Greece, but fights to the death between the leading warriors (pahlavāns) of two opposing armies. The most famous of these duels takes place between Rostam, the protector of Iranian kings and ruler of Sistan, and Sohrāb, the young and brash warrior of the Turanians (Iranians’ northern neighbors), who is Rostam’s son. At the time they meet in battle neither of them knows about the filial relationship, which is only revealed after Rostam has struck a deadly blow and Sohrāb lies dying in his arms. The story (which, incidentally, has a parallel in Irish mythology(11)), has caught the imagination of poets around the world.(12) For our purposes, let us note that the episode contains all three terms mentioned earlier, koshti, pahlavān, and Rostam, terms that have had a pan- Asian career. Its etymology notwithstanding, the word koshti early on came to mean wrestling of any kind in Persian, as illustrated by the episode of Bahrām-e Gur wrestling two Indian champions at the court of an Indian king in the late, more or less historical, part of the Shāhnāmeh. The word koshti spread to India with the Muslim conquest in the eleventh century. Adapted to the local languages as kusti (Gujarati and Marathi), kushti (Urdu/ Hindi), and gusti (Malayalam), it gradually marginalized (but did not fully displace) the Sanskrit word malla. The indigenous form of Indian wrestling, depicted on many Hindu temples (e.g., Fig. 4), was of the third type, and thus in India too the word kushti lost its semantic connection with belts and came to denote wrestling tout court, as seen in the Urdu/Hindi word for wrestler, kushtibāz, which means kushti player (rather than seizer). Only in Sindh do we find a form of belt wrestling known as malakharo (Fig. 5). From South Asia the word kushti spread to Southeast Asia, where in modern Malay gusti means wrestling. In the Sejarah Melayu, a sixteenth-century court chronicle that tells romantic and often improbable tales glorifying the rise of the Malacca Sultanate, the story is told of a hero named Badang whose fame spread to foreign lands—so much so that a king from India invited him to test his strength against his own champion, Nadi (or Wadi) Bijaya. The Indian warrior sailed to the Malay Archipelago and greeted the local king with a friendly challenge. The ruler was delighted and disuruh oleh radja bergusti, ‘ordered them to wrestle’ [Bausani 1964: 13]. The second word that gained widespread use is pahlavān, originally a middle Persian word meaning “hero.” In the ancient world wrestling was one of the military heroes had to master, and in due course the word came to denote “wrestler”; in

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31-2_中東学会.indb 308 2016/03/15 16:43:23 Fig. 4: Relief of Indian wrestlers on a Hindu temple

Fig. 5: malakharo in Sindh

Afghanistan the word pahlavāni is actually used more often than koshti for wrestling.(13) Outside the Persian-speaking world, the term was adopted in the lands surrounding Iran. In Ottoman and modern Turkish it is pehlivan, from which it has spread to the various languages of the Balkans, where the traditional form of Ottoman wrestling is practiced.(14) Further west in Croatian, however, pelivan has come to mean acrobat. In Arabic, bahlawān means “wrestler,” probably as a result of Ottoman influence. On the Indian subcontinent it is pronounced pahalvan and also means wrestler. In Malay, however, pahlawan means “warrior” or more generally “hero” [Beg 1982: 18, 39, 44, 45, 47, 48, 63], a reflection, perhaps, of the absence of a continuing tradition in the Malay world. Finally, there is Rostam.(15) No other Persian male name has spread so widely in the Muslim world, a reflection, no doubt, of his status as the paramount hero of Iranian

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31-2_中東学会.indb 309 2016/03/15 16:43:23 mythology.(16) Through the Ottomans, quite a few of whose officials bore the name Rüstem Paşa, it spread to the Arab world.(17) East of Iran, it remained a popular name among Parsis, whose heritage is (as their name indicates) Persian, and among the rest of the Indian population it came to connote a wrestling champion. Thus the paramount champion of India used to be called Rustam-i Hind, ‘the Rostam of India,’ and after Partition there were also champions known as Rustam-i Pakistan (Fig. 6). In the name exists as Rostomi and Rostami,(18) and in , finally, Rostam is a rare (and old-fashioned) forename, also rendered as Rastam and Rustam.(19) It is interesting to note that the geographic spread of the three terms koshti, pahlavān, and Rostam is more or less co-extensive with that of the Persianate political ethic/ cultural ecumene,(20) indicating perhaps the importance of court patronage, but this is a proposition I am not learned enough to address. From words let us now turn to actual practice—this time along the northern route linking West Asia to East Asia via Central Asia and along the Silk Road. All along that communication corridor we find different wrestling styles.(21) Given the etymology of the Persian word for wrestling, it is not astonishing that in Central Asia where Persian and Turkish cultural practices meet, most local wrestling (called in Uzbek and gushtin in Tajik) styles are of the belt variety, as seen here in Tatar köräş (Fig. 7). In Mongolian bökh belts seem to play no role, but further east in we have a national wrestling style, , in which contestants take hold of the opponent’s satba in order to throw him to the ground (Fig. 8). The Japanese wrestling styles and are not strictly speaking varieties of belt wrestling, but even there the belt is not irrelevant. In judo there is a technique called obi-tori-gaeshi (obi = belt, tori = grab, and gaeshi = throw/roll), and in sumo wrestlers almost always attempt to grab the opponent’s mawashi in order to throw him to the ground or outside the ring, as seen here (Fig. 9).(22) Oddly enough, in Iran the transregional indigenous style of wrestling (today known as koshti pahlavāni) makes very little use of the belt and is more akin to the güreș (both yağli and karakucak, i.e., with and without oil) of Anatolia and the Balkans and the kushti of South Asia. The common rules, which resemble contemporary freestyle wrestling in that the object is to pin the opponent’s to the ground, allowed athletes in the past to travel widely in order to seek fame and wealth. We have already encountered Bahrām-e Gur fighting in India and an Indian champion traveling to the Malayan Peninsula, but the best illustration for agonistic encounters between wrestlers

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31-2_中東学会.indb 310 2016/03/15 16:43:23 Fig. 6: Bholu Pahalvan, Rustam-i Pakistan in 1949

Fig. 7: Tatar wrestling

Fig. 8: Korean ssireum

Fig. 9: Sumo

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31-2_中東学会.indb 311 2016/03/15 16:43:23 from different parts of Asia can be found in the sixteenth-century Indian book Ā’in-e Akbari, a chronicle in Persian of the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1565- 1605):

There are many Iranian and Turanian wrestlers and pugilists at Court, as are stone-throwers, athletes of Hindustan, clever Mals from Gujrāt, and many other kinds of fighting men. Their pay varies from 70 to 450 d. Every day two well- matched men fight with each other. Many presents are made to them on such occasions. The following belong to the best wrestlers of the age—Mīrzā Khān of Gīlān; Muhammad Qulī of Tabrīz, to whom His Majesty has given the name of Sher-hamla, or Lion-attacker; Sādiq of Bukhārā; Ali of Tabrīz; Murād of Turkistān; Muhammad Ali of Tūrān; Fūlād of Tabrīz; Qāsim of Tabrīz; Mīrzā Kuhna-suwār of Tabrīz; Shāh Qulī of Kurdistan; Hilāl of Abyssinia; Sadhū Dayāl; Alī; Srī Rām; Kanhyā; Mangol; Ganesh; Ānbā; Nānkā; Balbhhadr; Rajrnāth [Allami 1989: 263].

The only country where wrestling continues to be patronized by a court is Japan,(23) and the successes of Mongolian, Hawai’ian, and other foreign sumōtori in the various tournaments there present a fascinating parallel to Akbar’s court, showing that while each country has by now a “national” wrestling style, switching from one style to another is possible for athletes.

III. Polo

Although known as the “King of Games and Games of Kings” in the modern era, polo in all probability, developed from rough equestrian games played by mounted nomadic peoples of Central Asia, Tibetans, Turks, and Iranians.(24) In Afghanistan, such a similar rough game has survived to the present day and is called , which literally means “dragging the goat” in Persian and is played by two teams of horsemen trying to convey the headless carcass of a goat (or a calf) clear of the pack [Azoy 1982]. Originally played by Afghanistan’s , it is now considered Afghanistan’s (Fig. 10):

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31-2_中東学会.indb 312 2016/03/15 16:43:23 The game of polo entered Iran proper from Central Asia under the Parthian dynasty (247 BC-AD 224), which originated in northeastern Iran (roughly today’s Khorasan), close to the steppes of Central Asia. The Parthians’ equestrian prowess was legendary and admitted even by their perennial rivals, the Romans: the “Parthian shot,” a move whereby a rider turns back and shoots an arrow in the opposite direction of his movement, was famous and is depicted on this ancient coin (Fig. 11). Under the Parthians the Central Asian equestrian game developed into the forerunner of today’s polo, played by two teams whose members attempt to convey a ball, guy, into the opposing team’s using a wooden stick, chowgān. In time the word chowgān came to denote the game itself.(25) The Sasanians (AD 224-651), who succeeded the Parthians as rulers of Iran, were also enthusiastic patrons of the game, as attested by the great Muslim historian al-Tabari and in romanticized form by Persian poets, such as Ferdowsi in the Shāhnāmeh and Nezāmi in his romances.(26)

Fig. 10: Afghan buzkashi

Fig. 11: A Parthian shot

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31-2_中東学会.indb 313 2016/03/15 16:43:24 From Iran polo first spread westwards. The Byzantines adopted it and called it tzykanion, a word derived from chowgān. It was very popular among members of the imperial court and the nobility, and Emperor Theodosius (r. 408-450) built a special stadium for the game in , called [Pagliaro 1939]. From the the idea of a game in which a ball is thrown with a wooden mallet was carried to Europe by the crusaders, and although polo itself did not catch on in Europe in the , there are speculations that and even are influenced by the West Asian game [Gillmeister 2002]. The advent of Islam put an end to Sasanian rule in Iran and drove the Byzantines out of much of the Middle East, but the Arab rulers that replaced the two empires continued the tradition of patronizing the game. The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs as well as the secular Arab monarchs who succeeded them, such as Egypt’s Ayyubid and dynasties, were enthusiastic about the game, known as sawlajān in Arabic.(27) The Caliph Ma’mun (r. 813-833) had a polo ground constructed near his palace, and a large polo field can be seen even today in the city of Samarra in , which was the Abbasid capital from 836 to 892 [Al-Amid 1973: 115-117]. The Persian and Turkic dynasties that came to rule much of West Asia after the decline of the Abbasids also patronized polo [Āẕarnūsh 2013]. The game reached it apogee during the Safavid Empire (1501-1722) in Iran, many of whose rulers played the game. The greatest of these, Shah Abbās (r. 1588-1629), moved the capital to , where he built the ‘Āli Qāpu Palace on one side of a vast square known as Meydān-e Naqsh-e Jahān. This square was used for polo matches, which the Shah could watch from the terrace of the palace—the goal posts can still be seen today (Fig. 12). But he also played himself, as witnessed by an Italian traveler:

When the King wishes it, and this is almost every evening, the game of pall- mall [polo] is played… and whoever knows how and whoever wishes to comes out to play; and some who play well, though they may not be of high standing, the King himself often calls on to play. The King too plays, and this… he does very well, and perhaps better than any other. [Della Valle 1989: 173-175]

Polo became a favorite motif in paintings, which often depicted scenes from the above mentioned epics and romances (Fig. 13). However, in the troubles that followed the fall of that dynasty polo died out in Iran.

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31-2_中東学会.indb 314 2016/03/15 16:43:24 Fig. 12: ‘Āli Qāpu palace and goal posts in the Meydān-e Naqsh-e Jahān in Isfahan

Fig. 13: A Persian miniature

Along the Silk Road, the game spread from Central Asia to China sometime between the end of the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) and the early Tang dynasty (618- 907). The arrival of Peroz III, who as mentioned earlier, fled to China and settled in the Tang capital Chang’an, may have stimulated the popularity of the game in China, as Sasanian aristocrats were fond of the game [Bower and Mackenzie 2004: 284]. Polo was popular throughout the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties, and what is remarkable is that women played the game as well. A wall painting from the tomb of Li Xian (653-684), the son of an emperor, shows a game of polo (Fig. 14), and archeological evidence suggests that a large polo field was constructed in the palace grounds at Chang’an in 831 [Liu 1985]. However, polo went into a decline during the Ming (1368-1644) and the Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, and it has been suggested that the disinterest of later emperors

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31-2_中東学会.indb 315 2016/03/15 16:43:24 Fig. 14: A painting from the tomb of Li Xian in Chang’an

was not unrelated to both Taoist priests and Confucian scholars objecting to it on moral grounds [Liu 1985: 208, 218]. Korean culture is thoroughly influenced by the Chinese, and in that country a game similar to polo existed that was called Kyuk Koo. It was used to train soldiers and for mounted combat, and games were surrounded by a lot of ceremony and often attended by royalty. According to James T. C. Liu [1985: 215], “Korean historical records mention the ritual of polo fifty-one times before the time of the Mongol invasion.” After the invasion, the game seems to have gone into a decline. In Japan, Polo was played as early as the Nara (710-794) period. A version of the game known as dakyū (‘strike the ball’) was popular among the Kyoto nobility in the Heian period (794-1185), but as power shifted away from the imperial court to the shoguns, the game declined [Möller 1993: 80]. Polo was revived in the eighteenth century by the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (r. 1716-1745), but the nature of the game changed somewhat: the end of the sticks were provided with a net in which the ball was scooped and thrown, rather as in modern [Guttmann and Thompson 2001: 37]. According to the Japanese historian of polo, Mika Mori, after the Meiji restoration “the collapse of the feudal system, leading to social and economic changes in Japan, did not allow the game to survive nationally” [Mori 2000: 116-117]. Locally, however, it has been preserved in two forms. In Hachinohe, a city in in northeastern Japan, an annual dakyū festival takes place at the stables of Shinra

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31-2_中東学会.indb 316 2016/03/15 16:43:24 Shrine, and here long sticks are used (Fig. 16). In Yamagata prefecture and at the Imperial Household Agency a different version of the game, using shorter sticks, is played.(28) Let us now turn to the lands east of the Iranian Plateau. In India, polo arrived with Muslim rule in the Middle Ages. The first of , Qutbuddin Aimak, died when he fell from his during a polo match and was crushed by his horse. The Mughals (1526-1857) patronized the game, and the most famous of the Mughal emperors, the aforementioned Akbar, was, like his contemporary Shah Abbās of Iran,

Fig. 15: Japanese dakyū

Fig. 16: Contemporary dakyū at Hachinohe

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31-2_中東学会.indb 317 2016/03/15 16:43:24 a keen player. In the words of his advisor, Abu l-Fazl, “superficial observers regard the game as a mere amusement, and consider it mere play; but men of more exalted views see in it a means of learning promptitude and decision. Strong men learn… the art of riding… It tests the value of a man and strengthens bonds of friendship” [Allami 1989: 309-310]. His son and successor, Jahangir (1605-1627) is depicted playing polo in famous painting (Fig. 17). After the collapse of Mughal rule in the late eighteenth century the game survived only in northwestern and northeastern India. In what is now northern Pakistan, a folk version of polo has been played for centuries,(29) and since 1936 a tournament has been held at Shandur, which boasts the highest polo ground in the world at 3,700 meters. At the other end of the Indian Subcontinent, in the princely state of on the border of , polo seems to have been introduced in 1600 [Dev and Lahiri 1987: 4], and it has been played to this day. But it is not clear whether these games were influenced by the courtly culture of the Mughals or derive from indigenous traditions. Be this as it may, it was in Manipur that the British first encountered polo in the

Fig. 17: Emperor Jahangir playing polo

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31-2_中東学会.indb 318 2016/03/15 16:43:24 middle of the nineteenth century. They gave it new rules and popularized it in the rest of India, where it became the favorite game of the indigenous rulers and aristocrats [McDevitt 2003]. From India the British took the game to the rest of the world, including to Iran, where it was reintroduced in 1897 by Major Sir Percy Sykes, who had British and Indian troops play polo in and [Sykes 1902: 343].(30) Iranians took to the game, and, remembering the version played in Iran until two centuries earlier, called the Indo-British import chowgān, rather like the who called calcio, after the old Tuscan . It is this British version of polo that was enthusiastically taken up by European, Indian, and (both North and South) American elites [Milburn 1994]. Variations of the game were invented, including bicycle polo, which gained the affection of the son-in- law of the last Kaisar-i Hind (Emperor of India), the Duke of Edinburgh (Fig. 19).

Fig. 18: Contemporary polo in Manipur

Fig. 19: Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, playing bicycle polo

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31-2_中東学会.indb 319 2016/03/15 16:43:24 Fig. 20: in

Finally, mention must be made of elephant polo, which is played in , , Rajasthan (India), and Thailand. The game seems to have originated in Meghauli, Nepal, and Tiger Tops in Nepal remains the headquarters of elephant polo and the site of the World Elephant Polo Championships.

IV. The Asian Games

Asian unity has been realized since the second half of the twentieth century in the shape of the Asian Games, which have been taking place regularly since 1951. The games originated in the Far Eastern Championship Games, the brainchild of Christian missionaries in China who endeavored to popularize “muscular Christianity” in East Asia [MacAloon 2008]. The first games were held in in 1913, with athletes from China, Japan, and the attending. Subsequently nine more games took place until 1934 [Hong 2005]. The eleventh games were slated to take place in 1938 Ōsaka, but they were cancelled due to the outbreak of war between Japan and China in 1937. Inspired by these games (in which India had participated in 1930), an Indian official from Lahore, G.D. Sondhi, took the initiative to organize a West Asian equivalent event: “West Asiatic Games” were held in Delhi in 1934. Teams from four countries, namely Afghanistan, Ceylon, India and Mandate Palestine, participated. Sondhi hoped to expand the scope of the games from the countries of West Asia to the whole continent, but he had to wait for this initiative until 1947 when India achieved

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31-2_中東学会.indb 320 2016/03/15 16:43:24 independence [Sisodia 2005]. After the end of World War II, the number of independent nations in Asia increased. During the Olympic Summer Games of 1948 Chinese and Filipino athletes suggested a revival of the Far Eastern Games, and in the same year Sondhi invited delegations from thirteen countries to a conference in Delhi to discuss the establishment of a pan-Asian sports organization. These efforts came to fruition in 1949 with the founding of the , and the first Asian Games took place in March 1951 in Delhi [Sisodia 2005: 406]. Between 1951 and 1974 among West Asian countries only Iran and Israel participated [Amirtash 2005: 458], and even they did not send athletes to all games: for instance, in 1962, Indonesia instrumentalized the games for political purposes and did not allow athletes from Israel (and the Republic of China on ) to compete, leading to a crisis.(31) In 1970 and 1978 and Pakistan, respectively, could not hold the games for financial reasons, and on both occasions Thailand stepped in. These multiple crises led the National Olympic Committees of Asia to replace the Asian Games Federation with a new organization, the , in 1981. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, rising oil income induced the Iranian government to seek a higher profile in international sports. And so when the High Council of the Asian Games Federation convened at the end of the 1970 games in to plan the next Asian Games, the Iranian delegation proposed to hold the 1974 edition of the games in Tehran, a proposal that was approved. The effects of this decision were felt in East Asia, since the stage was now set for the admission of the People’s Republic of China to the Asian Games. The world’s largest country had been absent from the games thus far, because until the early 1970s both the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee recognized the Republic of China on Taiwan as the rightful representative of China. After The PRC took China’s seat at the United Nations in 1971, the Iranian government effected a rapprochement with the People’s Republic. In September 1972 members of the Iran’s imperial family and government officials were invited to visit , where they received a warm welcome from Chairman Mao Zedong. Subsequently, at the board meeting of the Asian Games Federation in September 1973 in Bangkok, Iran proposed the admission of the PRC as a member instead of Taiwan. The proposal was supported by Japan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but opposed by Thailand and . After some intense debate, the AGF officially admitted the PRC as a member of the AGF on 16

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31-2_中東学会.indb 321 2016/03/15 16:43:25 November 1973 and the Republic of China was excluded [Hong and Zhouxiang 2012]. At this point the Asian Games have been held in East Asia seven times, in Southeast Asia six times (four times in Bangkok alone!), in South Asia twice (both times in Delhi), and in West Asia twice as well, once in Tehran in 1974 and once in in 2006. Since 1974 the participation of Arab countries in the games has gone up steadily, and with the support of the newly admitted PRC they managed to muster enough votes to oust Israel from the games. It is interesting to note that there is a common pattern in a number of cases whereby the holding of Asian games presages the holding of , which signifies a country’s arrival on the international sporting scene. Japan organized the Asian Games in in 1958 and the Olympic Games in that city in 1964, South Korea held the Asian Games in in 1986 and the Olympic Games in 1988, and China held the Asian Games in Beijing in 1990 and the Olympic Games in 2008. The same dynamic was at work in Iran [Amirtash 2005], except that the revolution of 1978- 79 and the subsequent war with Iraq cut short Iran’s integration into the international sporting scene. Iran’s new leaders, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, considered the staging of major world events a waste of money. Besides, the strict gender segregation enforced in the Islamic Republic would be incompatible with holding a major international event like the Olympic Games in Iran. The result is that no bid to host the Olympic Games has been made in Iran. As a faint echo of past ambitions, the accommodations built for the athletes participating in 1974 games are still popularly referred to as dehkadeh-ye olampik, ‘Olympic Village.’(32) Iran boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games in in protest against the Soviet occupation of neighboring Afghanistan and the 1984 games in Los Angeles because they were held in the United States. But the end of the war against Iraq in 1988 and Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989 ushered in a cautious reopening to the rest of the world, and sports contacts were considered a means to bring about a rapprochement with countries with which relations had been tense since the revolution—including the United States.(33) In 1996 the Islamic Republic of Iran invited athletes from Arab countries (including Palestine) to the first in Tehran. The games were considered a success, leading to the creation of the West Asian Games Federation, which has now thirteen members.(34) These games were the latest of the five regional sports events the Olympic Council of Asia has come to hold, the others being the Central Asia Games (since 1995),(35) the (since 1993),(36) the South

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31-2_中東学会.indb 322 2016/03/15 16:43:25 Asian Games (since 1984),(37) and the (since 1959).(38) As for the Asian Games, they returned to West Asia when hosted them in 2006.(39)

V. Conclusion

I hope this perforce cursory account has shown the continuities, parallels, and similarities of athletic practices all the way from West to East Asia. Iran has historically played a major role in the diffusion of polo, a game of Central Asian origin. Wrestling is a universally known form of man-to-man combat and has not originated in any one place, but it is striking how Persian words and concepts spread beyond the borders of Iran in pre-modern times. In the twentieth century, the direction of cultural influence was reversed when Iranians (alongside other Middle Eastern nations) enthusiastically adopted East Asian martial arts. In the Korean discipline of , in particular, Iranian athletes have shown great prowess: they were able to gain world championships in 2011 and 2015, the only non- ever to do so. Iranians have also been winning medals in , a Chinese martial art, and Sepaktakraw, a form of kick- from Southeast Asia. The popularity of East Asian martial arts in the rest of Asia (and elsewhere) testifies to the continued cultural interaction between the continent’s various regions. These connections can also be seen in the nomenclature of the multi-sport events held in Asia: when the forerunner of the Asian Games was founded in 1913, their geographical designation, Far Eastern Championship Games, still bore the stamp of ethnocentricity. One century later, the countries of the Middle East (minus Israel and Turkey, which are athletically part of Europe) participate in West Asian Games. Moreover, while the Far Eastern Championship Games included only Western disciplines, the Asian Games of today include Chinese Wushu, Indian Kabbadi, Japanese Judo and , Korean Taekwondo, and Southeast Asian Sepaktakraw. Clearly, Asia, all of Asia, has emancipated itself on the world’s sporting scene.

Notes

* I should like to thank Mikiya Koyagi, David Motadel, and Sunil Sharma for their help.

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31-2_中東学会.indb 323 2016/03/15 16:43:25 (1) For a book arguing for the usefulness of the concept, see Bonine, Amanat, and Gasper [2012]. (2) Moreover, north of the Black Sea the border between Asia and Europe is an arbitrary one, like the one between North and . (3) See, for instance, Lauffer [1967] and Schafer [1985]. (4) For a recent study of the impact of Japan’s rise in the nineteenth century on Iranians, see ‘Ābedi [2013]. (5) See Alam [1998]. (6) See Cole [2002]. (7) I thank Thomas Barfield for bringing this source to my attention. (8) Loghatnāmeh-ye Dehkhodā, s.v. “koshti.” (9) Koshti is etymologically related to the word French word côte meaning “rib” (cf. English “cutlet”), the lower end of the torso around which the belt is tied, which would indicate that its resignification as “belt” is a case of metonymy. Gereftan is a cognate of “to grab” (cf. German Greifen). (10) See also Behmanesh [1993]. (11) See Monette [2004]. (12) To wit Matthew Arnold’s poem Sohrab and Rustum and Friedrich Rückert’s long poem Rostem und Suhrab. (13) See, for instance, Talāsh [2012]. (14) See, for instance, Hill [1998]. (15) For an exhaustive discussion of this name, see “Rōtstahm, Rōtastahm” in Justi [1895: 262-266]. (16) Even Richard Wagner contemplated writing an opera based on one of his exploits. (17) It figures in the Sultan Qaboos Encyclopaedia of Arab Names. (18) Iago Gocheleishvili, e-mail communication of 23 June 2015. (19) Sumanto Al Qurtuby, e-mail communication of 23 June 2015. (20) As analysed by Arjomand [2008]. (21) See Philippe [2010]. (22) I thank Mikiya Koyagi for this information. (23) On court patronage of sumo through the ages, see Guttmann and Thompson [2001: 16-26]. (24) On these, see Diem [1982]. (25) Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, s.v. “Cawgān.” The word is related to chub, which means wood in Persian. (26) For details, see Chehabi and Guttmann [2002]. (27) For a detailed discussion of polo in the medieva1 Arab world, see al-Ṭā’ī [1999: 277-291] and Salāma [1983: 271-280]. (28) For the differences between the two styles, see Guttmann and Thompson [2001: 37-38]. (29) See Parkes [1996]. (30) For a few years after the Islamic Revolution polo was not encouraged due to its elite nature, but in the last decade a revival has taken place and Iran now has five teams. See Wikipedia, s.v. “Polo.” (31) For details, see Lutan [2005].

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31-2_中東学会.indb 324 2016/03/15 16:43:25 (32) Shahrad Shahvand, e-mail communication, 7 December 2014. (33) See Chehabi [2001] and, for more recent developments, Boniface [2014: 118-122]. (34) , Iran, Iraq, , , , , Palestine, Qatar, , , , and . The games took place in in 2002 and Doha in 2005. (35) , , Tajikistan, , and Uzbekistan. (36) China, , , Japan, , , , South Korea, and Taiwan (as ). (37) Afghanistan, , Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. (38) Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, , Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, , Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam. (39) For details, see Reiche [2015].

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31-2_中東学会.indb 327 2016/03/15 16:43:26 Figures

Fig. 1: http://www.parsinews.net/zoroastrian-kusti-the-sacred-thread/2614.html Fig. 2: http://davidgilmanromano.org/courses/ancient-athletics/lecture-images/2 Fig. 3: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/455356212302880079/ Fig. 4: Photo by H.E. Chehabi Fig. 5: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ameerhamza/3272327950 Fig. 6: https://plus.google.com/photos/114022317716204680508/albums/5989706446425129969 Fig. 7: http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-tatar-national-wrestling-belts-sabantuy-image21250040 Fig. 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssireum Fig. 9: http://dsphotographic.com/photos/sumo-wrestling/ (third photo). Fig. 10: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/6516374/Afghan-horsemen-play- Buzkashi-a-kind-of-polo-using-a-headless-calf-or-goat-instead-of-a-ball.html Fig. 11: https://legioilynx.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/page/16/ scroll down Fig. 12: https://www.flickr.com/photos/golden_road/3061062854 Fig. 13: Substitute this one. It is preferable since it shows the goal posts seen in Fig. 12: http://asbarez.com/115563/iran-disputes-azeri-claim-over-polo/ Fig. 14: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianling_Mausoleum Fig. 15: http://ukiyo-e.org/image/jaodb/Chikanobu_Yoshu-Official_Ceremonies_Chiyoda_Palace-Royal_ visit_and_watching_a_Dakyu-00029418-040718-F12 Fig. 16: http://japanracing.jp/en/jpn-racing/equine.html

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31-2_中東学会.indb 328 2016/03/15 16:43:26 Fig. 17: https://nsippets.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/the-british-library-jahangir-playing-polo/ Fig. 18: http://picssr.com/photos/prasundutta/page21?nsid=29155431@N04 (Last photo bottom right) Fig. 19: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/07/bicycle-polo-buffalo-bill-chidley Fig. 20: http://travel.cnn.com/bangkok/visit/gallery-super-sized-action-hua-hins-kings-cup-elephant-polo- tournament-681103/

Professor, Boston University ボストン大学教授

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