Pigeon racing

 

Last Sunday I went to watch a pigeon race. 

What is a pigeon race, perhaps you ask? Well, my dear friends, let me tell you: pigeon racing is one of the most bizarre and awesome, grandiose and subtle sports I have ever witnessed. It’s an old pastime of Old Delhi, a tradition which is slowly dying out—though, as I happily can report, still robustly alive in certain parts of this city. Pigeon racing is part animal husbandry and soothsaying, part adrenaline-laced excitement, and part lazy Sunday morning social hour.  It takes an immensely talented trainer, a wealthy owner, a cheering partisan crowd, and 85 clever pigeons. It is glorious.

I had first read about this dying sport in Twilight in Delhi, a novel published in 1940 about the pre-WWI Delhi of the author’s childhood. The book is magnificently evocative of the Muslim community living in the old part of the city, and one of the main pastimes of the book’s grand-patriarch is pigeon keeping and racing. This grand patriarch takes his pigeons out flying every morning and occasionally triumphs over his frenemies by having his pigeons “capture” members of their flocks.  I was intrigued by the book’s discussion about this hobby, but had little conception of what this might look like in reality. How could a person train pigeons to fly in a pre-designated path…and return home at a set time? How do you capture pigeons from a neighbor’s flock? How, really, do pigeons race?

For the last 6 months or so I’ve been keeping my eye open for information about this world of pigeon racing, so you can imagine my delight when my favorite Delhi walking guide announced she was leading an excursion to a pigeon race last weekend. Naturally, I signed up—perhaps one of the few times in my life I’ve happily woken up at 7:30am on a Sunday.

 [Rooftops of Old Delhi--before the masses arrive]

The first thing to know about pigeon racing is that it happens in a world onto itself; the rooftops of Old Delhi become the arena. Old Delhi is itself a wondrous part of the city—cluttered, labyrinthine, dilapidated, chaotic, colorful and in every single way an assault on all senses. But once you find your way up to the rooftops it’s a whole different scene.  Quiet, calm and peaceful (or, at least until the racing gets started). Yes, quiet, calm, and peaceful—but not empty. Because on the morning of a touted pigeon race (and, I’m told, on most Sunday mornings, anyway), the rooftops all across this portion of the city are crammed with eager onlookers. Literally, a 360 degree turn reveals rooftops packed with men, young and old, enjoying chai, chatting, and waiting for the games to begin. I suspect that the entire male population of Old Delhi ascends to the rooftops for a few hours each Sunday morning. 

 [The crowd gathers on our roof. The guy in red is the pigeon owner]

 [Crowds on other roofs, hooting and a'hollering.]

All male, of course. The only female, other than the few that had come with our group, who I could discern in the crowd was the 9-year-old daughter of the flock owner whose roof we were on. (After the race was over and we descended back towards the street we stopped into the owner’s apartment, just a floor below the rooftop, and met his wife. She had remained in the house during the entirety of what seemed to me to be the most exciting sporting event this side of the Superbowl, despite the fact it was her family’s flock that was competing!)

Anyway, as I understand them, the rules of pigeon racing are pretty simple. Competitors are scored based on:

1. How far their flocks fly within the allotted time. (For the race I witnessed, it was a half hour). Apparently there are official scorers sitting of roof decks all over the city who can confirm whether or not the flocks reach a certain neighborhood. Note though, that pigeons don’t just fly out for 15 minutes and then fly back for 15 minutes. Nope—within that 30 min span they make multiple circles around their home roost and it’s their furthest circle that seems to be scored.
2. If the flocks come home and roost within the allotted time. I didn’t get the sense that this was scored strictly, but if the competition is 30 minutes long and your pigeons disappear for 2 hours then I imagine you get penalized or disqualified for this.
3. If all of your pigeons come back. The competitive flocks are all 85 pigeons, so if only 83 end up coming home, your points get docked. In fact, once pigeons get released there is a lot of caterwauling from enemy rooftops as competitors are trying to distract pigeons from listening to their owners’ call and returning home.
4. If you capture any enemies’ pigeons. The competition I watched only had one flock released at a time, but in other competitions multiple flocks are released. The idea is that if your flock flies into a competitor’s flock and their pigeons get confused and come home with yours you get to keep the pigeons you’ve “captured” and then sell them back to the original owner. I asked how much a captured pigeon gets sold back for and the flock owner who was chilling with us told me that it could be anything. I guess it really depends on how much you dislike your competition!
   
   
   
    [These are the two pigeon trainers]

Now, I must admit that how one trains a pigeon to fly in ever increasing circles before gently coming back to roost remains a mystery to me. But clearly the pigeon trainers have a certain kind of mastery over these birds—even a novice bird-watcher like myself can see that the pigeons react differently based on the call being made by their trainer. I could myself could make out three kinds of calls: the caterwaul (in which all members on the rooftop in question join in) which seemed meant to drive the pigeons back out on their rounds; the shrieking whistle; and the soft coo, which along with handfuls of feed thrown into the air, coaxed the pigeons back home.  

I was told also that the pigeon feed is premium grade A human consumable stuff—clearly these birds are well looked after. In fact, the whole process of pigeon racing is really expensive—probably at $6000 a year (which is a lot of money in India—maybe almost a yearly middle class salary).   But the prize money is not to be snuffed at—in the tournament I witnessed first place was Rs 11,000, which is more than an average autorickshaw driver makes in a month. I don’t totally understand all of the finances of it, but the flock owner told us that Old Delhi hosts several informal “clubs” of pigeon racers. Members of the same club share pigeon trainers and won’t compete amongst themselves, but all club members will stake a particular member to compete in any given competition—maybe the prize money is also likewise shared?

 

[Some well-fed pigeons]

 [In addition to the prize money, the winners also won these awesome trophies!]

As with almost any sporting event, cultural event, or um, just event, period, in India, there also seemed to be an almost spiritual aspect to the racing. It was explained that this particular race was in honor of an recently-deceased grandfather who had been prominent in the pigeon racing world, and before the racing began a sort of dirge was sung for this grandfather.

Anyway, the race itself was very exciting. As you can see from the below video—everyone gets really into all of the hooting and hollering. The owner and the trainers themselves were getting so hysterical I thought someone was going to have a heart-attack. But apparently they knew their business—all of their pigeons came back on time, having traveled, at their furthest, about 4 kilometers.

And then they let me hold the pigeons!