Knowledge led to resolve. “I saw these horses, all pegged out like slaves, tied at the head and at the back, nose in the manger, no room to breathe,” she recalls. “Nobody was going to ride them. They were the saddest specimens of crossbreeds that you will ever see.” She and her partner, Dundlod, pledged to do something about it. “The future of this horse is outside as well as inside India,” she decided.
To blunt the objection that shipping Kelly’s handful of Marwaris to the United States would deplete the gene pool, Kelly and Dundlod started breeding top-quality horses in Rajasthan. In 1999, they joined others in founding the Indigenous Horse Society of India, the only national body of its kind, to work with the government on conservation-related programs, raise awareness about the Marwari and encourage breeders to adopt more modern methods. By 2000, the pair had won the 100-kilometer endurance race at the national equestrian games, convinced the Equestrian Federation of India to sanction the first national show for indigenous horses and produced a coffee-table book—Marwari: Legend of the Indian Horse—that remains the most complete study of the breed in English. Along the way, Kelly traveled to so many auctions and horse festivals in remote towns across the Punjab and Rajasthan that the Mirasi caste of horse traders began calling her ghorawalli: the horsewoman.
By interesting India’s equestrian community in the horse through shows, competitions and exhibitions, Kelly and Dundlod influenced the market and breeding practices. But even more significant was their effort to conjure up a studbook. Without bothering to trace the breed’s foundation sire, which, if possible at all, would have involved years of poring over documents and interviewing horse traders, they began registering those prime Marwari specimens whose immediate sires and dams could be identified. When, in 1997, they finally convinced the government to lift the ban on exports, prices began to jump.
By early 2002, when I first met Kelly and Dundlod, India seemed to have almost as many Marwari breeder associations as it did Marwari horses. Already, several of the associations claimed to have plans to develop breed standards and introduce studbooks of their own. But the conservationists were trying to save an animal that they had yet to identify. Which of the existing animals represented the purest specimens? For Kelly, who hoped to interest a major U.S. breeder in promoting the Marwari in the United States, it was vital that everybody work from the same manual and, one day, set stock in the same pedigree. But the other Marwari breeders were reluctant to cede control over the registration and valuation of their own horses—especially to a group led by a foreign woman and a lesser noble who wasn’t even from Marwar. One association, the Marwar Horse Society, had begun organizing the first national breed standards conference in the city of Jodhpur to make the next step in forming a coalition—and to stake its own claim to lead it. Kelly and Dundlod therefore set out for Jodhpur in October 2002.
The capital of marwar since 1459 and the city from which the riding pants (and short boots) adopted by the British in the 19th century take their name, Jodhpur seemed the natural center for the movement to save the Marwari horse. But shortly after the breed standards conference began, with a Hindu blessing and a series of redundant speeches by politicians, it began to unravel. One speaker after another made rambling set-piece presentations on topics of questionable relevance, whether the army’s mule breeding program or shoeing practices.
Kelly, who’d turned up in trim jodhpur pants and tall riding boots, her hair wound and secured in a knot behind her head, was slowly losing her cool. Poised stiffly in her seat, she looked like a spring slowly being twisted tighter and tighter until the metal is about to snap. Every so often, she exhaled sharply and whispered a cutting aside. But, she told me, she’d resolved not to explode.
“We are getting nowhere!” Dundlod finally stood to interrupt, during the tenth description of the Marwari’s ears. “Every breeder has his ideas about the breed characteristics, but without discussing them, we’ll never come to a consensus.”
The third day of the conference started on a sour note, as the breeders took up a proposed draft of the new breed standards. The first sentence read: “It is difficult to exactly trace the origin of the true Marwari horse with precision, but undoubtedly it has connections with the Arab and may have mixed with the Turkmenian breed and the horses of invading armies.”
