‘Want equal respect’: Pakistan’s females galloping to glory in tent pegging

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The 30-year-old has already claimed her first peg. The second lies close ahead. Her horse tears across the dry earth, kicking up a cloud of dust that hangs in the air as she charges forward. A few metres out, Shakoor lowers the lance, steadying her aim and bracing for impact. A collective gasp ripples through the crowded bleachers. Many onlookers shake their heads. Some look away. Shakoor exhales and slows her horse to a walk. Around her are the desolate, windswept fields on the outskirts of Rawalpindi in northern Punjab province. And there are men, most of them wearing turbans. Men with “dhol” (drums) hanging from their necks. And men whose fathers had ridden before them and their fathers before their fathers. The men who take pride in the ancient sport, some of whom perhaps are not ready to accept that women are now participating in an overwhelmingly male “neza baazi”, or tent pegging, a high-stakes sport in which horse riders gallop across a field to pierce a buried wooden target. The field is lined with thousands of male spectators, gathered to watch the teams of riders charging one after the other at a small wooden peg buried in the ground, trying to pierce it cleanly and carry it forward on their lance. The event is known as a “mela” in Punjabi, a carnival-like competition typically held on the outskirts of the garrison city. The beat of drums intertwined with the sharp bursts of the shehnai (oboe), traditionally played in weddings, pierces the cold winter air. Salespeople call out to the crowds from bustling stalls selling cardamom tea and varieties of fried fritters. Before the competition starts, riders mount their adorned horses, some of which are dressed in embroidered velvet gowns. Others have braided manes or brass bells ringing softly at their necks. One of the 74 teams competing in this year’s mela is Shakoor’s Bint-e-Zahra Club, Pakistan’s first female-only tent-pegging club. It has three other riders: Eshal Ibrahim and Noor un Nisa Malik, both 16, and Sehrish Awan, a 32-year-old mother of two competing for the first time in a mela. Shakoor says the club was formed in 2025 after she reached a “frustrating realisation” that female riders practised and played only in mixed clubs. “We wanted to give women riders a stage for training so they can form a community,” she says. The women are an unusual sight at a competition that has almost entirely male riding teams, mainly male fans and even male musicians. So when Bint-e-Zahra’s members prepare to make their run, the audience is in for a rare sight. Photographers, vloggers and locals rush to film them, surrounding them from all sides. Ibrahim is accompanied by her mother, who trails closely behind her, keeping a careful eye on her teenage daughter. “I cannot even take pictures of her in the crowd,” says Fatima Adeel, who accompanies Ibrahim to every mela. “I am in charge of her. I cannot leave a teenage girl alone in a sea of men.” “Any woman who wants to come in this sport should be encouraged so she can gain the respect she deserves in the sport,” she says. “Our society cannot bear a woman’s lead in any field.” Several kilometres away, Ayesha Khan, 22, gallops on Sawa, the horse she has ridden since she was eight, for a practice run with her club. She was 17 when her father encouraged her to try out for the women’s national team. A year later, she was the only woman selected for Pakistan’s under-21 mixed gender team and was sent to South Africa for a tournament to compete against a team that had four girls and one boy. “I was hit with the realisation of how tent pegging is conditioned to appear masculine in Pakistan. But my father and brothers taught me riding when I was five. I used to be the only child riding a horse between adults,” Khan says, describing herself as “addicted” to riding. Khan joined the women’s team in 2022 and quickly worked her way up to becoming its captain. That same year, she took the women’s team to Jordan, where it competed against 13 countries. “We came third,” Khan recalls proudly. “Yet that was the only trip that the Pakistani women’s team competed in internationally. Before that trip, never. After that, never again.” In 2024, the International Tent Pegging Federation organised an open international competition in Jordan. Pakistan sent a men-only team although the event was open to women. It was simply assumed that only men would want to go. “In Pakistan, we don’t have the concept of a player,” Khan tells Al Jazeera. “We have the concept of male and female. Unless there is a women-only event, our federation exclusively sends male teams.” But Khan persisted. At 20, she became the first Pakistani woman to compete against and beat 70 male riders at a mela. Today, she captains Pakistan’s only all-women tent pegging team. The event near Rawalpindi that Shakoor attended was organised by Samiullah Barsa, a 27-year-old United States national of Pakistani origin, as part of his wedding celebrations. “No wedding is complete without neza baazi,” says Barsa, who is dressed in a blazing red waistcoat and cowboy boots. His family emigrated in the 1980s from the Punjab city of Gujrat to the US state of Ohio, where they own a stable and host annual melas. Last year, their mela drew more than 2,000 visitors, Barsa says. Barsa recalls the first time he saw women compete in tent pegging. In 2015, he attended a mela at Kot Fateh Khan in Attock district, an hour from the capital, Islamabad, and the hometown of Malik Ata, fondly remembered as “Baba-e neza baazi” (the father of tent pegging). Ata was a politician who came from an influential feudal family in Kot Fateh Khan. He was also a legendary equestrian who organised grand melas and invited hundreds of teams from across Pakistan to compete in various equestrian sports, including neza baazi. At the first such grand mela, Ata invited the Australian women’s tent-pegging team, setting the stage for Pakistani women to embrace the sport. In 2021, the Equestrian Federation of Pakistan, established by Ata, sponsored six girls to train under a South African coach. Khan was among those who made the journey to South Africa. She credits Ata for laying the roots of female participation in Pakistani tent pegging. Barsa says Ata’s contribution to the sport cannot be denied and it was time for women to have their own teams. “Everywhere along the world, women and men have separate competition. For instance, in football or in cricket, have you ever seen women competing against men?” he asks. “When female teams lose against male teams, they lose hope and don’t come forward.” But has it been easy for women to pursue the sport? Not really, both Khan and Shakoor say. Shakoor says there is tremendous social pressure on girls and women to conform to roles defined by the patriarchy. “My mother has told me multiple times that I have to get married. But since I am part of such a manly sport, she worries how will I get good proposals. My sister did so too, but I never gave up,” she says. “My brother stood up for me and told my mother that I am excelling in my passion. He asked her to let me live my life.” Khan is relatively young, so marriage is not a concern for now. But she has heard relatives whisper to her mother: “It is probably just a phase. She should focus on her studies.” Before going to a mela, Khan tries to find out details about the organisers. With the events often spanning two or three days, she also asks whether there are separate enclosures for women. Most riding fields have none or few restrooms or spaces for prayers for women. In Pakistan, tent pegging is mainly played in northern Punjab, where villages and spacious fields stretch along the Ravi River, allowing the horses to freely run. Khan says many girls have reached out to her wanting to pursue tent pegging. But most of them don’t have family support. And then there are financial and structural obstacles, which compound women’s lack of access to the sport. “Not everyone has the privilege of owning a horse, especially women, who are already restricted by society,” Ibrahim says. Even if you are able to own one, there is a significant cost attached to their upkeep. A horse’s monthly feed averages 30,000 to 35,000 Pakistani rupees ($107 to $125), which is nearly the monthly minimum wage in Punjab. Caretaker fees and rental charges more than double that amount. “It’s a class thing. Everything related to horses is,” Khan says. A sporting horse costs about $1,500 in Pakistan. Shakoor agrees. She says she was able to buy a horse after saving from her monthly salary as a manager for a global microfinance network. “You can’t put a price on passion,” she says, using a Punjabi saying. She says she puts her horse before everything, even her own meals or health. “If I am sick, I do not care about my medicine,” she says. “But I lose sleep if my horse is sick.” But the high cost of the sport also means many opportunities are lost. Shakoor says she has missed several tent-pegging events because she could not afford to haul her horse across cities for multiple days of competitions. “Had I had any financial support through sponsorship, I would not have missed those events,” she says. For Barsa’s event alone, Shakoor’s team spent more than 100,000 rupees ($358), which included the cost of transporting five horses, their feed and lodging. Similarly, at the national tent pegging trials, every rider must bring their own horse, a rule that shuts out anyone who cannot afford transport, let alone own a horse. Awan, the 32-year-old mother of two children, used to ride horses as a hobby and began visiting melas to observe how tent pegging was played. Intrigued by the sport, she reached out to Shakoor on Instagram, asking to become a member of Bint-e-Zahra. In recent years, videos featuring female riders have gained millions of views on Instagram and TikTok, sometimes surpassing their male counterparts. Khan and Zoya Mir, the vice captain of the national tent pegging team, run joint TikTok and Instagram accounts, Equestrians In Green, where they post about their sporting victories. Some videos show the women playing neza baazi in slow motion, picking up a peg mid-gallop or emerging from clouds of dust dressed in their club’s gear, often set to trendy music and paired with captions that challenge the stereotypical association of horse riding with men. Some of these videos have millions of views. But the social media visibility also comes at a cost. Khan recalls a viral video of women riders wearing turbans at a mela, causing a backlash from veteran male riders who claimed “women were polluting the sport.” The turban, traditionally worn by men as a mark of their social position as well as a defining part of a horse rider’s identity, takes on an added significance in neza baazi. For some, women wearing it is seen as a challenge to a space long associated with male authority. But the riders at the Rawalpindi mela push ahead despite the vitriol. They wear their turbans with pride – Awan tying hers over a red niqab that covers half of her face while Shakoor has hers pulled low, the way her mentor taught her. Shakoor pulls up a photo from her Instagram account, which has more than 8,000 followers. Two riders wearing turbans pluck a peg side by side. The dip of their lances, the slight sway of their bodies, the moment of lift are all nearly identical. “This is a picture of me with my mentor Chaudry Nazakat Hussain, my true inspiration,” she says. “He encouraged me to create Bint-e-Zahra.” Last year, a mela held in Jathli in Rawalpindi’s Tehsil Gujjar Khan had 50 participating teams with nearly 200 riders – all male except Shakoor, Ibrahim and Malik. Representing the Bint-e-Zahra Club, Shakoor fought her way into the last seven in the team captains’ round, which is a recent addition in melas in which the captain of each club runs for a position. Shakoor, the only woman among the final seven qualifying riders, did not secure a position but considers being included a feat nonetheless. “In the captains’ round, horses are assigned to riders randomly. This minimises odds of performing better. A sportsman is known for their skill, not their horse,” she says. Of all the lessons the sport has taught her, Shakoor says the most valuable has been courage. “This is a sport of the brave. If you don’t have the heart for it, it’s not for you,” she says. “Passion and dedication have no gender. … We don’t want to prove we are better than men. 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