Why Kabaddi still lives in the shadow of Cricket

Once played across the subcontinent under different names — hu-tu-tu in Maharashtra, chedu-gudu in Madras and Mysore, jabarjang in Punjab, and hu-du-du in Bengal — kabaddi was rapidly standardised in newly independent India. In 1953, a ruling by a committee formed by the All India Kabaddi Federation declared that the only legitimate chant allowed during the play would be ‘kabaddi,’ and that no other words could be spoken.

This standardisation enabled kabaddi’s emergence as a ‘national sport,’ while simultaneously stripping it of much of its vernacular and rural roots.

As Alter argues, kabaddi has never achieved the kind of popularity enjoyed by cricket. “This is not to say that kabaddi is unpopular,” he notes, “but simply to point out that its popularity has been formalised, normalised and institutionalised, whereas cricket has not only been vernacularised but vulgarised to the extent that it is played ‘against the rules’”.

A game of breath and bodies

Kabaddi is played in an open area, with teams separated by a line drawn on the ground. Each side sends one player — the raider — across the centre line to tag members of the opposing team, known as anti-raiders.

What gives the game its distinctive character, Alter notes, is that the raider must complete the act in a single breath, continuously chanting the word kabaddi. To score, the raider must touch an opponent and return safely across the centre line before running out of breath; the anti-raiders’ objective is to capture the raider before this happens.

A game from ancient times

The origins of kabaddi remain ambiguous. Some believe it was designed as training for hunting or self-defence, while others suggest it functioned as preparation for warfare. Alter cites a theory that saints who practised pranayama (a yogic practice) transformed breath-holding exercises into a sport. Many accounts suggest that kabaddi has been played since prehistoric times.

Kabaddi’s etymology is just as uncertain as its origins. One explanation, cited by Alter, breaks the word into two parts: ka and baddi. Since ka is the first letter of the alphabet, it may signify “beginning,” while baddi, derived from barbarana (roar), is associated with animation or coming to life. “Thus we can say that the fundamental meaning of kabaddi is to begin living,” Alter notes.

A circle kabaddi match being played in Bhimber (Wikipedia)

In Indigenous, Traditional, and Folk Sports: Contesting Modernities (2024), anthropologist Mariann Vaczi adds, “Evidence of [kabaddi] can be found in the Mahabharata, a famous Indian epic, where Abhimanyu, the youngest warrior of the Pandavas, fought against seven enemy heroes within the enemy line of defence…”

What is beyond dispute is that kabaddi was played across the subcontinent in multiple forms — surjivani, gamini, and amar.

According to Alter, surjivani allows a player to be reinstated once an opponent is tagged out. In gamini, players are not reinstated, and play continues until one team is eliminated. In amar kabaddi, players do not leave the game. Instead, a point is awarded to the raiding team and at the end of a fixed time period, the team with the most points wins.

Kabaddi in modern India

Kabaddi’s modern history begins in the early twentieth century. In Nation At Play: A History of Sport In India (2015), political scientist and author Ronojoy Sen argues that the sport first appeared in modern India in 1911 at the Badshahi Mela in Delhi. Around the same time, middle-class enthusiasts also began to organise competitions in Maharashtra’s Satara district, followed by Pune.

This period coincided with the peak of nationalist fervour. As Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement urged Indians to renounce Western goods and influences, kabaddi came to be associated with the movement. Alter cites a quote by scholar Ajay Bhalla:  “Before independence, when people were imprisoned by their infatuation for the depravities of Western civilization there were some people who said that kabaddi was a low-class village game. But now that we Indians have cast off the yoke of Westernization and have given birth to a new patriotic spirit this sport is finally receiving the recognition it deserves.”

Yet standardisation remained elusive. From the late 1920s to 1950, competitions across India followed different rules under different organisations.

Sen writes that the first all-India kabaddi competition was organised in Baroda by the Hind Vijay Gymkhana in 1923. “At the same time, different organisations like the Maharashtra Sharirik Shiksha Mandal and the YMCA attempted to standardise the rules. But it took more than a decade before kabaddi could make it to the program of the All-India Olympic Championships (or the Indian Olympic Games), which were later known as the National Games.”

It was at the 1936 Berlin Olympics that kabaddi was presented as India’s signature sport. “This was the rather infamous Nazi Olympics in Berlin, where kabaddi was showcased as a demo sport by a private club in Maharashtra. That episode marked a fairly significant chapter in the sport’s history,” says Charu Sharma, sports commentator and Director of Pro Kabaddi League, in an interview with indianexpress.com.

A kabaddi court at the 2006 Asian Games (Wikipedia)

On the history of kabaddi, Alter opines: “On the one hand, it is a history of increasing standardisation and modernisation in explicitly international terms. On the other hand, however, this same history ascribes to kabaddi a kind of innate Indianness. These two histories come together in the Berlin Olympics of 1936, where modern, rule-bound and technically elaborate kabaddi is played on an international stage for a global audience because it is thought to be uniquely Indian.”

In 1937, there was a proposal to include kabaddi in the programme for the Indian Olympic Games. It was added to the schedule in 1938.

Post-independence developments

The issue of standardising kabaddi carried well into independent India. “The All-India Kabaddi Federation was formed in 1950, and a national competition was held every year, in which both state and institutional teams took part,” Sen notes. He says kabaddi was included as the only demonstration sport in the 1951 Asian Games in Delhi.

“But it was one of the most important step-ups because the Asian Games are the second-biggest international multi-sport event after the Olympics, and being part of that was really a big deal. The inclusion of other nations that had begun playing Kabaddi in an organised fashion was also an important part of that beginning,” says Sharma.

According to Alter, another significant event of the post-independence period was the establishment of a women’s national competition in 1955. “Suffice it to say,” he writes, “that the standardization of kabaddi – its civilization –  made it possible for a fairly violent masculine game to become ungendered while developing into a national sport.”

Sharma adds, “India then formed the Asian Amateur Kabaddi Federation in 1978.” In the 1982 Delhi Asian Games, kabaddi was once again a demonstration sport, which paved the way for its inclusion in the official programme of the 1990 Asiad.

“The standardization and internationalization of kabaddi have helped what was and still is essentially a rural sport to acquire the semiofficial status of a “national” sport,” notes Sen.

Popular, but not as cricket

Yet questions about popularity persist. Sen finds that in the 1990s, former kabaddi player and Arjuna Award winner, Shriram Bhavsar, claimed that Mumbai alone had one thousand kabaddi clubs. “In fact, he believed that kabaddi was more popular than cricket or football. While there is little doubt that kabaddi is popular, particularly in rural India, the claims of its overtaking cricket are not supported by any real evidence”.

A clear example is the fleeting presence of the sport in the 2001 blockbuster Lagaan. While the film focuses on cricket, the scenes featuring kabaddi serve to establish it as an indigenous, rough game tied to peasant bodies, in contrast to the colonial sport of cricket. The 2004 Tamil movie Ghilli, by contrast, highlights the strength and honour associated with the game. The hero, a kabaddi player, goes to Madurai to participate in a bout but instead rescues a woman from a local gang leader. Another film centred around the sport is the 2014 release Badlapur Boys, wherein young Vijay, hailing from Badlapur, plays the sport to draw government attention to a long-standing water crisis in his village. Yet Indian cinema’s portrayal of the sport has seldom shed its rural, rough-hewn image.

The Pro Kabaddi League

Kabaddi underwent a dramatic transformation in 2014 with the launch of the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) and World Kabaddi League. “The PKL, promoted by the Mahindra Group…was an unexpected success, with a television audience of 435 million viewers in its inaugural year, compared with 560 million for the 2014 IPL,” writes Sen.

Reflecting on his journey as Director of PKL, Sharma says: “I began pushing for kabaddi to gain a stronger profile and to earn its place on the pedestal of sports in India. That was one of the many reasons behind the birth of the Pro Kabaddi League, which went on to completely transform the kabaddi landscape in India. The league presented a new, international, competitive, and sophisticated avatar of the sport”.

Patna Pirates winning moments (2016, Wikipedia)

Yet some opportunities were missed. India never launched a women’s pro league. Even as Indian women remain among the world’s best, alongside Iran, notes Sharma.

Meanwhile, in Punjab, World Kabaddi Cups featuring a version of the sport known as ring kabaddi have further popularised the sport. “In Punjab, the game kabaddi was played by well-built people and considered to be the game of the strong and healthy folk. Often, the rich offered a bait of money that was tied up to a poll for the winning side,” Alter notes. This entanglement of power and pelf has often led to violence on the kabaddi field.

The paradox of kabaddi

One reason kabaddi continues to thrive across regions, Alter found during his 1990s fieldwork, is its accessibility. “It does not require a large field, nor does it require expensive and complex equipment. All that is needed is a small plot of land and chalk with which to draw lines on the ground. If there is no chalk, players will often use their clothes and shoes to demarcate the boundary…”

The irony of kabaddi lies here: the forces of standardisation and internationalisation that drove its popularity may have also contributed to its decline.