Kabaddi has acquired star status but will other "street" games such as pitthu, kho-kho and gilli-danda get their rightful space under the sun?

GROWING UP IN Calcutta meant easy access to the Santhal-dominated regions of West Bengal. Even if that didn’t translate to spending time in the midst of the tribe, trips to Shantiniketan in the winter months were an opportunity to watch, among other treats, the Santhal Sports Day celebrations.

Some of the contests were run of the mill — races, archery and so on — but a personal favourite was the mace fight, the indigenous name of which I have forgotten now. What would happen is that two men – bare torsoed, not necessarily of exceptional build – would sit on a bamboo contraption, somewhat like a gymnastics balance beam, with their legs on either side, pick up a rather big mace made of a jute casing, with jute and cotton inside. At the whistle, they would beat each other up mercilessly. The ability to swing relentlessly while balancing the backside on that narrow seat separated the good ones from the bad. Blows from the mace probably didn’t hurt the players much, but falling off the beam — often at awkward angles as they tried desperately to stay up — must surely have hurt. I’ve seen men fall and land head first on the hard ground and go woozy. But the entertainment was fantastic; each fight lasted approximately 30 seconds.

I wondered then and I wonder now, even more so after the success of the Pro Kabaddi League, whether there might be takers for such a contest if it were to be broadcast on television. Does it sound too much like a segment inside a larger game show? What if it could be glammed up? What if, instead of picking a winner inside 30 seconds, it was a longer contest? What if the winner needed to knock the other chap off five or 10 times — like sets in a tennis game? Now I agree that I’d be a bit sceptical if someone tried to get me excited about the Great Santhal Mace Fight that I’d never heard of. But what about pitthu — variously known as lagori, dikori, lingocha and much else — involving seven stones and a tennis ball? In most parts of India, rich or poor, urban or rural, we all must have played, or at least seen, pitthu being played at some point. Doesn’t it seem like the sort of sport that can be developed for television?

But why am I going on about television? It’s simple. For a sport, any sport, to make money in this day and age, television must be made part of the picture. Even cricket, the biggest sport in India, became as big as it has after the advent of satellite television in the early 1990s. The recent popularity of European football or Formula 1 racing is, similarly, an achievement of television. Kabaddi — for the longest time an unglamorous, indigenous sport of no real stature — is a hit today. Why? That’s because it was remade for television by a bunch of enterprising people. The basic rules and philosophy of the sport were adhered to, but small amendments were made — a bonus-point zone and time limits for each raid, for instance – and the action was jazzed up to make for better viewing pleasure. And it worked.

Let’s come to pitthu now. The only stumbling block that I can see is the fact that there is no organised set-up for the game — there are no pitthu athletes competing seriously, there are no proper clubs. Still, it’s a simple game, one that involves good aim, lots of running around, high energy and athleticism, teamwork, some amount of strategising, and so on. Now, how about if we restrict the number of players per team to seven or so, restrict the area within which the action must take place, give the teams cool jerseys, cover the ground with one of the new synthetic turfs, and then try to make it work? To my mind, there’s a hit formula waiting to be tapped.

The point, as such, is this: the sports we watch and follow, the sportspersons we idolise or dislike, are all made available to us, primarily, by television. They are brought to us. We are made aware of who or what these things and people are. For the longest time, sports such as kabaddi and kho-kho or, indeed, gilli-danda, were thought of as sports that one played as children on streets. Kabaddi has now lifted the lid – enough, perhaps, for entrepreneurs with a penchant for risk-taking to peer through the gap.

One of the interesting things Charu Sharma, director of Mashal Sports, the guys who put together the Pro Kabaddi League, told me was that, for the first year, the teams were bought for a pittance. Even the television rights were sold for a song. The idea was to test the waters, he said. Even the idea of introducing a women’s league to run simultaneously with the men’s was put on hold for the first year (a sad comment on gender parity in sports, of course). They were entering unchartered territory. Going forward, things might — will, I think — change. A successful formula has been discovered.

With kho-kho, gilli-danda, pitthu, or even those mace fights, the start must be made with caution – but now suddenly it looks like a start could be made. A market for novelty (or nostalgia) sport clearly exists, and indigenous sports could tap into it. Someone just has to set the ball rolling.