Kabaddi's soft powers

Why this indigenous sport deserves more attention

There are many good reasons professional kabaddi deserves the same sort of attention as International Yoga Day, on which the government recently expended much publicity and effort for a second consecutive year. Like yoga, kabaddi is an ancient, indigenous cultural phenomenon with a truly all-India level of popularity, being a designated state game in seven Indian states from Punjab to Tamil Nadu. Though scarcely prominent in national consciousness until the two-year-old Pro Kabaddi League invested it with glamour, it has been a part of the Asian Games since 1990 - and India has won no less than seven gold medals in the discipline. Kabaddi demands a level of aerobic fitness, sharp reflexes and muscular strength that is perhaps unique among its peers in contact sports. Importantly, too, it is a low-cost entertainment - even more so than football, the ultimate poor man's sport, or wrestling, the other sport in which India enjoys some global success. At its most basic level, it requires a small patch of clear ground - a kabaddi court is just 13x10 metres. In that sense, the sport has the potential to be more genuinely inclusive than cricket, the perennial national obsession. As a means of promoting the fitness culture among young people of limited resources, then, kabaddi has at least as much promise as yoga.

The Pro Kabaddi League or PKL, the fourth season of which began on June 25, has demonstrated the possibilities that lie in making this sport a viable livelihood opportunity for scores of young men and women. Like the Indian Premier League, PKL has leveraged a reasonably robust business model adapted from the best practices of global sports industries. The combination of star power - many of the teams are owned by Bollywood actors and cricketing greats - and attractive presentation on Star Sports has invested the sport with a certain cachet. The third season, for instance, saw a television viewership of 435 million, making it the most viewed sporting event in India after the Indian Premier League with 552 million viewers. Sponsorship has been healthy too - the league attracted 11 sponsors for the fourth season against nine in the third edition, and Star Sports, 74 per cent co-owner of the league rights with Anand Mahindra-promoted Mashal Sports, expects to earn 50 per cent more from this season. Many of the PKL sponsors are large brands - Bajaj, Castrol, Airtel, Nestle, for example. The broadcaster's confidence in its sustainability is so high that it has held two seasons in 2016 and has also launched an edition for women called Woman's Kabbadi Challenge. To be sure, kabaddi has some way to go towards attracting the kind of money that the IPL rakes in - last year Star earned roughly Rs 45 crore from PKL sponsorship compared with Rs 100 crore for IPL. And where Indian cricket team captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni and other stars get to earn in crores, PKL champions earn Rs 10-20 lakh per season, that is, for approximately six weeks of duty. But this can hardly be called inadequate, given the comparative wages in other conventional jobs and certainly enough to attract foreign players from countries like South Korea and Bangladesh. Many PKL players, who come from humble backgrounds and small towns, are now household names and have already started enjoying a standard of living that was unthinkable before. In fact, unlike IPL, which has been marred by problems of shady deals and match-fixing, PKL has managed to stay in the realm of healthy entertainment so far. The emergence of the kabaddi professional, therefore, should be encouraged as a source of pride and as much a manifestation of India's soft power as yoga.