Kabaddi: the ancient game of breath

A sport that needs no equipment, and what professionalism did to its central rule

A The game requires a rectangle of flat ground and nothing else. There is no ball, no bat, no net and no goal, and the equipment list of a professional match is identical to that of a village one: a marked surface and fourteen players. This is not a quaint survival but the reason the game exists at all, since a pastime that costs nothing to stage is a pastime that can be played anywhere by anyone, and kabaddi has been played across South Asia for a very long time on precisely those terms.

B Its antiquity is asserted more often than it is demonstrated. Games involving a raider, a chant and a held breath are described in South Asian texts and depicted in sculpture, and the modern sport is plainly descended from that family, but the specific claim that today's rules descend unbroken from antiquity is the kind of assertion that sporting bodies make and historians treat cautiously. The rules are easily described and unexpectedly subtle in practice. A raider crosses into the opposing half, attempts to touch one or more defenders, and must return across the halfway line to score; the defenders attempt to hold him until he fails to get back. What converts this into a contest of nerve is the traditional constraint on the raid: the raider must chant continuously, repeating the name of the game, and may not draw breath while in the opponents' territory. The chant is not decoration. It is an audible proof that a single breath is still being held, and it converts a physiological limit into a public one that both teams and every spectator can monitor.

C The tactical consequences of that rule run through everything. A raider must judge how much of his breath to spend on approach and how much to reserve for escape; defenders must decide whether to attack early, while he is strong, or wait for the moment when his lungs make him predictable. Defenders link hands to form a chain, and the chain's discipline matters more than the strength of any individual in it, since a single defender pulled out of position opens the route back. It is a game of a few seconds repeated for forty minutes, and its intensity comes from the fact that every raid has a natural deadline written into the raider's body. Wrestling supplies much of the defensive technique, which is unsurprising in a region with a long wrestling tradition, and the best defenders are frequently former wrestlers who have learned to apply holds within a rule set that forbids most of what they were trained to do.

D Attempts to codify the game for competition began in the twentieth century. The court was given fixed dimensions, weight categories and match durations were established, and a national governing body was formed in India in the 1950s after the game had already been demonstrated at the Olympic Games and adopted into regional competitions. Standardisation was contested, as it always is, by those who felt that a folk game formalised is a folk game diminished; it nevertheless allowed teams from different districts, and then different countries, to meet on agreed terms for the first time. Codification also had an unintended effect on who played: a game with fixed courts, categories and officials requires facilities and administration, and the sport began its slow migration from open ground to enclosed halls.

E Inclusion in the Asian Games from 1990 made the sport international in a technical sense while confirming its dependence on one country. India won every men's title for a quarter of a century, which was good for the game's profile at home and unhelpful for the claim that it was a genuinely international competition. The pattern has changed only recently, as Iran and a handful of other nations have built programmes strong enough to win, and the arrival of credible opposition has probably done more for the sport's prospects than any amount of promotion. A competition whose result is known in advance is not a competition, and the case for including any sport in a larger multi-national event depends on there being several countries capable of winning it.

F The decisive change came from television. A professional league launched in India in 2014 adopted the franchise structure that had already transformed the country's cricket, and the results exceeded every projection: the league became one of the most watched sporting competitions in the country within its first season. The reasons are not mysterious. A raid lasts thirty seconds, requires no explanation, and produces a resolution — a point scored or a raider caught — at a rate that suits broadcast far better than sports built around long periods of accumulation.

G Professionalisation has altered the game itself, and the most significant alteration concerns the breath. Broadcast competition requires reliable timing, and a rule enforced by listening to a chant is difficult to adjudicate at speed and impossible to televise unambiguously, so the professional format replaced it with a clock: a raid must end within thirty seconds. The change is defensible and probably necessary, and something has gone from the game with it. A limit set by a competitor's own lungs is not the same as a limit set by an official's timer, even when the two produce identical results, and the players who learned the game in villages describe the difference readily while accepting that they cannot have both.