25 January,2025 11:42 AM IST | Mumbai | Debjani Paul
Aniket Pote and his mother are all smiles as they reunite at their Bandra East home following his World Cup triumph. Pic/Kirit Surve Parade
I still can't believe that a game we used to play in PT [physical training] period, is now being appreciated and played by foreigners from all over the world. This was the best takeaway for me from the Kho Kho World Cup last week," says Aniket Pote, who has just returned to his Bandra East home from Delhi, which hosted 23 countries at the maiden World Cup held there between January 13 and 19.
Unsurprisingly, India dominated the tournament, with both the men's and women's teams bagging the Cup. After all, as winning team member Pote points out, "Baccha baccha Kho Kho khelta hai India mein (every kid grows up playing Kho Kho here)." What amazed viewers watching the WC unfold on TV last week, though, was seeing players all the way from the US, UK, Germany, South Korea and even Kenya and Uganda compete in what has traditionally been an Indian backyard pastime. Interestingly, Pakistan was missing from the event, despite the sport also being popular there.
The World Cup marks the rise of this childhood game that we've all played in schools and with our colony friends, to a serious international sport backed by money. And riding high on this wave are the aspirations of players like Pote, most of whom hail from humble backgrounds and chose this sport more than a decade ago, when it still had very limited scope. Now, their sights are set higher still, with hopes of a possible Olympic debut in 2036.
The WC was a proving ground of sorts for the sport's Olympic dreams, and the organisers went all out in order to ensure robust participation from so many countries, offering free air tickets and accommodation to the foreign athletes. Ambassadors for the sport were sent out along with coaches to several different countries to teach them the sport and invite them to the WC. All of this was funded by a dozen-odd sponsors that included the Maharashtra government.
The state's backing of the sport harks back to a generations-long connection with Kho Kho, which is said to have originated here. "Kho Kho had been played informally for centuries, but it was in Pune that [freedom fighter] Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote the first rule book for the game at the Deccan Gymkhana in 1914. After that, Kho Kho was born," says Professor Chandrajit Jadhav, joint secretary of the Kho Kho Federation of India (KKFI), and general secretary of the Maharashtra Kho Kho Association.
The sport's deep connect with the state is apparent in the Indian WC team line-up as well - seven of the players on the men's team and four on the women's team hail from Maharashtra. On Friday, the Maharashtra government also announced a cash prize of R2.25 crore as well as a Class 1 government job for each WC player from the state.
This is a big deal for the players, who dedicated themselves to the lightning-fast sport for years even when the rewards were slow in coming. For Pote, it is an unbelievable reversal of fortunes. "I started playing Kho Kho in 2006. Back then, even I didn't think it had any potential as a career," Pote says, "I came close to quitting - my family's financial condition wasn't good, and my father was worried that instead of studying or focusing on my career, I was wasting time playing games."
At the time, Pote's father was a BEST driver, bringing in Rs 20,000 per month. His mother is a domestic worker, earning about R3,000. After rent, the family of five would have barely R7,000 to survive on the entire month.
The turning point for Pote came in 2008, when he played in the Under-14 national championship, and his outstanding performance drew the attention of their local MLA. "He came to our home to congratulate me. I'll never forget how proud my father was of me that day. After that, it became his dream to see me play on TV some day," recalls Pote.
At the time, Kho Kho on TV seemed like a fantasy. But Pote kept at it. Fourteen years later, the dream finally came true when the Ultimate Kho Kho (UKK) League was launched in August 2022 and was televised and watched by lakhs of viewers. "But my father wasn't around to see this dream come true. Just three months before the League, he succumbed to throat cancer. My mother saw me on TV and burst into tears," Pote recalls.
UKK was a game-changer for Kho Kho, giving it the sheen of a serious sport backed by money, just the way the IPL had done for T20 cricket in 2008, and the Pro Kabaddi League had done in 2014. It brought greater visibility to the players, gave them an income source - up to R5 lakh for a month-long season - and made both the government and the masses sit up and take note of Kho Kho as more than just a "pastime".
By this time, the government had also ramped up support for the game, pushing for the revival of the Asian Kho Kho championship in 2016, where India again won both men's and women's competitions. The athletes started getting employment under the government's sports quota. Pote is the most recent beneficiary, having just joined his posting as a sports executive officer at Pune's Balewadi Sports Complex. "My starting monthly salary is R47,500. This is the most anyone in our family - in our entire clan - earns. And it will increase once the government offers me the Class 1 posting for the World Cup triumph," says Pote with a clear note of pride in his voice.
The fact is, most Kho Kho players hail from working class families, many of whom have begun to lift their families out of poverty with their sports quota jobs. Take the World Cup line-up for example. Bengaluru athlete Gowtham MK is a postman by day and the son of an auto rickshaw driver. Solapur's Ramji Kashyap grew up collecting scrap with his family but now has a Central Railway job in Mumbai. On the women's side, former captain Nasreen Shaikh's father is a utensil vendor at a Delhi flea market, while Nirmala Bhati - also from Delhi - is the daughter of a truck driver. Both of them now have jobs with the Income Tax department, just like current captain Priyanka Ingle, whose farming family left Beed due to persistent drought and migrated to a chawl in Pune, where her father started with odd jobs and went on to launch his own travel agency.
"When I had started playing more than a decade ago, there was no sports quota for women in Kho Kho. Now we're getting jobs, awards and recognition," Ingle tells us over the phone, even as we hear fans congratulating her in the backdrop. "What women players need now, is our own televised league like the UKK, so there are better opportunities for all us too. We also hope we get the chance to win medals for India at the Olympics soon," she adds.
Most players from blue-collar backgrounds are drawn to Kho Kho because it doesn't require any investment; no expensive gear or training camps like cricket, football or tennis involve. Their one advantage is their endurance, built up over years of hardship, says Narendra Kunder, who is the PT teacher at Pote's alma mater Mahatma Gandhi Vidya Mandir in Bandra East, where he also runs the Shirsekar Mahatma Gandhi Sports Academy. "Most of the kids who play in our club are from the slums in Bandra East. Their parents work in the flower market, some are construction labourers, others are domestic workers," he says, "Upper-class kids will never have gone a day without shoes; our kids have grown up playing barefoot in the soil. They are built for challenging games like Kho Kho, which requires both agility and endurance."
But with opportunities now opening up in the sport, children from wealthier families have started to take an interest too. "When UKK went on air, suddenly even well-to-do kids started signing up for training. The same thing happened when the Pro Kabaddi League had started as well. When one player succeeds, four new ones will join in the hope of a bright future," says Kunder, who has done a PhD in Kho Kho and has also coached the Rajasthan UKK team, as well as the Kenyan team that competed in the World Cup.
"Kho Kho's accessibility is its greatest strength," says Sudhanshu Mittal, President of both KFFI and the International Kho Kho Federation (IKKF), "Unlike elite sports that require expensive equipment or specialised training, it can be played with minimal resources. Players can participate without financial barriers, allowing talent to emerge from every corner of society, regardless of economic status."
It's this grassroots appeal that will give India an edge at the Olympics if Kho Kho is included in the Games. "This is a sureshot gold for India. Our players have been playing this game since childhood, while other countries are just picking up the sport, so there is a while yet before they can beat us," says Kunder, "In most other sports, it has been the other way around, where Indians have worked hard to learn the game and catch up to international standards. That's why it fills me with pride to see other countries learning an indigenous Indian sport."
But how did Kho Kho go from gully game to international sport? Mittal tells us it was a strategic transformation that included the creation of UKK to showcase the sport on TV and bring it greater visibility, as well as other steps such as modernising the game. "We replaced traditional mud surfaces with a standardised playing mat, introduced innovative rules to make the game more exciting, and reduced the team size from nine to seven players to make the game more compact and dynamic. These changes also made Kho Kho more television-friendly," he explains.
In the meanwhile, the passionate father-son duo of former Rajasthan player and founder of the Kho Kho Federation of England Brij Haldania and IFFK General Secretary Rohit Haldania made it their mission to tell the world about Kho Kho. "It started with an exchange of friendly matches between England and India in 2017 and '18. And in the last few years, my father and I have personally visited six continents to coach and promote Kho Kho," says Rohit.
One hundred and fifty-five countries now play the sport, he tells us. Among them is Brazil, whose team played at the World Cup just four months after discovering the game. Brazil Coach Laura Doering recalls, "I discovered Kho Kho when I met Rohit through the International Olympic Committee's Young Leaders Programme. He showed me a video of Kho Kho and said he'd like a Brazilian team to compete."
Doering, primarily a flag football coach, was able to put together a team from the players she knew. "Flag football requires the same agility, but we had just four months to learn the complicated rules, as well as the moves, which are very different from what we were used to," she says, recalling how she learnt the game from reading rule books and watching YouTube videos.
"Then Rohit arrived for a short training camp, and we realised we were not even playing the game right," she chuckles.
The team lost every single game at the WC, but Doering says the players are already asking her when they can resume practice for the next tournament. "We got here and realised how much faster the Indian team is. All my players had aching bodies after the game because they are not used to using the muscles Kho Kho requires. Just the way Brazilians play football almost from birth, we could tell that Indian kids had grown up playing Kho Kho. It will take time for us to catch up," says the coach, adding that she hopes to return to Brazil and set up a South American Kho Kho league.
Meanwhile, back home in Mumbai, the next generation of players has a new pep in their step as they race up and down the ground during warm-up at Kunder's Kho Kho club. Sujal Jaigade, 19, has been training here for eight years, and has already represented Maharashtra at the national level. "After seeing the World Cup triumph, I am filled with hope for the future," says the second-year BCom student from Bandra West's Rizvi College.
Jaigade, the son of a peon at Mantralaya, hopes the sport will do for him what it has done for Pote and other athletes like him. "After seeing the success of the Indian players, and the appreciation and opportunities coming their way, especially my senior Aniket Pote, I believe I can make it too," he says as he takes off again, leaving us in the dust.
Rs 2.25 crore
Cash reward from Maharashtra govt for each WC player from the state
Rs 7 lakh
Cash reward for players who win gold at nationals
Not many may know that Kho Kho is considered an indigenous sport in South Africa as well. It was introduced to the region with the arrival of Indian migrants there during the British colonial era. Over the years, however, the game's popularity transcended the Indian-origin community there and began to be played across the country. It is now part of the curriculum at over 1,300 schools there, and is recognised as one of nine indigenous games in SA.
Kho Kho's evolution in India from "mitti to mat" has brought its own set of challenges with it, says KFFI Joint Secretary Chandrajit Jadhav. The Indian format moved from plain mud grounds to mats for the first time at the senior nationals at Baramati in 2012, he says. "Some injuries are occurring because unlike mud, the mats don't have any skid factor, so in the high-paced games when the players stop suddenly, it can put stress on the ankle or knee," he explains. The mats were introduced to make the game more global, considering not all countries would have the conditions to play on the bare ground, he adds. Interestingly, the move from natural grass to astroturf is what led to India's decline in international hockey in the 1980s. It took them decades to recover their position at the top of the game.
The Indian federation also roped in researchers at Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies, Faridabad, for a month-long camp where a physical analysis of the players was done to study how best to improve nutrition and training while reducing injuries. "This will be our main area of focus now," says Jadhav.
