India

The second-largest country by population with over one billion people, India is heir to vast empires with deep history, and birthed four of the world's major religions. Its position at the nexus of ancient trade routes and long association with the British Empire have influenced its cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and multilingual culture.

The official national sport is field hockey, and older generations still follow the national teams with deep emotional investment. Soccer is increasingly popular in some regions, and tennis is a popular sport to play in the cities where there is less room for a cricket pitch.

Squash and bowling are urban sports among those who can afford to join the clubs that own the indoor courts or pay the fees for the lanes—space in India's cities is at a premium. Table tennis, which can be played in many homes, is both popular and egalitarian. Indoor volleyball is very popular as a recreational sport in all regions of the country and at all ages; basketball, on the other hand, has not yet attracted the attention of the urban Indians who could turn to it for recreation as so many other urban-dwellers do, and remains a sport taught in children's gym classes.

But far and away, the most popular sport in India either to watch or to play is cricket, and it is followed and pursued with the same sort of passion as soccer in Europe. Among young people, especially in rural areas throughout the subcontinent, a local cricket variant called güli-danda is widely popular. The name of the sport comes from the gilli (a stick about three to six inches long) and danda (12 to 18 inches long) used in place of a cricket bail and bat. Variants are common.

In northern India and in the Indian Army, the “game of kings”—polo—continues to be popular. India introduced polo to the Western world during the time of British rule, after the sport's lengthy history in Persia and Central Asia. Badminton is a popular youth and adult recreational sport throughout India. The game originated on the subcontinent, a British adaptation of the native sport called poona.

A recent recreational sport is throwball, which is played mainly in India and South Asia. Played at school and in informal clubs, throwball pits two teams of seven players (and five substitutes waiting on the sidelines) each on either side of a net within a rectangular playing space. The game is much like volleyball—the ball is passed back and forth without touching the net, in the hopes that the receiving team fails to catch it—but instead of being volleyed, the ball must be caught with two hands and immediately returned with one hand. Since it depends so much on reflexes more than strength, the game is easy to play with mixed groups of men and women, children of different ages, or adults and teenagers.

A team tag game native to the subcontinent is kabaddi, which has spread throughout south Asia and to the British Army. Two seven-member teams (five members in reserve) play on a court half the size of a basketball court. Each team takes turns sending players to the other side to try to tag opponents, who defend by linking hands. Formal matches are segregated by age and weight; informal play is less scrupulous about fair matches or follows the age-old convention of team captains alternating turns picking players from the assembled group, in order to form balanced teams.

...