India has no official national sport: in February 2020 the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports said in reply to a Right to Information request that the central government has never declared any sport or game the national game. Field hockey is the traditional answer, earned by eight Olympic gold medals between 1928 and 1980, while cricket is the de facto national sport by any measure of money, crowds and television audience. Kabaddi, the contact game codified in Maharashtra in 1921, is the third contender and has the strongest claim to being Indian in origin. The right answer depends on whether you mean law (none), history (hockey) or love (cricket).
The 2020 RTI Reply and the Hockey Myth in Schoolbooks
For decades Indian general-knowledge books listed hockey as the national game, and many still do. The claim has no legal basis. When the question was put to the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports through the Right to Information Act, the answer reported by The Times of India on 13 February 2020 was plain: the central government had not declared any sport as the national game of the country. Olympics.com later made the same point in an explainer, noting that hockey, kabaddi and cricket are all popular answers and none of them is correct in the legal sense.
There have been attempts to change that. In July 2018 the government of Odisha wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking him to declare field hockey the national sport. Odisha had a direct stake: in February 2018 the state government signed a five-year deal to sponsor the men's and women's national hockey teams, the first state in India to sponsor a national team, and its capital, Bhubaneswar, hosted the Men's Hockey World Cup from 28 November to 16 December that year. No declaration followed, and the national-sport question remains a matter of tradition rather than statute.
Field Hockey: Eight Olympic Golds from Amsterdam 1928 to Moscow 1980
Hockey's claim rests on a run of results no other country has matched. India's hockey team made its Olympic debut in 1928 in Amsterdam, beat Austria 6–0, Belgium 9–0 and Switzerland 5–0, and won the final 3–0 against the Netherlands under captain Jaipal Singh Munda without conceding a goal all tournament. At Los Angeles in 1932 India beat the United States 24–1, with Roop Singh scoring 10 and Dhyan Chand 8, still the largest margin of victory in any Olympic match. At Berlin in 1936, with Dhyan Chand as captain, India beat Germany 8–1 in the final, the biggest winning margin in an Olympic final.
The 1948 London final was the one that mattered most at home. India, independent for barely a year, beat Great Britain 4–0 in the first meeting between the two sides. Golds followed in 1952, when Balbir Singh Sr. scored five goals in a 6–1 final against the Netherlands, an Olympic final record that still stands, and in 1956, with a 1–0 win over Pakistan. That made six consecutive titles and a 30-match unbeaten Olympic run, which ended with a 0–1 loss to Pakistan in the 1960 Rome final. India won again in Tokyo in 1964 and, for a record eighth time, in Moscow in 1980, beating Spain 4–3 in the final.
Dhyan Chand (1905–1979), born in Allahabad and a soldier in the British Indian Army, is the face of that era. He won gold in 1928, 1932 and 1936 and, by his own count in his autobiography Goal, scored 570 goals in 185 international matches. The state has honoured him in ways it has never honoured any sport as such: his birthday, 29 August, is National Sports Day, and India's highest sporting award is the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna. The stadium in New Delhi that hosted hockey at the 2010 Commonwealth Games also bears his name.
Hockey India, Bhubaneswar and the Comeback Bronzes of Tokyo and Paris
The governing body has changed more often than the results. The Indian Hockey Federation was formed in Gwalior on 7 November 1925 and made India the first non-European member of the International Hockey Federation. After the federation was dismissed in 2008, Hockey India was established on 20 May 2009 and is now the body recognised by the sports ministry for both the men's and women's game.
Results fell away after 1980. The switch to artificial turf at the 1976 Montreal Games blunted India's grass-court skills, the team failed to qualify for Beijing in 2008, and it finished last at London 2012. The revival has centred on Odisha: Bhubaneswar, whose Kalinga Stadium laid India's first Olympic-standard water-based pitch, staged the 2018 World Cup, and the state began bankrolling both national teams in 2018. At the Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021, India beat Germany 5–4 for bronze, its first Olympic hockey medal in 41 years, and at Paris 2024 it beat Spain 2–1 for a second straight bronze. India has also won the Asian Games men's title five times: 1966, 1998, 2014, 2022 and 2026.
Cricket: From the Oriental Cricket Club of 1848 to Lord's in 1983
If hockey has the history, cricket has the country. The British brought the game in the early 1700s, and the first documented instance of cricket being played in India dates from 1721. In 1848 the Parsi community in Bombay formed the Oriental Cricket Club, the first cricket club established by Indians. The Board of Control for Cricket in India was founded in Madras on 1 December 1928, India played its first Test at Lord's in 1932 under C. K. Nayudu, and the first Test win came against England at Madras in 1952, in India's 24th match.
The turning point was 25 June 1983, when Kapil Dev's side, appearing in its first World Cup final, beat the two-time champions West Indies at Lord's. A second 50-over title followed in 2011. In the shortest format India won the first T20 World Cup in 2007, again in 2024, and in March 2026 beat New Zealand by 96 runs in the final to become the first team to win the T20 World Cup three times and the first to win it at home. The women's team won its first 50-over World Cup on home soil in November 2025, beating South Africa in the final. Sachin Tendulkar, who played 664 international matches, remains the highest run-scorer in international cricket with 34,357 runs and the only batter with 100 international centuries.
Eden Gardens, Motera and the Indian Premier League
Cricket's claim to being the people's sport is easiest to see in the grounds. Eden Gardens in Kolkata, established in 1864, holds 68,000 and is home to the Kolkata Knight Riders. The Narendra Modi Stadium in Motera, Ahmedabad, rebuilt on the site of the old Sardar Patel Stadium and opened in February 2020, holds 132,000, making it the largest cricket stadium in the world and the largest stadium of any kind by capacity. It hosted the final of the 2023 Cricket World Cup and the 2026 T20 World Cup final.
The money is just as lopsided. The BCCI is a private body that takes no grants from the sports ministry, yet it is the wealthiest cricket board in the world, with income of about ₹18,700 crore in 2023–24. Its Indian Premier League, founded in 2007 with ten city franchises today, sold its current media rights, awarded in 2022, for about US$6.2 billion, more than double the previous contract, and the Broadcast Audience Research Council rates it the most-watched sports event in India. No other sport in the country comes close, which is why most Indians asked to name the national sport today will say cricket regardless of what the ministry says.
Kabaddi: The Village Game Codified in Maharashtra in 1921
Kabaddi is the contender with the deepest Indian roots. Historians such as Ronojoy Sen place its origins in the Vedic period, and it has regional names across the country: chedugudu in Andhra Pradesh, ha-du-du in Bengal, sadugudu in Tamil Nadu and hu-tu-tu in western India. The first written rules were drawn up in present-day Maharashtra in 1921 and revised in 1923, when the first national tournament was held in Baroda. An Amravati-based club demonstrated it at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the All India Kabaddi Federation was set up in 1950, and the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India in 1972, the same year Bangladesh made kabaddi its official national sport.
Kabaddi became an Asian Games medal event at Beijing in 1990, and India has won the men's gold at nearly every edition since, the exception being 2018, when Iran won both the men's and women's titles. Indian teams have won every Kabaddi World Cup staged by the International Kabaddi Federation. The Pro Kabaddi League, launched in 2014 with eight franchises and expanded to 12 in 2017, is described as the second most-watched sports league in India after the IPL, which gives kabaddi a solid claim to second place in the country's affections.
Hockey, Cricket or Kabaddi: Matching the Answer to the Question
Each answer is defensible if you say what you mean. If the question is legal, India has no national sport, and the 2020 ministry reply is the source to cite. If it is historical, hockey is the answer: eight Olympic golds, Dhyan Chand's birthday as National Sports Day and Odisha's 2018 campaign all point that way. If it is about what a billion-plus people actually watch, argue over and spend money on, cricket wins by a wide margin. Kabaddi, the oldest and most Indian of the three, sits between them as the sport most likely to be recognised as indigenous.
The split mirrors India's neighbours. Bangladesh formally gave kabaddi national-game status in 1972 (the background is in our national sport of Bangladesh post), while Pakistan, where field hockey is widely called the national game even as cricket draws the bigger following, is covered in the national sport of Pakistan. Cricket's route from England to India and the rest of the former empire is mapped in the geography of cricket-playing nations.