Kabaddi
A South Asian contact team sport: the raider must touch opponents without drawing breath and get back over the midline.
Quick Facts
IndiaCharacter & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Kabaddi
Kabaddi is a South Asian contact team sport that rests on wrestling skill and on breath. Two teams of seven face each other on a rectangular court divided into two halves; in the standard form played at the Asian Games the area measures roughly thirteen by ten metres. The teams take turns sending a raider into the opponents' half. Throughout the raid he must keep repeating the word kabaddi, which proves to the referee that he has not drawn breath, touch as many opponents as he can and get back over the midline before they hold him. He scores a point for each opponent touched, and the touched players leave the court; if the defenders hold him, the point is theirs and he is the one who leaves. The match runs two halves of twenty minutes with a five-minute break. The defence is pure wrestling: catching an ankle or a wrist, chaining defenders together and dragging the raider down, with no grabbing of clothing or hair allowed. Kabaddi has two main variants, the standard and the Punjabi circle style, and a string of local names; in Bangladesh, as hadudu, it is the national sport. It has been on the Asian Games programme since 1990, has had its own world championship since the 1990s, and since 2014 India has run the professional Pro Kabaddi League.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.