The Bearwood Brothers Who Brought Kabaddi To Britain

For this week's I Choose Birmingham newsletter I got in touch with my former employers to chat about ancient Indian sport Kabaddi ahead of the World Cup, which comes to the Midlands later this month.

When I arrived in Birmingham in the late 90s my first regular paid job was for a small documentary company called Endboard, based down a narrow driveway just off Bearwood high street. Run by two brothers, Yugesh and Sunandan Walia, it was a serious workplace but also enjoyably homely. At lunchtime we would all gather on the sofas to eat our sandwiches and watch the 1 o’clock news. Later in the afternoon Sunandan’s daughters would often drop in on their way back from school to do their homework.

My main role was to develop successful pitches for new programme commissions, which I signally failed to do. I was also slowly cataloguing the Endboard archive, and one day while digging through the shelves in the back room I came across a box of videotapes labelled ‘KABADDI’. Immediately I saw a vision of men and women performing feats of balletic agility on a dusty, sun-baked field, while shouting the word ‘kabaddi’ repeatedly. Loosely comparable to the game of tag, the rules involve two opposing teams making raids on each other’s side of the pitch. Once the ‘raider’ has tagged an opponent, they are not allowed to breathe in until they reach home – hence the chanting.

Like many others of my generation, I had been introduced to this ancient Indian sport as a hungover student watching Channel 4 on a Saturday morning. Now it turned out that these intense postcards from the subcontinent had a Bearwood postmark, with Yugesh directing the action while Sunandan produced and provided excitable commentary. As the Kabaddi World Cup lands in the West Midlands for the first time this month, I got back in touch with the flying Walia brothers to find out how this remarkable footnote in the history of TV sport came about.

Yugesh: Sunandan had pitched an idea to do with hockey to Channel Four, because England had won the Olympic gold. And the commissioning editor was interested. He called us in and he liked the idea, but then, while we were waiting to finish our coffees, he said, ‘what I'm really looking for is something to replace sumo in the schedules. You know, a foreign sport.’ So we immediately thought of kabaddi and told him about it. And he said, ‘Get away. That's not real.’ There was a game taking place in Huddersfield a couple of weekends later, so he flew up to see that.

Sunandan: When we got there, I'd hoped that they would be well behaved, but they'd come to have fun. So when they opened their boots, I could see how much whisky was in there. And very soon, the match devolved into a fisticuffs match rather than a kabaddi match. And I thought, Oh, this is not going to get commissioned. This is a disaster. But we persuaded him to let us shoot some test footage in India.

Y: There was an All-India tournament way down in the middle of nowhere. Sunandan brought some footage back, and he said, ‘This is great, let's do it.’ So we went in for hockey, and came out with kabaddi, basically. It was a nine-part series, and because we wanted total control, we had to organise our own tournament in Calcutta.

S: We built towers and camera positions especially [like the one above]. We thought, how do we introduce this to Britain? Because it has to be interesting enough to catch people's imagination. And so we needed to field the best possible teams in India. We decided that the tournament should have eight teams, because that's all we could manage, eight men's and eight women’s teams. And that was pretty groundbreaking in itself, to have women playing a contact sport on TV. It’s played within a small area, and you are supposed to tag each other, and to tag requires a special sort of skill. If you have that skill of pulling off the raid and coming out again after having touched another player, you become a star – like Balwinder Singh, who would come and play in the UK leagues every summer. It was an amateur sport at that time, so you’d have teams connected with the police and the railways and so on, and each team had its own character. The Combined Forces, for example, had an excellent team, but they were very disciplined compared to, let's say, Maharashtra, who were much more free-flowing.

ICB: How did the shoot go? You had to build a tournament from scratch — it sounds like a logistical headache.

Y: It was challenging, yeah. There were multiple cameras. And we are documentary makers. We’d never shot sport before but we hired a sports director, Nick Kennerley, who came out with us. And then when it came to the edit we were also a bit lost, because we’d never edited a sport before either, and it was a mess to start with. The commissioning editor, Mike Miller, was fantastic. He said, ‘Look, you're documentary makers. You tell stories, don't you? Well, every game has a story. You’ve just got to tell the story of that game.’ And suddenly it clicked. So you’re working out what the strategy is. Once a raid has been made, what are the others going to do? What's their thinking?

S: For the Indians, it was a bit of a shock to see a Channel 4 production turn up and spend so much money on something that was really seen as a village sport. One of the guys on the organising committee came up to me privately and said, ‘Are you sure you're doing the right thing? You're spending so much money’.

Kabaddi made its UK TV debut on 5 May 1991, just before The Wonder Years on a Sunday evening. Channel 4 later ran it on Saturday mornings, sandwiched between Trans World Sport and Gazzetta Italia, where it quickly picked up a cult following.

Y: Mike Miller called us after the first screening, and he said, ‘I won my bet’. I said what are you talking about? He said there was a bet within Channel Four that it wouldn't get 1 million viewers, and he'd bet that it would. In the end it was 1.1 million.

S: My perception is that other people in the world of sports broadcasting rubbished it — they didn't like this foreign sport that had suddenly erupted on their screens. But the general audience — it was a mix of young and middle-aged — really took to it. And what was interesting was the reaction it had back in India. Something that had been seen as a rural game came to be taken very seriously. And now there's thousands of rupees put into the sport. It's like the IPL, with auctions and everything.

The Kabaddi World Cup takes place from 17-23 March in Coventry, Wolverhampton, Walsall and Birmingham. A selection of Endboard’s early work will be screening as part of Flatpack Festival (9-17 May).

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