How golf in India is unshackling itself from its tag as ‘an elite old man’s sport’  

Despite its arrival in India nearly two centuries ago, golf has always been a niche hobby. Now, as younger Indians That is now slowly changing.

Something unprecedented happened on the first Saturday of August 2021. Indian Twitter was abuzz about golf: a subject it hardly cares about. Usually, a live game gets less attention in India than, say, highlights of a 20-year-old cricket match. But on that Saturday, at 2 am IST, Indians were up, looking up definitions of birdies and bogeys, reading explainers, and refreshing the leaderboard. They all mentioned one name. #AditiAshok. A 23-year-old female Indian golfer, on the brink of winning a historic Olympic medal in Tokyo, had made tens of thousands wake up in the wee hours to watch a sport they had never watched before.

Aditi agonisingly missed out on a medal on the final day, to finish fourth. But she came close — close enough to push her countrymen to the edge of their seats, close enough to slightly lift her sport’s profile in her country. Her performance signalled the drifting away of golf being “an elite old man’s sport” in India. 

Golf in India is old. Really old. Older than India itself, if you consider August 15, 1947, as the country’s date of birth. It even predates the First World War and, in sporting history, the football world cup, Wimbledon tennis championships, and the first-ever modern Olympics.

As one of the earliest colonial imports, the British brought golf to the subcontinent in 1829 when they established the Royal Calcutta Golf Club. (It is the oldest golf club in the world outside Great Britain.) Soon more clubs sprouted in different directions — the Royal Bombay Golf Club in 1842, the Bangalore Golf Club in 1876 and the Madras Gymkhana golf club in 1877. 

All this, while golf in the United States, which is now considered the leading nation in the sport, did not even exist. Europe was still getting introduced to it. India meanwhile, had almost half a dozen fully functioning clubs by the beginning of the 20th Century.

Right from its beginning, however, golf has largely remained a rich man’s game. The high cost associated with memberships, course fees, equipment, and accessories made the sport exclusive to the upper class. This is especially true in India, where the rich-poor divide is starker than in the major golf-playing nations. Most of the courses here are tough to access as they are either owned by the private clubs that charge a hefty membership fee, or the Indian army. A golf set containing a driver, a wood, a hybrid, seven sets of irons, and a putter costs anywhere between ₹40,000 to ₹2,00,000 in India.

Because of its exclusivity to the elite, golf has never grown popular in India. There have been sporadic successes at the professional level, just a handful of internationally recognised Indian names, and very few youngsters taking up the sport.