Is Hockey India's National Game?
Hockey is not India's national game because India has never officially declared one. Here is what a 2012 RTI reply and Parliament answers actually said, and why schoolbooks still teach otherwise.
By Sushant Kataria· 6 min read
No. India has no officially declared national game. In 2012 the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports told Lucknow student Aishwarya Parashar, in reply to her RTI query, that it had not notified any sport as the national game; the same position was repeated in a Rajya Sabha reply published by PIB that December.
Hockey is the game most Indians still name first, and for understandable reasons: eight Olympic men's golds, Major Dhyan Chand's birthday as National Sports Day, and decades of textbook and quiz-book certainty. Popular usage is not the same as a government notification.
What the government actually said
The widely reported Parashar RTI began with a child's reasonable question: when had the Centre notified hockey as the national game? The query reached the Sports Ministry. Under Secretary S.P.S. Tomar replied that no order or notification in the ministry's records named hockey (or any other sport) as the national game; it was "known to be a national game in general parlance." India Today and other papers carried the story in August 2012, just as London's Olympics put Indian hockey back in the headlines.
Parliament closed the loop the same year. On 13 December 2012, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Youth Affairs and Sports Jitendra Singh told the Rajya Sabha, in a written answer issued through the Press Information Bureau, that "the Government has not given status of National Game to any sports discipline" and that the ministry did not propose to do so. A later RTI reply, reported in 2020 by Business Standard from a Maharashtra teacher's query, repeated the same line: the Centre had not declared any sport the national game, preferring to promote popular disciplines rather than crown one of them.
That is the official position. Everything else is habit.
Why hockey feels like the national game
Habit was earned on Olympic turf. Hockey India's medal tally and Olympedia's India hockey record list eight men's Olympic golds: Amsterdam 1928, Los Angeles 1932, Berlin 1936, London 1948, Helsinki 1952, Melbourne 1956, Tokyo 1964 and Moscow 1980, plus silver in Rome 1960 and bronzes in Mexico 1968, Munich 1972, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024. Six straight golds from 1928 to 1956 made field hockey the clearest Indian success story of the mid-twentieth-century Games, the same Olympic calendar that also fixed odd sporting numbers such as the marathon's 42.195 km.
The face of that era is Major Dhyan Chand. Captain of the Berlin 1936 gold-winning side, he became the shorthand for Indian sporting genius. India marks National Sports Day on 29 August, his birthday: the Press Information Bureau treats the day as a tribute to him and as a national fitness occasion. In August 2021, after the Tokyo hockey teams had gripped the country, the Prime Minister announced that the Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting honour, would be renamed the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award, a decision recorded by PIB. Renaming the top award after a hockey player deepened the sense that hockey and the nation were one story, even without a gazette notification saying so.
School books and competitive-exam primers sealed the myth. Generations learnt "hockey is the national game" the way they learnt the capital of a state: as a fact to recite. When the RTI reply arrived, the surprise was not that children believed it; it was that the ministry could find no order behind the sentence.
Notified symbols, unnotified sport
India does notify some national symbols. In a written Rajya Sabha reply covered by The Hindu, the Home Ministry said the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change had notified the tiger as national animal and the peacock as national bird (re-notified on 30 May 2011 because earlier papers were missing from the ministry's files), while confirming that no such notification existed for a national flower. A copy of that 2011 wildlife re-notification is among official papers circulated by state governments, including a Puducherry memorandum that reproduces the MoEF text. The contrast matters: animal and bird sit in the gazette; a "national game" does not.
Other countries in the region have been more explicit. Bangladesh made kabaddi (ha-du-du) its national game, a point we note in our piece on where kabaddi came from. India never made an equivalent choice for hockey, cricket or anything else.
Cricket's rise, and hockey's long wait
If hockey owned the Olympic decades, cricket took the television decades. India's win at the 1983 Cricket World Cup, when Kapil Dev's side beat the West Indies at Lord's, is still treated as the moment a national audience locked onto limited-overs cricket. Satellite broadcasts, the Indian Premier League and wall-to-wall coverage later finished the job. The 22-yard pitch became the country's dominant sporting grammar, while hockey lived for long stretches in smaller halls and scarcer airtime.
That gap is why many Indians conflate "most loved" with "officially national." Popularity is measurable. Legal status is a document. India has plenty of the first for cricket and a deep historical claim for hockey; it has never issued the second for either.
Bronze, Odisha and a state that backed the sport
The belief never quite died, and recent results refreshed it. At Tokyo 2020 the men took Olympic bronze, their first hockey medal in 41 years; at Paris 2024 they took bronze again. Hockey India's tally records both. The women's team also reached a Tokyo bronze-medal match. Those campaigns put blue shirts back on primetime and sent crowds back to the terraces.
No state has done more for that revival than Odisha. In 2018 the state government, through Odisha Mining Corporation, became sponsor of India's national hockey teams, a first for any Indian state, as reported by the Indian Express. In April 2023 the Odisha Cabinet extended the sponsorship to 2033, with OMC committing about ₹434.12 crore, according to The Hindu. Bhubaneswar's Kalinga Stadium hosted the 2018 Men's Hockey World Cup; the 2023 World Cup split matches between Bhubaneswar and Rourkela, where the new Birsa Munda International Hockey Stadium was built for the event. State patronage is not a national-game declaration, but it is the clearest modern signal that hockey still has a political and financial home in India.
The short answer
Hockey is India's most decorated Olympic team sport and the emotional shorthand for sporting nationalism, from Dhyan Chand to National Sports Day to Odisha's World Cups. It is not, and has never been shown by notification to be, the national game. The Sports Ministry's 2012 RTI reply and the December 2012 Rajya Sabha answer are blunt: India has not conferred that status on any discipline. The tiger and the peacock have gazette paper behind them. Hockey has gold medals, statues, schoolbook memory and a state that still pays the bills. That is a powerful inheritance. It is not an official title.