Delhiwale: Gilli danda, live from Mehrauli’s Zafar Mahal

We find a group of young men playing gilli danda at a Mughal-era monument in Mehrauli. Here’s a dispatch.

It looks like cricket, but it isn’t. It is gilli danda, a game not commonly seen on Delhi’s streets. Even so, one winter afternoon we found a group of young men playing the game at Zafar Mahal, a Mughal-era monument in Mehrauli.

The men said they play gilli danda sometimes during the winter season. (Mayank Austen Soofi / HT Photo)

The players were all from the locality. They looked like college students but turned out to be people with working lives. Vaibhav Midha is a dholak player in a music orchestra. Ankit Gosai is a cab driver. Prateek Arora works in a hospital. Mohit Thurkral is a travel agent who speaks fluent French.

“We play gilli danda only sometimes, and that too in the winter,” said one of the players. Gilli danda, another explained, doesn’t have the concept of teams. The dependable Wikipedia condescendingly calls gilli danda an “amateur sport’ that “is played with two sticks: the large one called a danda, which is used to hit the smaller one, a gilli.”

The danda lay forsaken near another unmarked grave.