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The whole package: Is Mohit Khatri rugby’s first breakout star?
Not just mail, postal worker Mohit Khatri also delivers expert tackles on the rugby field. There’s new interest in the sport. Could he be its new poster boy?
To anyone dropping in to the India Post office at Delhi’s Connaught Place, Mohit Khatri, 27, will seem like an ordinary employee. He spends most workdays making entries in a register and tracking parcels. But look closer. At 5’8”, muscles straining against his shirt, Khatri seems much too well-built for the job. He seems much too focused too. It’s like spotting Clark Kent after you’ve watched the Superman movie. Something isn’t quite adding up.
All this depends, of course, if you spot Khatri at the post office at all. He does lead something of a double life. In his Superman avatar, Khatri serves as captain of Indian Rugby 7s, and has also led his state team of Haryana to three rugby championship wins. At the moment, he’s training hard with his club, the Delhi Hurricanes, for an all-India tournament. If you’ve watched even a bit of rugby, it is no less than a gladiatorial battle.
The sport is heating up in India. The first-ever edition of the Rugby Premier League (RPL) was held in Mumbai in June, with Indian and international players across six teams. Khatri, hybrid player for Bengaluru Bravehearts, was the most expensive among them. The franchise acquired him for ₹4.75 lakh. It was a nail-biting series. Bengaluru Bravehearts finished in fourth position, while underdogs Chennai Bulls won the league and took home ₹45 lakh in prize money.
But Khatri is just hitting his stride and starting to pay attention to the bigger picture. “The league gave Indian rugby players an opportunity to go shoulder-to-shoulder with international ones we have been watching over the years,” he says. It made him realise how far he, and the game, need to go. “If we want to play at the Olympics and get recognition, we have a lot of work to do.”
Field of dreams
For most rugby players in India, the first step is often introducing people to the game itself. Rugby is played on a field just like football. But unlike football, rugby uses an oval-shaped ball. Players can pick it up, run across the field with it, and kick it too. It’s a heavy-contact sport for the teams of seven. There are intense tackles and huddles, full-body collisions are common, and scoring depends on how far you can kick the ball or run with it. So, players typically develop a “rugby bod”: Bulky, broad, muscular, but supple enough to move like athletes half their size.
Khatri’s own induction into the game is the kind of made-for-biopic story that filmmakers love. He grew up in Kundli, Haryana, the son of a housewife and a father who moved from farming to running a small business. Khatri grew up trying out everything: Cricket, football, wrestling and kabaddi, until his cousin Vikas Khatri, ten years older and captain of the Indian rugby team from 2016- 2022, told him to “stop fooling around with different sports and try rugby”.
It was 2011. Khatri, then 13, was eager to give it a shot. His cousins Prince Khatri and Neeraj Khatri also signed up. “Vikas’s success inspired us. We trained at a small field near the village and later at the Delhi Hurricanes Rugby Club.” It worked out better than the captain envisioned – while Vikas Khatri has retired and serves as a coach, Khatri and his cousins have all made it to the Rugby India League on different teams. This makes them possibly India’s only family with four cousins in rugby.
Making the pitch
Sporting life outside of cricket is tough. With a relatively unknown sport such as rugby, it’s tougher. If this is the first time you’re reading about rugby (and thank you for making it this far!) it’s because we’ve only had a men’s national team since 1998, a women’s one since 2009 and 27 state teams since 2014.
Most urban Indians probably know of the sport because actor Rahul Bose actively promoted it when the men’s team was formed. Khatri was born that year – which makes the game no more than a generation old. Bose is now the president of Rugby India, the governing body for the sport in the country, but was also a part of the Indian team in its first decade. “I actually started playing rugby 42 years ago in 1983. It was present in just a few cities, schools and clubs,” he says. “Today it is played in the hinterland as well as tribal areas. We have district- and national-level tournaments, and it is a part of Khelo India.”
In small towns, however, it’s still a strange new game, full of firsts, new records and unexpected challenges. “In the early years, friends would pull our leg over getting into the sport,” Khatri recalls. “Senior panchayat members also needed convincing to give us space to play. We had to use the same field that was used for cricket and football.”
Khatri did odd jobs in those early years. He was a gym trainer between 2019-20 to earn enough money to play rugby on the side. Up until 2015, when he’d been selected to play for Haryana and led the state team to gold in the three national tournaments, he still had a plan B. “A lot of Haryanvi men become bouncers at nightclubs and for events, I knew I could do that if I needed to.”
Turning point
So, when government support came in the form of the sports-quota India Post job in 2021, Khatri could finally breathe easy. Professional coaching has taught him about not just moving faster, but playing safely and recovering properly. His background in wrestling and kabaddi gave him an edge, he admits. “Both are very physical and make you comfortable with rough contact between players. That is why I like rugby and am naturally inclined towards it.”
Bose has been following Khatri’s game for years. “He has always been talented, hardworking and focussed, but the league has shown him how the game is played at the highest standard,” Bose says. “There is also a culture of openness, warmth and humility between players off the field. While Mohit has all these things, it is good to get an affirmation from the behaviour of the top players in the world.”
And Khatri is realising what the road ahead looks like, for him and for the sport. After a brief rest period, he will be back to training. Sheetal Sharma, a member of the Indian Women’s Rugby team, also trains at the Delhi Hurricanes Rugby Club and has been watching his rise. “I was a Hindi commentator for the Rugby League and I’ve watched Mohit’s game evolve. But what works well for him is his nature off the field. Indian Rugby is having a moment, and he wants it to benefit not just him but his club and fellow players as well.”
The ultimate goal, of course, is to represent India at the Olympics in 2032. Already, there’s corporate sponsorship and endorsement deals from protein brands. Might a Bollywood push give rugby the attention it needs? Mohit Khatri’s playbook already has the makings of a Diwali blockbuster.
From HT Brunch, July 12, 2025
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