In March 1872, a Times of India (ToI) correspondent reported from Bareilly in the North-Western Provinces of British India (now Uttar Pradesh) on a new craze: “All the world here is nearly mad on the subject of ‘ badminton ’, the newly fashioned game of shuttlecock across a rope.”This was one of the first mentions in ToI of a sporting passion that would suddenly sweep India. And unlike many passing crazes this would have lasting effects. It would help formalise a game that had barely received its name. It would gain more participants that any other sport, even cricket, brought in by the British. It would spread from India to other parts of Asia, like Indonesia and China, that remain powerhouses for the sport.Most important of all, from the point of view of India’s sporting ambitions, that long-ago badminton craze would help develop the infrastructure that would set India on the path to success, most notably with PV Sindhu recently becoming the first Indian to win gold at the World Badminton Championships. She is part of a great generation of Indian badminton players, like Saina Nehwal and Srikanth Kidambi , the doubles specialist Jwala Gutta and, from a bit earlier, Pullela Gopichand, who has also mentored many of the current players.Before him too were international champions like Syed Modi, whose life was tragically cut short, Prakash Padukone and Nandu Natekar. And as early as 1947, badminton gave India possibly its first sportsman to reach an international final as an individual player when Prakash Nath reached the finals of the All-England Badminton Championship, even as his home in Lahore was ransacked and he became a refugee.Badminton is by some estimates, the most widely played sport in the world after soccer, yet its barely taken seriously in the Western world, with the odd exception of Denmark. Its centre of power is Asia and in recognition of this, in 2005 the Badminton World Federation moved to Malaysia (most global governing bodies for sports are located in Switzerland or Monaco).Badminton originated with toys called battledores and shuttlecocks. Children used the bats to keep the shuttles in the air. Many people still play like this, at a leisure level, hitting around a plastic shuttlecock. But at the professional level it changes abruptly, almost becoming a different game, using more aerodynamic feather shuttles – making it one sport dependent on animal products, something animal rights activists aren’t happy about – and requiring intense levels of athleticism and strength. The fastest serve recorded in professional tennis is 263 km/h; in 2017 in Bengaluru a Danish badminton player hit a smash at 426 km/h.Modern badminton began when battledore and shuttlecock players started facing each other across a rope or net. In Betty Uber’s book A Brief History of Badminton from 1870 to 1949 she notes “an eighteenth-century French print, which depicts a game in progress definitely resembling an archaic form of Badminton.” There is also the long-standing story that British officers in Poona started playing this way and took the game back to Britain. The one thing that seems certain is that at some point games was played this way indoors, in one of the huge halls at Badminton Park, the British home of the Duke of Beaufort.Even this date isn’t clear – Uber suggests 1870, but also notes a reference to a 1860 booklet published by a London toy dealer titledBadminton Battledore – A New Game, but no copy of this has survived. But as the ToI reference from 1872 shows, the name had clearly been fixed by then and the game had come, or come back, to India.It was two years later, in 1874, that the craze really swept India. “Mahabaleshwar has gone Badminton mad. The woods are deserted, and old and young spend their evenings in dark spots playing this evidently fascinating game,” reported ToI in May from the hill station near Bombay. The writer noted disapprovingly that this obsession was coming in the way of the main reason young ladies were there, to find good marriage prospects.In February, a Calcutta paper reported a shortage of shuttlecocks. A local firm had ordered “25 gross”, meaning 3,600 shuttles, but before they came “a scientific artisan in the bazaar, we are informed, essayed to make some, but failed signally.” It would only be in the 1920s that Indian shuttle making would develop, in Baniban village near Calcutta. This survives, using duck feathers from Bangladesh, but is struggling in the face of competition from China and Japan.In 1874 badminton was so popular in Ooty that year that a local writer wrote a spoof of Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech, describing the seven ages of Badminton players. In Simla, summer capital of the Raj, the rains did not stop the game: “Badminton on swampy grass and under dripping trees, and sometimes in Macintoshes and under umbrellas, but still the real game.”From Satara and Surat, Jabalpur and Faisabad, Ahmedabad and Ahmednagar, Hyderabad and Karachi (both in Sind, now in Pakistan) reports came to ToI of the badminton craze. In Delhi a group of Italian musicians made good money playing light music to accompany badminton events. In Mussoorie one of the first injuries was noted, a young lady hit in the eye by a shuttle. News of the craze even reached London – ToI reported how British magazines, like the Graphic, were talking about “The New Indian Game – Badminton.” In support for Poona’s claim to being the founding centre for badminton, in 1874 the sport seemed particularly well established there, with the construction of ‘sheds’ for it at a cost of 1000 rupees. A report from June 1874 described “a cruciform building, each limb forming one court, so that four games may go on at some time in it.” It was open on all sides, but if there was too much breeze hanging mats could enclose it.In Imperial Boredom, Jeffrey A. Auerbach’s illuminating study of the monotony of British lives in India, he notes that sports became an obsession because “officers, many of whom had grown up in military and middle-class families in rural communities, increasingly saw them as a way to alleviate boredom.” It was common not just to play existing sports, but also improvise new ones to pass the time. For example, there was stické, a kind indoor tennis using a special court, one of which was created at the Viceregal Lodge in Simla.Back in the UK one might need to be as rich as the Duke of Beaufort to be create a special court for badminton or any other game, but in India it could be done quite cheaply, and land was easily available. Most of the sports were, of course, meant for men, but badminton was deemed light enough – perhaps because of its association with toys – for ladies. And by the 1870s, a generation after the trauma of 1857, there were again many British ladies in India, many, as that Mahabaleshwar correspondent noted, in search of husbands. Badminton helped in this since in those early days it was commonly played between teams. The report from the Ahmedabad tournament of 1874 mentions a style of playing called Unicorn “one lady and two gentlemen on each side” which seems like a set up for a sports swavayamvar.In 1876 a report on Badminton matches in Simla noted that “Single versus Married is the usual match, the latter being the generally victors” – which is hardly being subtle about the intentions. By then Indians were getting interested too. A Calcutta report from 1875 mentioned a touring group of nobles from Jodhpur who “have taken kindly to badminton, at which nationalised pastime they can give points to some of the best local players.” A report from Lucknow that year described a badminton party held by Dewan Muttra Dass who “is the first native gentleman who has set a good example of badminton; it is hoped that the rest of the native gentlemen will emulate the English game.”Badminton probably seemed attractive to Indians because it could be played indoors – as Noel Coward’s song would say, only “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” This also helped with a particular group of fans, the many women in purdah. In David Gilmour’s The British in India, he quotes one witness on how “in the later 1920s purdah women in ‘gorgeous saris’ were ‘experts at badminton and volley-ball.” Indians also tweaked badminton – a ToI report from 1875 in Secunderabad describes a badminton game with “the flight of a worsted ball across an elevated netting of wire.” This kind of ball badminton, dispensing with expensive shuttles, would become an established tradition in South India.Badminton became part of club life in India, with clubs building and maintaining courts. In S. Muthiah and Ranjitha Ashok’s oral history of business life Office Chai, Planter’s Brew, AV Ram Mohan, who grew up in Nellikuppam, a town dominated by EID Parrys, recalled how in the Club over there “new Slazenger tennis balls, Montana table tennis balls, and shuttlecocks by the dozen were always available even to youngsters in those days when cost-cutting was not heard of; many youngsters became very good at racket games…” From India the British took the game to their colonies in Malaya, and the Chinese trading community took to it enthusiastically.Malayan players like Wong Peng Soon would win the first Thomas Cup tournament in 1949, at a time when Asians were simply not expected to beat Westerners. Colin Brown, in his essay on politics and Indonesian badminton, argues that it was the Chinese who took the game from Malaya to Indonesia. Many well-known Indonesian players like Rudy Hartono and Liem Swie King are of Chinese origin, though this fact has been glossed over during the many periods of anti-Chinese fervour in Indonesia. These outbursts also lead to many Indonesian Chinese badminton players leaving the country and moving to Singapore, and other parts of Asia, and ultimately China itself, where they would play a crucial role in developing the game.Badminton seems to be particularly responsive to investment in development, partly because of the difference between the amateur and professional games. Most countries don’t get beyond the amateur stage, either because other sports have a better call on resources, or perhaps because it’s hard to shake the image of badminton as a somewhat juvenile pastime. But countries which do invest in badminton seriously can get results, as Indonesia’s example proves, where the success of players like Hartono was built on by the government.Denmark is another example where a small group of players, who picked up the game from the British, managed to have a disproportionate impact by raising resources for the game. Denmark is too small to develop team sports in a big way, and not as cold as the other Scandinavian countries to focus on winter sports, and so chooses to make its mark in more niche sports, like equestrian events, and badminton. India could have had more success earlier if it had built on the legacy of the 1874 craze, in the form of the many badminton courts that were built and the access to equipment across the country. The occasional success of players like Padukone was proof of this, but it seems to have been hard to achieve more, perhaps because of the inefficiencies of a government lead sports development system.It is only now, with Gopichand’s more entrepreneurial attitude to badminton, and greater ability to raise resources, that we are seeing the successes of Sindhu, Nehwal and the rest of this ‘golden generation’ of badminton players. Finally, 145 years after badminton first became a craze in India, and then rest of the world, we seem ready to take control of this part of our sporting heritage.