The rising popularity of skateboarding in India

Skateboarding in India has been simmering under the radar for over a decade but is gaining traction only now as a mainstream alternative sport

In the world of skateboarders, perfecting the ollie is a rite of passage. A fundamental trick, it involves the skater leaping into the air, no hands involved, feet not leaving the skateboard at all. “You can tear your shoes, you can injure yourself,” says Sareena Coutinho, a 16-year-old skateboarder from Mumbai. “There’s a lot of risk, but with it, a lot of fun.”

It’s been only 18 months since Coutinho was first introduced to skateboarding but she’s gotten very good at it, particularly at kickflips and varial flips. She has won a few local competitions, owns two boards now and has recently been sponsored by a new Tardeo-based skate shop, Legacy. Coutinho is inspired by skateboarder Pamela Rosa from Brazil and Cata Diaz from Barcelona. “The style, the tricks, their level,” she exclaims. “Hopefully, someday, we’ll beat them.”

The need for open public spaces

Coutinho is a regular fixture at the Carter Road Skate Park in Mumbai’s Bandra neighbourhood since it opened in late 2020. A vibrant patch of concrete at an edge of the reconstructed promenade, it’s got a bowl as well as “street elements”–stairs, ramps and rails. Coutinho and crew head out around 3 pm and clear out in two hours because, as she says, “How do you practice with so many people staring at you?” Indeed, on any given evening, there are more curious bystanders than budding skaters, roller skaters or BMXers of all ages doing their thing.

“When we opened, it felt like skaters just came out of nowhere, en masse,” says Altamash Sayed, founder of Bombay SB, the company that has designed and constructed the skatepark along Carter Road on the request of Bombay Collective’s Ayaz Basrai. “It was as if people had bought boards from Decathlon on an impulse but had no place to skate–and now they did.”

Based on a conversation he had with a Decathlon manager, Sayed estimates that there are about 30,000 active skateboarders in Mumbai. Across India, he thinks the number could be as high as 5-6 lakh. “At 22, I had to source my first skateboard from Switzerland from a friend who was visiting, and had very soon realised that I needed to build my own park. Rolling around under my building was not going to cut it,” recalls Sayed, who has also built skate parks in Aizawl in Mizoram and in Thane (expected to open soon). “Now I’m almost 40 and I’ve realised that compared to a small bowl like the one at Mumbai’s Khar Social,” which he also assisted in building in 2015, “public parks have a lot of pull.”

Keeping the wheels turning

Skating has been around for decades, and is probably at its peak worldwide, especially since it became an Olympic sport in 2021 and finally, fully shed its “rebel” origins. As the skateboarder and author Kyle Beachy writes in his memoir The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life (2021), skateboarding is “every bit as relevant to our moment as yoga, tarot, protest, facism, or cooking…To know skateboarding is to know more completely the rigors, rewards, and negotiations of being human.”

In India, skateboarding has been simmering under the radar for over a decade. Today, it is a combination of access to equipment, merchandise, the culture (including indie outfits started by senior skaters and enthusiasts) and the wild mushrooming of parks countrywide that’s elevating skateboarding from a subculture into a mainstream alternative sport.

“Everywhere in the world–from Brazil to China–skateboarding has picked up once people began to build their own ramps, parks and bowls,” says Abhishek “Shakenbake”, founder of Holystoked Collective. “It takes about 10-15 years.” For the uninitiated, Holystoked Collective is the OG of India’s skateboarding scene. Along with being a crew that supports rising talent, these “local gardeners of concrete” have built parks across the country. Shake has lost count of the number of parks they’ve built since their first, in Bengaluru’s HSR Layout, shut down in 2013–two years after it was opened. From Chennai to Gwalior and Ahmedabad to Mahabalipuram, there’s a Holystoked park everywhere.

Their latest park opened in Pune during the last week of May this year to much fanfare: skaters from around the country converged to celebrate, film each other and show off some “gnarly” tricks. “For a community to grow, it needs safe spaces, where it can grow without being told off,” says Shake, who has also helped build skate parks in the Maldives, Myanmar and Bolivia. “And skating is impossible to do if you’re doing it alone.”

Shake’s first board was secured from a friend returning from Dubai. His maiden encounter with skateboarding was through the film franchise Back to the Future (you’d be surprised by how little impact the video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has had on the genesis of India’s skateboarding community). “The Internet was not what it is now, and who had heard of skate magazines here?”

Then 25 years old and a law student, Shake found a group of like-minded skaters who hung out at a private space built by British skater Nick Smith–who has been, to many–the godfather of India’s skate community. Smith built the first-ever bowl in India in Goa in the early 2000s. In the 2010s, he built skate parks, helped forge collectives, organise skate jams (the first one, ironically, at Carter Road in 2011) as well as Homegrown’s Third Eye tour, and broker deals with brands such as Vans, Quiksilver, Levi’s and Red Bull for collaborations and sponsorships.

“In India, it’s been one step forward, two steps back–with a big headache,” laughs Smith over a phone call from London. Smith has been skating since the 1970s, when skating first became popular in the West. He has seen it rise as part of the counterculture, die out worldwide in the 1990s and then be resurrected by Nike in the early 2000s, “transformed into a global machine like any other sport”. Now 60 and retired from the business, he keeps an eye on the scene in India. “I like watching the young blood coming up. They’re not hampered by being 25 or 30 when they’re picking up tricks.”

Attempts towards social transformation

In fact, India’s fledgling scene reminds Smith of the time when he began; “when the parents had made a few quid and the kids could have a little time to smoke a joint or something. The previous generation didn’t have that choice, they had to hit the ground running, and keep running.” In this context, he’s happy to have witnessed some social disruption in India: kids from Bengaluru, Dharavi and other places who “haven’t had to go into some god-awful job and where they get chewed out by some fat, nasty boss. And that’s really glorious.”

Skating’s link with social change runs deep in India. Janwaar Castle’s immense success has transformed the town of Panna in Madhya Pradesh. Girl Skate India is an organisation that has been encouraging girls to come out to skate since 2015. The SiSP school in Kovalam is producing some of the finest skateboarders in the country, including Rahul Rafi and Vidhya Das. Beyond this, almost every city now has its own skate scene–with crews (Mumbai’s coolest include Meteoric and Skate Flames), collectives and competitions–that takes on the character of the city itself, according to Shake.

Ask anyone in the skating scene and they will tell you that the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021 is more an acknowledgement of skating’s immense popularity in the world–of how it has affected everything from pop culture to fashion (brands like Supreme and Palace were born in the bowl)–rather than the other way around. “I mean, they’re introducing breakdancing in Paris 2024 [at the Olympics],” says Shake. “It’s them trying to stay relevant to the youth who may no longer be interested in watching athletics.”

However, Shake admits that it could change how the “powers that be” could perceive the sport. “The Roller Skating Federation of India now has to hold competitions and figure out rankings on the world level. They have to now spend money towards this.” It’s all become a lot more serious now, there’s a lot of skill on display, especially on Instagram. “It’s a tall order to ask a kid to not only practise and improve skills, but also raise the funds to actually go there.” But, he reckons, in the next 4-5 years, we’ll have kids who’ll be on par with the best in

Until then, skate culture will continue to grow. Large-scale events like Jugaad, an annual national-level competition held in Bengaluru, will continue to spotlight the best. Holystoked hopes to begin pressing its own boards soon, instead of sourcing them from China like most others. Down the line, if Sayed can wing it, Bombay SB will host India’s first-ever Skate League (like the IPL) for the country’s best skaters. Meanwhile, all of them agree on the need to continue to build more parks.

“I want to do this because I know what it did for us,” says Shake. “Because, as they say: If you build it, they will come.”

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