A Sport Is Born: Inside The Bold Bet To Make India Fall For Muay Thai

Fighters performing Wai Kru, the slow, ritual dance every Muay Thai bout begins with.© NDTV

Under the chandeliers of The Grand in Vasant Kunj, two fighters in traditional Thai headbands moved through the Wai Kru, the slow, ritual dance every Muay Thai bout begins with, a bow to teachers, ancestors, and parents, performed centuries before anyone in the room was born. It was a strange thing to watch in a New Delhi ballroom. It was also, in a sense, the whole point. The event was billed as "Unboxing the Spirit of Muay Thai", and it marked the formal launch of Tero India's push to plant Thailand's national sport in Indian soil. What was actually being unveiled was an experiment: can a 700-year-old combat discipline become a mainstream Indian sport, the way cricket did, the way kabaddi is trying to?

The Pitch: Not A Launch, A Birth

Chandrakant Singh (CK to almost everyone) is trying to answer that question. As MD and CEO of Tero India, and a partner at parent company Tero Entertainment, he has spent the past month launching not one but two sports in the country, starting with 3x3 basketball and now Muay Thai.

On being asked how much money is going into promoting Muay Thai in India, he told NDTV, "It is not driven by money, it's not driven by business or profit value... It is driven by how you make this a culture in India. The moment you're able to do that, the money value and the investment becomes a secondary part of it."

Pretty much what Ravi Kishan has taught us all (through reels), always build a brand yourself first; money follows (my brother).

The culture of Muay Thai, CK explained, gets built in three ways. Through competition: events and matches that put the sport in front of people, but that people watch and walk away from without it becoming part of their lives. The other way is through gyms: a physical space that turns Muay Thai from an occasional spectacle into a daily habit. And the most effective way is making it a part of everyone's childhood, folding the sport into school academies, the way physical training is already taught in schools, so that children grow up thinking of it not as combat but as self-defence.

"If we map these three things, we can make any sport popular," he said. "We can commercialise any sport. We can take any sport to a good level, to an international level. That's the invention." For now, the rollout stays deliberately small: one academy each in Delhi and Mumbai to start. CK doesn't call it a pilot, he calls it a launch. "You come to know more about your product when you launch it," he said.

The Fighter Who Got There First

While Tero was still drawing up its three-stage India plan on paper, Priya Vats was already living it, years ahead of the infrastructure now being built around her.

Vats became the first Indian woman to fight at Bangkok's storied Lumpinee Boxing Stadium, competing on sponsorship in a sport that, back home, barely had a name. Her route there was neither short nor linear. She entered combat sports in 2012 through an MMA reality show, then spent two years in a private-sector job, training as an amateur Muay Thai fighter on the side, squeezing fight camps around a career that had nothing to do with fighting. In 2019, she travelled to Thailand with an MMA team and tried out for Muay Thai instead, staying on to train there for three years before the pandemic forced her back to India.

Today, she and her husband, fellow Muay Thai fighter Prateek Vats, run gyms in Ghaziabad and Mohali, teaching a sport that is still, in her telling, misunderstood by the very people it could serve best.

"Don't go with the mindset of becoming a champion," is her advice to beginners. "Learn the skill first. Learn it as self-defence." Training at her gyms starts at around Rs 3,000 a month, with flexible, cheaper, alternate-day options, a deliberate low bar to entry in a country where most people arrive at a gym chasing quick results and leave when they don't get them fast enough. "You won't become a champion in a day or two," she told NDTV.

The numbers she works with tell their own story about how early this all still is: roughly 10 men want to learn Muay Thai for every two women who walk into her gyms, and organised Muay Thai events remain rare in India even as an amateur circuit quietly grows underneath. She has also watched something shift on the margins. Gyms can no longer get away with cutting corners, she says, "in the age of social media", where students compare notes and call out shortcuts in real time.

Vats' own struggle with money along the way is not incidental to her advice, it is the source of it. "I struggled with money," she said, "but if anyone wants to do it, they can. It's just a question of will."

Thailand's Stake In The Story

If CK is building the business case and Vats is proof that the demand already exists in pockets, the credibility is meant to come from Bangkok.

The Sports Authority of Thailand (SAT) has attached itself to the initiative not merely as an endorsement but as an infrastructure partner. In a video address played at the launch, SAT Governor Gongsak Yodmani framed Muay Thai as one of Thailand's principal instruments of soft power, a martial art the Royal Thai Government treats as both a cultural export and an economic one. SAT's backing, he said, would rest on three pillars: delivering an accredited curriculum to train Indian coaches and athletes, building sports tourism between the two countries, and supporting gym accreditation, certified equipment, and event organisation on the ground.

Speaking to NDTV, CK was careful to note that SAT's contribution isn't primarily financial. "They would make a significant investment, I am not just talking about the money part of it," he said. "I am talking about their people... the whole thing which is required from their side, they will put into us." SAT, in his framing, is less a funder than a rulebook, the body that will keep Indian Muay Thai tethered to its Thai roots rather than drifting into pure spectacle. "They will ensure it is not just entertainment while it goes to grassroots development," he said, "so that it is a cultural tie."

Finding The Next Priya

The unglamorous part of any sport's origin story is talent-spotting. The talent exists, scattered and self-made, largely without institutional backing.

Tero says it has a scouting team already working to integrate with boxing federations and the Sports Authority of India, hunting for exactly the kind of fighter Priya already is.

Three years from now, CK wants Muay Thai to be a sport Indians play, watch, and take up instinctively when they think about their health. Whether that happens will depend less on the ballroom launches and video messages from Bangkok, and more on whether India can build enough gyms like the ones Priya Vats already runs, quietly, on a shoestring, one student at a time, before the money arrives to do it at scale.

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