gilli-danda

• Gilli-danda
• Gilli-Danda
• gilli danda
• Gilli Danda
• gillidanda
• guli danda

Ultimately from Sanskrit दण्ड (daṇḍa). This etymology is incomplete. You can help Wiktionary by elaborating on the origins of this term. Where is the first element from?

gilli-danda (uncountable)

1. A game played in several Asian countries, in which a large stick is used to hit a small oval-shaped piece of wood. It is played much like tipcat, baseball, and cricket.
   • 1970, Instructor, Volume 80, Instructor Publications

     It is played by children of all ages. Boys like it especially, but it is not unusual to see girls and even adults playing Gilli Danda!

   • 2004, Triveni: Journal of Indian Renaissance, Volume 73, Triveni Publishers:

     Bhuvan the hero of the film to understand 'cricket', relates it to his understanding of their native folk game of Gilli Danda. He says: ball (image of the silli thing) is gola-gola-ball, bat-phalli-phalli-bat.

   • 2011, Bhaskar Majumder, Rethinking Villages, Concept Publishing Company, page 110:

     The indigenous games like gilli-danda, goli, kabaddi, tash, kabootar urana (pigeon flying), erhi koodna (long jump), surra, cheel jhapatna, tahat etc., were commonly played by both children and adults of the village[...]

   • 2013, Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty, Shantanu Chakrabarti, Kingshuk Chatterjee, The Politics of Sport in South Asia, Routledge, page 156:

     This happens because the hero of the film asserts that cricket is only a poor copy of their own age-old children's game of gilli-danda. So this mockery inverts the colonizing mission of civilizing the childlike natives on its head and also 'desecrates the "purity" of cricket roots' asserted by the British.

   • 2013, Hachette India, Indiapedia: The All-India Factfinder:

     Also called guli danda, Gilli Danda is a sport for an amateur which is very popular among rural youth. It is known as Danguli in Bengali, Kuttiyam Kolum in Malayalam, Kitti-Pullu in Tamil, Chinni-Dandu in Kannada, Gooti-Billa in Telugu and Lappa-Duggi in Pashto. It follows the structure of cricket or baseball, only it is played with sticks.

   • 2015, Victoria Williams Ph.D., Weird Sports and Wacky Games around the World: From Buzkashi to Zorbing, ABC-CLIO, page 122:

     A game of gilli-danda continues until all players have had a turn at being on strike. The winning team is the side that records the most danda lengths and thus scores the most points.