Quizzing redux: The return of a niche pursuit
Quizzing was once viewed as a nerdy and somewhat elitist hobby. Now, thousands of new enthusiasts are making it mainstream again, especially in Kolkata
It’s a hot day in May in Kolkata, and the grounds of the Dalhousie Institute in the central part of the city are abuzz with activity. Within the grounds looms the hall in which the Neil O’Brien Dalhousie Institute Open Quiz is to be held. This year, the event took place on 10 May, and a record 108 teams of four members each took part in an attempt to win the Errol Cowper trophy,.
Started in 1970, the DI Open is the second oldest open – meaning age is no bar for participation – quiz in India, the first being the Eddie Hyde Memorial Quiz started in 1969. The latter is also in Kolkata and was also at one point conducted by Neil O’Brien, famed quiz master and father of parliamentarian Derek O’Brien. The two quizzes are part of a ‘Grand Slam’ of heritage quizzes that are held in the city, the other two being the Summer Invitation and the Argus Quiz.
The city’s quizzing calendar is often oriented around these four, in addition to another major event usually held in January, the Kolkata International Quiz Festival, one of the largest in the country and organised by Mosedu Knowledge Foundation.
The plethora of options points to the obsession citizens have with this hobby.
The old guard of quizzing in India includes many, many Kolkatans. Some of them are Siddhartha Basu, the man behind the televised quizzes of the 1980s and ’90s such as Mastermind India, University Challenge India and Kaun Banega Crorepati, sports producer Joy Bhattacharjya, and Derek O’Brien, who conducted the Cadbury Bournvita Quiz Contest.
Kolkata has teams that have existed for decades. A particularly well-known one is Inmaniacs, a team from IIM Calcutta, which has been around since 1978 and features a rotating cast of the institution’s students and alumni. The Inmaniacs won this year’s DI Open.
Perhaps quizzing is one of those rare colonial gifts. The College Quiz Bowl is a regular part of student life in the UK and pub quizzes are everywhere. While serious quizzes like Mastermind and University Challenge have inspired Indian versions, Old Blighty also has a host of more light-hearted ones such as Only Connect and Big Fat Quiz. That this love should have rubbed off on the people of the old capital of British India isn’t surprising.
Of course, Kolkatans are not the only quiz-lovers in India. Chennai has given the country famed quiz hosts such as Navin Jayakumar, who, alongside his mother, the venerable Saranya Jayakumar, was inducted into the DI Quizzing Hall of Fame this year. Bangalore (the Karnataka Quiz Association being one of the most active in the country), Delhi (the quiz club at St Stephen’s College counts parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor as one of its founders), Hyderabad, Mumbai and other cities also have their own circuits.
But quizzing scenes across India, both at college and open levels, are also dominated by men, both on the podium and in the competitions.
28-year-old academic and historian Urvi Khaitan has quizzed ever since she was in primary school, finding it a great way to overcome her shyness. She took part enthusiastically in the quiz club at her alma mater, St Stephen’s College, and loved the adrenaline rush of a good quiz – but soon found the larger Delhi circuit off-putting.
“When I was in college, from 2014 to 2017, there was a Whatsapp group of many Delhi quiz circuit people which created an in group-out group situation that was really alienating,” she remembers. “A lot of toxic and misogynistic jokes were passed around, and if you called them out, you were told you just weren’t being a good sport.’”
She also found that women got to be specialists in certain themes, but never generalists. “Quiz hosts who were looked up to were always male,” she says, adding that even female quizzers seem to have a canonical preference towards male authors, male directors and male sports figures.
29-year-old Debasmita Bhowmik, who was part of the Ranchi Quizzing Circuit as a college student, remembers a group of young men who were unable to interact with female quizzers. “They were much more welcoming to the new guys,” she recalls. “I remember our quiz club had a female president and they insinuated that she got the post only because the seniors were being nice.”
To the credit of many quizzing circles across India, organisers have attempted to tackle the issue. KIQF, for example, ensures it has many women as hosts. One such person is veteran quizzer Jayashree Mohanka, who is part of the nationally famous team, Hammer and Tongs.
“Back when I was in school and college in the 1970s and ’80s, the quizzing circuit had many women and it was not at all a gendered hobby,” Mohanka remembers. “When I came to Calcutta to study, there were many teams in the city led by formidable women including Saranya Jayakumar, Renee dos Santos and Phyllis McMahon. I have been in two teams helmed by women: Bulu Mukherjee and Vimala Jagannath. I have witnessed the slow decline. Many younger girls now say they feel unwelcome in the circuit.”
To deal with the issue, Reesoom Pal and Mohanka started a women’s quiz club in Kolkata in 2019. Mohanka disseminates notices about quizzes and available women teammates through its Whatsapp group.
College quiz clubs also have a big part to play in encouraging girls and queer people to join in, and many do. Jadavpur University’s quiz club Enquiry holds the All About Eve quiz, in which all questions are about female achievers in various fields.
But it’s not just women who have to deal with othering. Emerging quizmaster Samanway Banerjee, points out that as someone not from Kolkata, one of his major concerns when he started hosting these events was that people of various backgrounds be able to enjoy them.
“I want to take quizzing to schools in suburban towns, because I know so many people are interested,” he says. “Their knowledge base might be different than that of an urban crowd, but it’s no less rich.”
Abhinav Dasgupta, a long-time member of the Mumbai Quiz Club attests to this. “I’d say that no other part of the country has as much diversity in quizzing as West Bengal, especially in places beyond Kolkata,” he says. He points out that there is a linguistic divide as the major quizzes tend to be held entirely in English. This means hyperlocal knowledge, and knowledge in other languages, tends to get left out.
A significant equalising factor for both of these issues has been the rise of online quizzing.
Online quiz leagues rose into prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic. Indian quiz leagues such as Fundaesliga, B612, Zephyr and others took off when almost everyone was cooped up at home.
Academician Aryapriya Ganguly and sports journalist Sreshth Shah, founders of Fundaesliga, were among those who were able to adapt quizzing to an entirely online activity. To do this, they took the help of a unique format called Mimir, played in four-person groups. Soon, other advantages began emerging.
“Quizzes could now be played according to a mutually decided time rather than an organiser-decided time,” Ganguly points out. “You could also connect with players anywhere, which means quizzing became geography-agnostic.”
Suddenly, Indians were playing at par with international players, including those from elite centres in the US and the UK, without having to be based there. Participants in Fundaesliga include people from the Netherlands, Australia, the US, the UK and many other countries, as well as from all over India, including tier 2 and 3 towns.
Historically, Indians have not done well in international quizzing. Ganguly points out the two reasons for this: knowledge from the Global South was never even within the purview of international level games, and two, the question formats were vastly different.
“The trivia in formats like Quiz Bowl is more academic knowledge,” says Shah. “But Indian quizzing is steeped in a very different kind of trivia tradition, which looks at quizzing as an exercise in fun, and not in testing.”
With the advent of Indian online leagues, international quizzers suddenly became aware of a well-spring of knowledge that they had previously ignored.
Despite the hobbyist reputation of Indian quizzes, many hosts actually pride themselves on being as esoteric as possible, making quizzes inaccessible for many but the most serious players. Ventures such as Quiz Pro Quo and India Wants to Know set out to change that.
Yogesh Tolani, one of four co-founders of Quiz Pro Quo, says it began as a way to conduct some leftover sets during the pandemic and soon became a regular affair with a dedicated audience. During the season, games on versatile themes take place every Sunday, with puzzles, puns, physics, films and queer history all finding a place. There are different hosts for each quiz, including many beginners and many women.
“I always wanted to stop the focus on points and competitiveness, and just focus on learning interesting facts,” says Tolani.
Meanwhile, quizzing has also led many to entrepreneurship. India Wants To Know is a bootstrapped venture started by Bangalore-based Sai Ganesh, after he quit his full-time job two years ago. The venture, which started out with a ten-episode Youtube panel quiz series, is now known for their viral social media ‘content storytelling’, especially their “QOTD: Question of the Day” posts.
“I noticed that the number of people who turn up at college quizzes is a lot lower than people who turn up at school,” says Ganesh. “We asked, how can we have a sweet spot where people still find quizzes accessible but the content doesn’t suffer?”
Another ‘knowledge company’ founded by ardent quizzers Kunal Mandal, a former member of Siddhartha Basu’s KBC team, and Titash Banerjea, is Gyaanspace. The company has worked with many brands to hold major events such as the Cycle Heritage Quiz and the CBSE Heritage India Quiz. It now works with online content, live events, and multi-city quiz projects, alongside training programs for schools based on quizzing or debating, and employee engagement initiatives.
“I would be sitting with my father and with my grandmother, and all three of us would be watching quizzes on the TV together, which is how my love of the activity developed,” smiles Banerjea. “It’s time to bring that back, and not let quizzing get confined to a narrow elite group.”
Abhinav Dasgupta believes online quizzing has made the sport more accessible. “There’s now something in it for everyone,” he says. Debasmita Bhowmik, meanwhile, points out that offline format changes have helped, too. “A chit picking method called Ruckus, in which you can’t make your own teams beforehand and instead sit with all new people, is a very good way to open things up,” she says.
As for the casual quizzer: pub trivia nights are becoming more popular. Ganesh says that Bagalore has always had great hosts, and now pubs are keeping people entertained with quizzing.
Thousands play the puzzles and quizzes that Nayanika Mukherjee, former puzzle editor of The Indian Express, and Sukanya Verma, film critic of rediff, set every day. During the pandemic, Mukherjee invented a multi-player Wordle that was instantly picked up by many publications. She got her current job through this, and now works on news quizzes, crosswords and Sudoku puzzles in a small but crowded field of experts that includes the cruciverbalists of The Hindu and the puzzles editor of the Hindustan Times, Kabir Firaque. Her main aim is the same as that of many others: to make quizzing as approachable as possible.
“Many of our quizzes and puzzles were appreciated by readers because they focus on knowledge bases that people in all tiers of cities will be able to relate to, as well as work out,” she says. “There’s no need for any kind of esoteric knowledge.”
Meanwhile, Verma, whose quiz questions were noticed by her editor on social media, has had great feedback on her Bollywood quizzes from filmmakers, casual quizzers and social media fans alike.
“During the dark and dispirited times of the pandemic, I wanted to provide people with even ten seconds of distraction and relief,” she says. “I’ve done this for five years now and I think I could do it for another five.”
Clearly, the niche hobby that was confined to small groups in metros like Kolkata, Chennai and Delhi for decades is now exploding across the country.
Rush Mukherjee is an independent journalist based in Kolkata.
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