Communities, People, and the Jams We Remember
This website set out to be a collective memory of the history of Parkour in India. Over the last couple of days, that memory has grown considerably: names, dates, stories, and a few rediscovered treasures. Here’s what’s new, and where we need your help.
A Directory of Communities
The communities directory now holds 29 parkour communities on record, organised by state and union territory: from Chennai to Kolkata, Nashik to Gurugram, Goa to Arunachal Pradesh. You can search the whole list by name, city, or discipline, or jump straight to your region.
Each community now has its own page, recording what we know: when it was established, the names it has gone by over the years, who founded it, the people involved, and where to find it today. Some entries are rich with detail. Many are thin; a name, a city, little else. If your community is one of the thin ones (or missing entirely), we would love to hear from you.
The People Behind the Movement
The Parkour scene in India was built by people: practitioners who started training when there was nobody to learn from, and who then turned around and taught everyone else. The new People section records them: founders, teachers, key members, and the quiet contributors every community depends on.
Founders are now credited on their community’s page, and each person’s page shows the communities they helped build. These connections matter. They are how a future traceur in some corner of India will trace their own lineage back to the people who started it all.
The Jams We Remember
The biggest addition is a new Events section, a chronological record of the jams and Pk-Days that brought India’s scattered communities together:
- Pk-Day Mumbai, November 2008. Among the earliest documented open jams in India. A video of it once existed; it was taken down years ago, and we are hoping someone saved a copy.
- Pk-Day Hyderabad at Golconda Fort, November 2009. A jam at one of the most spectacular training grounds imaginable, with surviving video.
- Pk-Day Mumbai and the National Jam 2010. One of the earliest large-scale gatherings, with traceurs from Chennai, Hyderabad, and Nasik, and guests from American Parkour.
- Parkour India National Jam 2012. Three days in Mumbai, reported at the time as the largest parkour jam India had yet seen. The original announcement survives, and so does video of the jam itself.
Each event page records who organised it, who attended, and what evidence survives. Where video still exists, you can watch it right on the page.
What We’re Still Missing
The honest truth? There are enormous gaps. We have entire states with nothing on record - the communities from Delhi come to mind. Communities we know existed but cannot yet describe properly for lack of complete information. Jams that live only in the memories of the people who were there. And the story of NOS and Parkour Mumbai (perhaps the most significant untold history in Indian parkour?) that is still waiting to be told properly - by the people who knew them … or maybe not, but there are still some stories to be told.
If you attended any of these jams, if you have photos or videos gathering dust on an old hard drive, if you remember names we haven’t recorded or stories we haven’t heard: please write to us at indianparkour @ gmail. com. Every detail helps, however small it may seem.
This is your history. Help us keep it.