I N THE BEGINNING there was the Great Gama. He was Indias first sporting superstar. From Peshawar to Patna, from Junagadh to Jamshedpur, in Calcutta or Dhaka or Srinagar or Madrasthere was no place where the Great Gama did not draw magnificent crowds.
He was not a big man. There were other wrestlers of legendary heft, but this compact tempest of muscle had blown them all off the ground.
More than half a century after his death, Gama remains a powerful memory, wrapped in a myth: an oral legend passed from wrestler to wrestler in every wrestling school in India.
An old wrestler told me: When I am ill, I look at a portrait of Gama that hangs in my akhada. I feel the illness leave me, I feel my strength surging back.
Who really was the Great Gama?
This is a book that explores wrestling as it is practised now in India; the men, women and events that have shaped its history from Gama to Sushil Kumar; whose two Olympic medals yanked the sport out of its rural obscurity and on to TV screens. It is a journey through the wrestling landscape of India, both past and present.
From behind the scenes with Indias Olympic wrestlers to akhadas quietly defying urbanization. From dangal to dangal in villages and small towns to the intrepid women who dared to break the barriers in this manly sport. From Gamas journey to becoming a world champion to the man who became one of the first Asians to foray into staged American pro wrestling, what we now know popularly as World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).
Through the voyage, an observation: wrestling is not obscure, and never has been. It has only been hidden from those who have never tilled land. Kushti rules the farmlands. It has done so for centuries. It has had pride of place in the courts of Chalukya kings and Mughal emperors. It was embraced by Hinduism and Islam, and has led its own gentle revolution against the caste system, rejecting its fundamental underpinnings.
The British loved it when they first came to the country, and understood immediately its importance to Indias martial tradition. Then they turned against it during the freedom movement.
Nonetheless, this is not a book of history, nor is it a scholarly investigation.
The focus of this book is to tease out the lived experience of Indian wrestlers now, to share their daily life (for wrestling is not a sport, as every wrestler told me, but a way of life), their struggles and beliefs and their oral tradition. The historical references are used as a storytelling tool, to give context and depthwhen neededto the stories and beliefs that are an integral part of the wrestling philosophy.
Since wrestling in India now is dominated by the northern statesHaryana, Delhi, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtrathe book too stays largely within these geographical boundaries.
The southern states of India, as well as places like Bihar and Gujarat, can claim a rich history of the sport, but in the present times, wrestling has all but disappeared from these places, surviving only in little pockets. No international wrestlers come out of these areas, nor do they form a part of the local dangal circuit. I have had to leave those pockets out.
The most glaring omission here, a question I cant shake off, is the puzzling decline of a Muslim wrestling culture. As the importance of GamaGhulam Muhammadattests, there was once, not so long ago, a thriving and vibrant community of Muslim wrestlers. Much of the lexicon of Indian wrestling, for example, consists of Persian and Arabic words, and contemporary wrestlers and coaches are well versed with the exalted importance of wrestling in the Mughal court, and the contribution of the Mughal Empire in spreading the culture of wrestling through patronage. Now, a Muslim wrestler is as rare as an Indian Olympic champion. This loss deserves a book of its own, and is far beyond the scope of this one.
The names of two people in this book have been changed on their requestSatbir and Billu Singh.
T HE TALE OF THE TWO-TON WRESTLER
There was once a two-ton wrestler who was undefeated. Restless to meet someone who could truly challenge him, the giant went in search of a certain three-ton wrestler he had heard of. He did not have to go far. The two wrestlers met at a farmers field, and began wrestling immediately. It was a furious match and the earth shook as they grappled. There was a herd of fifty goats nearby, but the wrestlers, consumed by their fight, did not notice them, and crushed six goats to death.
The goats belonged to an old woman. When she saw what happened, and that the wrestlers had gone on wrestling without any heed, she gathered both the dead and living goats and put them in a bag, and slung the bag over her back. Then she picked up the two-ton wrestler and put him on one shoulder. She picked up the three-ton wrestler and put him on her other shoulder, and started walking home. The wrestlers were still too much in the heat of battle to notice.
As she walked, a black vulture got a sniff of the dead goats in her bag and circled down towards her. It grabbed the old woman and flew off. As the bird flew over the kings palace, the woman slipped from its talons, and landed in the eye of the princess, who was sitting on the palace roof. The princess rubbed and scratched frantically, but could not dislodge the thing that had gone into her eye. She called her courtiers, she called the royal doctor, but no one could help. Finally, the king had to call a high council to figure out what to do. The council agreed that a fisherman renowned for his skills must be called in to cast a net into the princesss eye and drag out whatever it was that caused her such discomfort.
The fisherman came with his family and cast the net. Then they pulled and pulled. Days went by. The fisherfolk grew more and more tired. Finally, they pulled the net all the way through the eye, and there, in the net, was the old woman, her bag of goats, and the two wrestlersstill grappling on her back, as if nothing had happened.
F inally, silence. The man selling boiled eggs has snuffed out his hissing burner and rattled off, his wobbly cart stacked high with empty egg trays. The sweet-lime-juice man followed soon after, leaving a wake of fragrant citrus peel. The akhada courtyard is now empty, except for two men noiselessly plastering posters on the walls of the wrestling hall in the middle of the square. They are working by the light leaking out from the row of rooms that form the periphery, thin veins of pale yellow against the dark.
The biggest wrestling competition in Haryana, the posters say. The biggest prize money ever, in supersized lettering, above a row of photographs of politicians too smudged to recognize in the dark. The two men litter some handbills outside the row of rooms for good measure and leave.
One by one, the lights in the rooms start going off. The wrestlers will sleep now. Only in the outhouse, where Mehr Singh reclines in front of the television, is there a light on. This small room has three single beds laid out parallel to each other, like in military barracks, and the TV is tuned to a music show. Mehr Singhs eyes are heavily glazed, and more bloodshot than usual, the result of three hours of steady drinking and smoking. He had started smoking his hookah soon after he woke up at four in the morning, drawing on the cool, long pipe all day long. Since sundown, he has also drunk his way through half a litre of cheap whisky. The room smells sharply of tobacco. Mehr Singh looks at me uncomprehendingly for a moment, then follows my gaze to his glass which is perched precariously on the bed, some whisky still left in it.
