Sunday, April 1, 2018

Wrestling and bodybuilding in India

When I was about 12, I would spend a few evenings a week at a hobby club building electrical and mechanical models.  On our way back home, we would wait at a public bus-stop for our ride back home, and across the stop would be a traditional akhara, or a training club for traditional Indian style wrestling.  Pehelwani, or Kushti, or Mallayuddha, as it was called, has been popular in India for hundreds of years and is a blend of the orginal version of the sport practiced since at least the 11th. centuries, that was subsequently influenced by Persian methods brought in by the Mughal kings around the 16th. century.  Waiting for the bus, I would see young men grappling under the supervision of an older teacher.  They wrestled in langotis (G-string like one piece briefs) on wrestling pits made of soft sand curated using sand, oil, water and buttermilk.  Commitment to an akhara was a serious one: there would be two sessions of practice, one in the morning that began at the crack of dawn, and a second session in the evening.  The wrestlers circled and sized one another in the pit slapping their chests and thighs with cupped hands. They grappled in a style similar to freestyle wrestling, their bodies caked in sand.

Bodybuilding and wrestling have been part of tradition in India and, while in middle school, I began going to an Indian style “gym”.  Gyms were grim pulpits of sweat in those days. To get there, I would navigate a warren of narrow lanes in a slum.  One of the rooms in this slum, about 15 feet by 15 feet was the gym, its floor made of hard packed mud.  A small window let in some light and the equipment consisted of free weights in rough cast iron, Indian clubs and, if I recall correctly, a set of parallel bars for free form exercises.  Babua, an older kid from our neighborhood was the reigning pehelwan (strongman and/or wrestler) and he would be here in the gym all of the time.  One of the professions of the locality’s pehelwan was to be a malishwala—a masseur to the richer businessmen who could afford it—and this is what Babua ended up doing for a living. The weights would be called “loha” (iron) and you treated the loha with respect.  If your feet touched the loha, you touched your forehead in remonstration and respect.  

A top flight wrestler, called a pehelwan, typically carries out several hundred baithaks (deep knee squats) and dands (a “cat-stretch” push up—combination of a stretch and a push-up) in training every day, aside from jogging a few kilometers. They engage a daily diet that includes a couple of liters of milk, a half a kilo of almonds (for the protein) and a half liter of ghee (clarified butter).  A wrestler does not have the sculpted muscles of a bodybuilder or a Bollywood star.  They train and eat for strength and look down upon the narcissism of the bodybuilder.

Strength training in an akhara incorporates many traditional Indian elements of free form and  weight based training, and they offer certain advantages. In the 1970s, if you were into exercise, you grew up practicing dands and baithaks (in Bengal we called them “don”).  The “dand” was incorporated by Bruce Lee in his exercise routine after he had studies the routines of the early 20th. century Indian wrestler “The Great Gama” (more on him in a bit).  Traditional Indian weights consist of the gada (a club or mace about 10-100 lbs that could be a decorative mace or a sturdy piece of bamboo stick that was end weighted with concrete, stone or iron), a pair of clubs--jori (each 25 to 80 lbs) that one worked in rhythm and synchronicity grasping one with each hand, and Nals, stones used as free weights which, by the 1970s, had largely been replaced by regular iron free weights.  Unlike the restricted motion routines of western style free weight exercises, routines with the gada or jori involved swinging them in specific trajectories and they offer the advantage of angular momentum and inertial direction changes, aiding the balancing muscles significantly.

There is a theory that wrestling became popular in Bengal in the 19th. century, in response to Bengalis being considered soft, weak, and effeminate by their British colonizers. Nineteenth century British accounts of India are rife with such descriptions—Bengalis were considered more suited to clerical jobs as opposed to the warrior like Sikhs and tribes of Northwest India who were described as tall, fearless, and honor-bound. Physical exercise along with Western education became popular among the educated upper middle class Bengali elite in the mid-nineteenth century.  Wrestling akharas sprouted.  Famous Bengalis of that time, Vivekananda, members of the Tagore family had all taken classes in wrestling.  Kheti Babu and Ambu Babu were famous wrestling teachers of the mid to late 19th. century.  Their nephew, one Jyotindra Charan Guha, a.k.a. Gobar (Cowdung) Guha, was to become one of the first Indian wrestlers to ply his trade in the West.

For those times, Gobar Guha was a large man—between 6 feet 1 and 6 feet 2 inches, and between 240 and 290 lbs.  He arrived in the US in the 1920s by way of stints in England, and stayed in the US for about 6 years performing as a wrestler.  Accounts of Gobar’s exploits in the US by Indian writers paint a highly successful career.  He is said to have defeated famous wrestlers of that time such as Ad Santel.  When he lost, such as to the greatest professional of that time, Ed “Strangler” Lewis, it was only under extenuating circumstances. He fought the boxer Jack Johnson in England.  Historical win-loss records, which I was able to look up on the internet, however paint a more modest picture. Gobar, by one account, won 5 fights and lost about 23. Here, for instance are a set of fight cards from Utah:
6-18-1926:  Ogden, Utah, Armory
                Al Dawson  def.  Joe Rond
                Pete Visser  def.  Goho Gobar

6-30-1926:  Ogden, Utah, Armory
                Ralph Morley  drew  Don Furniss
                Al Dawson  def.  Al Craven & Fat Dawson
                Pete Visser  def.  Goho Gobar

9-15-1926:  Ogden, Utah, Auditorium
                Goho Gobar  def.  George Nelson
                Jack Woods  def.  Charles Mason
                Ira Dern  def.  Bill Edwards
 “Goho Gobar” offered an exotic sight—a large man in a turban who as also erudite, and spoke his mind freely about colonialism.  An American newspaper wrote about him (as quoted in Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India by Rononjoy Sen, 2015): Gobor “seems to have the temperament of a bushy Newfoundland pup, the strength of an unusually mild mannered elephant, the manners of an Oriental nabob and the general line of intellect of George Bernard Shaw.

Gobar returned to India to fight, in 1926 at Park Circus, Kolkata, a man who is likely the greatest Indian wrestler of all times—the Great Gama—all of 5 ft. 7 inches, but with a 56 inch chest, 17 inch arms and 30 inch thighs. Gobar lost, after which he retired and ran a wrestling akhara in Kolkata. 


Gama, unlike Gobar, came from North India, from a poor family, and was part of a traditional line of wrestlers who would practice their craft under the patronage of kings and rich landlords.  Gama gave notice of his talent after he tied the reigning Indian Champion, Rahim Baksh Sultaniwala, a seven foot tall Kashmiri, around 1910. Gama’s promise then led him the the John Bull Championship in England where he dominated the world champion of that time, Stanislaus Zbyszko, but with the match ending in a tie.  In the second fight, Zbyszko did not show up and the match was handed over to Gama by default. Gama then went on to defeat a number of prominent American and European wrestlers after which he returned to India.  His training regimen consisted of wrestling forty wrestlers daily, five thousand Baithaks (squats) and three thousand Dands (pushups).  His daily consumption included 2 gallons of milk, and a  pound and a half of almond paste with fruit juices. After India gained indepence and the country was partitioned, Gama moved to Pakistan where he passed away in 1960. In 2015 he was inducted into the Wrestling Hall of Fame, as the greatest Pehelwan of all times.