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.
