Kolhapur is a small city by India’s standards with a population of some 700,000 nestled in the southwest corner of the state of Maharashtra and an hour’s flight from Mumbai.
It is said that the best wrestlers come from this city because of the climate and the water, which is cool and reputed to be rich in iron and other minerals, and Kolhapur is today the main centre of the martial art. And it is here that the best fighters, trainers and akhadas, or wrestling schools, are to be found.
Kushti’s history in Kolhapur is relatively recent – only since the eighteenth century has it been practised here – but the sport flourished during the rein of Shri Chatrapati Shahu Maharaj, the king of Kolhapur, who ascended the throne in 1894. During this golden age, the monarch built hundreds of akhadas across the city and held tournaments, inviting the best wrestlers from around India and beyond.
Little has changed in the way the sport is staged. The bouts take place in an earthen pit lined with red soil dredged from a river and mixed with ghee and water. Each morning Hindu prayers – pujas – are said in the circular pit, which has among wrestlers a revered status and is treated as if it were a temple.
HANUMAN, the monkey god of the Ramayana, is revered in Kolhapur. It was Hanuman who helped rescue Sita, Rama’s wife, from the demon Ravana. And it was Hanuman who flew to the Himalayas and carried back a mountain with medicinal herbs to save Rama’s brother, Laksmana. He symbolises immense strength and fearlessness and it is to him that India’s wrestlers pray for victory.
Since India’s wrestlers took home medals from the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the spotlight has been turned on kushti, a 3,000-year-old martial art still practised in small pockets of India, Pakistan and Iran; a relic, if you like, of shared Aryan traditions and with a rich moral, ethical, philosophical and mystical heritage. Its ancestry is that of the warrior and it finds mention in the historical record of Parthia, which prevailed as an empire from 132BCE–226CE, a thorn in the side of Rome until vanquished in the time of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. But by then kushti had spread throughout the Roman empire; it is arguably the antecedent of the Graeco-Roman style.
Kushti is under threat as India’s sporting authorities, buoyed by Olympic success, seek to force its best practitioners to abandon the mud pits for the wrestling mat and train in the more recognised styles of wrestling.
‘Modern life has many temptations,’ a heavy-set palawan told me ringside as we discussed the future of this ancient sport. The young men are being drawn away from the villages to jobs in the cities and turning their backs on many of the traditional arts. Few want to put in the hard work required to become a true wrestler.
Even those who stay and undergo the rigours of training are becoming corrupted by money – bouts are rigged and wrestlers compete for material gain, not for prestige.
‘Everything has changed dramatically,’ the palawan tells me. ‘Nowadays people are not putting in much effort. Even with all these modern trappings the young people are still not happy.
‘We had very little but we were content, we were very happy.’
The future looks bleak for kushti. India’s sporting authorities want wrestlers to fight on modern mats rather than on red clay, saying that the practice is outdated and that wrestling in India should catch up to the rest of the world.
It is said that whoever worships Hanuman will be granted fortitude and strength. India’s palawans are fighting what they know will be the death knell of kushti, and the end of Hanuman’s army.
There are at least six major akhada scattered around Kolhapur, mostly hidden down small lanes of homes and shops. There used to be hundreds, but their numbers have dwindled with neglect and disuse, and as the numbers of schools decline, so do the numbers of wrestlers. Old-timers complain that younger wrestlers lack the commitment to keep the sport alive.
Kushti is a demanding sport. Wrestlers live, cook, eat and sleep together in the akhada, forming small communities of as few as a couple of dozen to as many as one hundred, with ages ranging from as young as seven to their mid-twenties. They come from across India. Many have been away from their homes for much of their lives and look on fellow fighters as family.
The day begins at 5am with a group run before a punishing regimen of weightlifting and push-ups, perhaps more than five hundred over the course of a morning. Then the trainers arrive, and the wrestlers are paired for practice bouts.
After prayers are said and the pit prepared, the wrestlers rub their faces and bodies, and those of their opponents, with red dirt, which serves both as a blessing and to improve grip during the bout. The wrestlers spar for several hours. They eat and rest and, in the evening, the routine is repeated.
The wrestlers’ diet is designed to maintain muscle bulk and is heavy on crushed almonds, milk and ghee. They cook their own chapattis over an open fire after a day’s training. They are not required to be vegetarian and eat chicken and eggs.
Most of the boys come from poor families; for many, kushti is their one chance to break out of the cycle of poverty, to make a name for themselves and their families.
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